The Biden administration has taken the first steps toward eventually rejoining the Iran nuclear peace deal by rhetorically opening the door to it, but they also took two substantive steps toward it today.
Those steps include rolling back one of Trump's most nonsensical positions.
Besides signaling Thursday a willingness to talk with Iran, the administration also reversed Trump’s determination that all U.N. sanctions against Iran had been restored. And, it eased stringent restrictions on the domestic travel of Iranian diplomats posted to the United Nations.
The State Department announced the moves following discussions between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his British, French and German counterparts and as Biden prepares to participate, albeit virtually, in his first major international events with world leaders.
The Trump regime's position that all U.N. sanctions had been restored was always ridiculous because it literally wasn't true. The regime could not find a single other country to agree with them that all sanctions should be restored and, in fact, they never voted for it. The Trumps couldn't even find enough support for a vote.
We're a long way away from actually rejoining and restoring the Iran nuclear deal, but these are the first steps to doing that. And we should rejoin it. The deal was working as intended until Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.
Critics of the agreement were happy to see Trump withdraw and reimpose sanctions on Iran, but he didn't necessarily do that because he disagreed with policy. Trump didn't even know what the policy was; all he knew was the nation's first black president agreed to the deal and, in his mind, that meant it must be a bad deal. Destroying President Obama's legacy achievements animated and motivated many of Trump's worst actions. The policy may have mattered to the most ideological members of Trump's regime, but in most cases Trump's own positions amounted to little more than diplomatic shitposting.