Trump’s ‘poison pill’ threatens revival of Iran nuclear deal

"The current stalemate was deliberately pre-manufactured by the Trump administration to put their successor exactly where they are right now,” said a supporter of the deal.

Atta Kenare / AFP via Getty Images

Trump’s ‘poison pill’ threatens revival of Iran nuclear deal

NBC-April 16th 2022

By Dan De Luce

Donald Trump imposed more than 1,000 sanctions on Iran as president, but one of them could prove to be a “poison pill” that derails an effort by his successor to revive the 2015 nuclear deal designed to prevent Iran from building an atomic bomb.

Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018 and blacklisted Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, a powerful arm of the Iranian military, as a foreign terrorist organization in 2019. Now negotiations aimed at renewing the nuclear deal are at an impasse over the sanction, with Iran demanding the Biden administration lift the U.S. terrorism designation, according to a current official and three sources familiar with the discussions.

The discussions between Iran and world powers came tantalizingly close to clinching an agreement in late February but became bogged down after Russia raised fresh concerns and as Iranian officials pushed for the lifting of the terrorism designation on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, the sources said.

The Biden administration offered a proposal to lift the designation in return for assurances from Iran not to retaliate against U.S. officials for the 2020 killing of a top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani, who died in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad, the sources told NBC News. Iran rejected the proposal and responded about two weeks ago with a counterproposal, the details of which remain unclear.

The Biden administration has yet to respond formally to the Iranian counterproposal, the sources said.

“The ball is in Biden’s court,” said one source briefed on the discussions.

Now administration officials are debating how to proceed, knowing that lifting the terrorism label would spark a scathing reaction in Congress and among Middle East allies.

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:https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trumps-poison-pill-threatens-revival-iran-nuclear-deal-rcna24572