WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- The United States has once again threatened Iran with “other options” if negotiations in the Austrian capital fail to restore the 2015 agreement which abandoned three years ago.
Speaking on CNN, U.S. special envoy for Iran Robert Malley warned of a “period of escalating crisis” if diplomacy failed to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
The remarks came days after negotiators from Iran and the remaining parties to the JCPOA concluded the seventh round of talks in Vienna, aimed at bringing the U.S. back into compliance with the agreement by removing its sanctions against Iran.
Referring to Iran’s stance that the U.S. should first remove its sanctions on the Islamic Republic, Malley said, “If they continue at their current pace, we have some weeks left but not much more than that, at which point the conclusion will be there’s no deal to be revived.”
“At some point in a not-so-distant future, we will have to conclude the JCPOA is no more and we would have to negotiate a wholly different deal and we would go through a period of escalating crisis,” he added.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday that if the Vienna talks fail, “then we are actively looking at alternatives and options”.
“I’m not going to put a time limit on it,” Blinken told reporters, but the remaining runway for a deal is “getting very, very, very short.”
He blamed the former American administration of Donald Trump for “the worst decisions made in American foreign policy in the last decade” by withdrawing from the accord in 2018.
“In getting out of that agreement, we were promised that it would be replaced by a stronger one … Instead, of course, we’ve seen just the opposite,” he said.
Russia’s lead negotiator at the talks,

Mikhail Ulyanov, agreed with Blinken’s remarks, saying, “The decision to withdraw from #JCPOA was like shooting in one of U.S. legs. It doesn’t matter if it was left or right leg.”
Last Friday, an unnamed senior State Department official said the seventh round of the talks “was better than it might have been, [but] it was worse than it should have been.”
Like Blinken, the senior U.S. official also acknowledged that Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA was a “self-defeating” move, but again insisted that the responsibility is “very much on Iran’s shoulder” to restore the deal.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said on Monday that the U.S. and its allies are trying to influence the process of the talks.
“These announcements of optimism and pessimism are part of a psychological operation, and it is quite clear that they are the design of the European and American sides” to influence the negotiations,” he said.