Intel: Biden adviser says Iran deal supporters, detractors both wrong on sanctions’ effectiveness

May 11, 2020

A longtime foreign policy adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden argued today that President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal has proven both the accord’s supporters and detractors wrong “about a critical thing.”

“Advocates and defenders of the [deal], myself included, thought that when the Trump administration pulled out and imposed unilateral sanctions, that those sanctions were not likely to be as effective, because the Trump administration wasn’t bringing the rest of the world along with them,” said Jake Sullivan, Biden’s former national security adviser at the White House. “That didn’t turn out to be true. Actually, those sanctions have been very effective in the narrow sense of causing deep economic pain on Iran.”

Still, Sullivan noted that the sanctions themselves have not produced “the magical outcome that the Trump administration is looking for” beyond hammering Iran’s economy. He also argued that opponents of the deal were wrong because reinstating sanctions “turned out to be a fairly straightforward thing” after Trump’s withdrawal.

His remarks came during a virtual interview at the conservative Hudson Institute.

Why it matters: Sullivan, who is informally advising the Biden campaign, helped oversee the Iran deal negotiations under President Barack Obama. Biden has vowed to reenter the nuclear deal and lift Trump’s sanctions if he wins the US election in November and if Iran returns to compliance with the accord. (Since Trump’s withdrawal, Iran has tripled its stockpile of low-enriched uranium allowed under the deal’s limits.)