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Elliott Abrams: Biden Will Have Difficulty Reviving the Iran Deal
(Times of Israel) Raphael Ahren - A return to the 2015 nuclear agreement would be difficult, Elliott Abrams, President Trump's point man on Iran, said Monday in Tel Aviv. "There's going to be a negotiation with Iran anyway. That was the intention of the Trump administration....I don't think that going back to the JCPOA in 2021 is a simple prospect," he said. "We have a maximum pressure sanctions program. If you look at September and October, you will see sanctions being put in place. This will continue in November and December, because it's unrelated to politics, it's unrelated to elections. It's the foreign policy of the U.S., and it's based on Iran's conduct." However, he stressed that the administration will not dramatically escalate punitive measures against the regime. Some of the sanctions are unrelated to Iran's nuclear activities, and are instead connected to the regime's human rights abuses and its conventional regional aggression, he stressed. "They can be reversed, in theory, but it's hard for me to see how any president would really do that without a change in Iran's behavior." "We have a lot of leverage as a result of that pressure. So our view is that that leverage should be used, not discarded. Using that leverage, it should be possible to get Iran to stop doing a number of the things that it is doing, including their nuclear activities."