Biden made final decision to keep Iran’s IRGC on terrorist list

Biden made final decision to keep Iran’s IRGC on terrorist list

Politico -May 25th 2022

President Joe Biden has finalized his decision to keep Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on a terrorist blacklist, according to a senior Western official, further complicating international efforts to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Another person familiar with the matter said Biden conveyed his decision during an April 24 phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, adding that the decision was conveyed as absolutely final and that the window for Iranian concessions had closed.

Bennett later confirmed the contents of his conversation with Biden last month in a tweet. “I welcome the decision by the US Administration to keep Iran’s IRGC on the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list — which is where it belongs,” he added.

The United States placed the IRGC on its “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” list in 2019. The designation was part of the “maximum pressure” campaign then-President Donald Trump imposed on Iran after pulling the United States out of the nuclear deal, which had restricted Iran’s nuclear activity in exchange for sanctions relief.

Israel has long been among the most vocal foreign governments in opposing the removal of the Iranian military branch from the terrorism list and the continuation of the nuclear agreement.

Biden administration officials have spent more than a year in often-indirect discussions with European, Iranian and other officials aimed at reviving the nuclear agreement. But while the negotiations have made significant progress, the IRGC’s terrorist designation has become a major stumbling block to a final restoration.

Iranian officials want the United States to lift the terror label before Tehran returns to compliance with the nuclear deal. But the United States has refused to do so, unless Iran offers some security-related concessions beyond the nuclear agreement.

U.S. officials point out that the IRGC terrorist designation was technically never part of the nuclear deal itself, and they say that the deal could be restored with the designation still in place. But supporters of a return to the deal argue that the terror label was among a host of non-nuclear penalties Trump imposed on Tehran partly to make it politically and legally harder to revive the agreement.