WASHINGTON – President-elect Joe Biden's nominee for secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said on Tuesday that when it comes to Iran policy, it is vitally important that the incoming administration would “engage on the takeoff, not the landing, with our allies and with our partners in the region to include Israel and to include the Gulf countries.” Blinken addressed a question from Senator Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) as a part of his Senate confirmation hearing.
“President-elect Biden is committed to the proposition that Iran will not acquire a nuclear weapon,” said Blinken. “Iran, with a nuclear weapon or on a threshold of having one would be Iran that is even more dangerous than it already is when it comes to all of the other malicious activities that it has engaged in, whether it is support for terrorism; whether it is fueling and feeding its proxies; whether it is destabilizing the region.”
He went on to say that Iran with a nuclear weapon or with the threshold capacity to build one is an Iran that would act potentially with even greater impunity than it already is. “I think we have an urgent responsibility to do whatever we can to prevent Iran from acquiring weapon or getting close to the capacity to having the material to break out on short notice,” said Blinken.
Blinken noted that in his opinion, the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran was succeeding in blocking Iran's pathways to producing material for nuclear weapons. “It also featured the most intrusive inspections and monitoring regime in the history of arms control,” he said.
“The challenge we face now is that we pulled out of the agreement. Iran is now taking steps to undo the various constraints that were imposed on it by the agreement: It has increased a stockpile of low enriched uranium. It is now enriching at a higher level. It is deploying centrifuges in ways that were prohibited under the agreement,” he continued. READ MORE
