Biden attempt to resurrect Iran nuke deal off to bumpy start
The Biden administration’s early efforts to resurrect the 2015 Iran nuclear deal are getting a chilly early response from Tehran. Though few expected a breakthrough in the first month of the new administration, Iran’s tough line suggests a difficult road ahead.
Having made several significant overtures to Iran in its first weeks in office, the administration’s outreach has been all but shunned by the Iranians. They had already rejected Biden’s opening gambit: a U.S. return to the deal from which President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018 if Iran resumes full compliance with its obligations under the accord.
Iran is shaping up to be a major test of the Biden administration’s overall approach to foreign policy, which the president has said will realign itself with the kind of multilateral diplomacy that Trump shunned. Although there are other hot-button issues — Russia, China and North Korea among them — Iran has a particular significance for Biden’s top national security aides. They include Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and special envoy for Iran Rob Malley, all of whom were intimately involved in crafting the 2015 deal under President Barack Obama and may have personal stakes in salvaging it.
Biden took office pledging to reverse Trump’s pullout from the deal, which gave it billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program. Just last week, Biden delivered in at least three ways: agreeing to return to multinational talks with Iran about reviving the deal, rescinding Trump’s determination that all U.N. sanctions on Iran must be restored, and easing onerous travel restrictions on Iranian diplomats posted to the United Nations.
Yet, Iran has held firm to demands that it will not respond to anything less than a full lifting of the sanctions Trump reimposed. Over the weekend, Iran made good on a threat to suspend adherence to a U.N. agreement allowing intrusive inspections of its declared nuclear sites. Although it stopped short of ordering the removal of international inspectors, Iran reduced cooperation with them and vowed to revisit the step in three months if sanctions aren’t removed.
The Iranians’ hard-nosed stance has left the administration at the cusp of a difficult choice: move ahead with sanctions relief before Iran resumes full compliance and risk losing the leverage it has or double down on demands for full compliance first and risk Tehran walking away from the deal completely.
It’s a delicate balance and one the administration is loathe to admit it faces, given the politically sensitive nature of Iran in Washington — Republicans strongly oppose the nuclear deal — and in Europe and the Middle East itself, particularly in Israel and the Gulf Arab states that are most directly threatened.
On Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed that the U.S. is prepared to return to the nuclear deal provided Tehran shows “strict compliance” with it. Speaking to the U.N.-backed Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Blinken said the U.S. is committed to ensuring Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon and pledged to work with allies and partners to “lengthen and strengthen” the deal struck between Iran and Germany, France, Britain, Russia, China and the U.S.
“Diplomacy is the best path to achieve that goal.” he said.
Just 24 hours earlier, though, Iran on Sunday rejected entreaties to suspend cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog. While Iran did not expel the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is charged with monitoring Iranian compliance with the deal, it did end the agency’s access to video from cameras installed at a number of sites.
There was no immediate response to that development from the U.S., but on Monday the White House and State Department both downplayed the significance of the move. “Our view is that diplomacy is the best path forward to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear w e a p o n ,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “That does not mean they have clearly not taken the steps needed to comply and we have not taken any steps or made any indication that we are going to meet the demands that they are putting forward either.” At the State Department, spokesman Ned Price addressed the IAEA mission more directly, praising the agency for its “professionalism” in keeping inspectors and their apparatus in the country despite Iran’s early threat to expel them on Tuesday. He said the U.S. supports IAEA chief Rafael Grossi’s success in reaching a temporary deal with Iran but lamented that Tehran remains out of compliance.
Price said the the administration was concerned that Iran appeared to be going in the wrong direction but would not comment on the administration’s view of whether its outreach to date had achieved results. Nor was he prepared to say what the administration might do to push Iran back into compliance with the deal considering its continued threat to abandoned all restrictions it imposed.
“The United States is willing to meet with the Iranians to hash out these difficult complex questions,” Price said, alluding to phrases that administration officials have used to refer to their initial aim of “compliance for compliance” and then “compliance for compliance-plus.”
“Compliance-plus,” according to administration officials, would include limits on Iran’s non-nuclear activities, including missile development and support for Mideast rebel groups and militias. A main reason Trump gave for withdrawing from the nuclear deal was that it did not address those issues and his administration has tried for more than a year to expand the deal to include them.
The doctor slid a miniature camera into the patient’s right nostril, making her whole nose glow red with its bright miniature light.
“Tickles a bit, eh?” he asked as he rummaged around her nasal passages, the discomfort causing tears to well in her eyes and roll down her cheeks.
The patient, Gabriella Forgione, wasn’t complaining. The 25year-old pharmacy worker was happy to be prodded and poked at the hospital in Nice, in southern France, to advance her increasingly pressing quest to recover her sense of smell. Along with her sense of taste, it suddenly vanished when she fell ill with COVID-19 in November, and neither has returned.
Being deprived of the pleasures of food and the scents of things that she loves are proving tough on her body and mind. Shorn of odors both good and bad, Forgione is losing weight and selfconfidence.
“Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Do I stink?’” she confessed. “Normally, I wear perfume and like for things to smell nice. Not being able to smell bothers me greatly.”
A year into the coronavirus pandemic, doctors and researchers are still striving to better understand and treat the accompanying epidemic of COVID-19-related anosmia — loss of smell — draining much of the joy of life from an increasing number of sensorially frustrated longer-term sufferers like Forgione.
Even specialist doctors say there is much about the condition they still don’t know and they are learning as they go along in their diagnoses and treatments. Impairment and alteration of smell have become so common with COVID-19 that some researchers suggest that simple odor tests could be used to track coronavirus infections in countries with few laboratories.
For most people, the olfactory problems are temporary, often improving on their own in weeks. But a small minority are complaining of persistent dysfunction long after other COVID19 symptoms have disappeared. Some have reported continued total or partial loss of smell six months after infection. The longest, some doctors say, are now approaching a full year.
Researchers working on the vexing disability say they are optimistic that most will eventually recover but fear some will not. Some doctors are concerned that growing numbers of smell-deprived patients, many of them
young, could be more prone to depression and other difficulties and weigh on strained health systems.
“They are losing color in their lives,” said Dr. Thomas Hummel, who heads the smell and taste outpatients clinic at University Hospital in Dresden, Germany.
“These people will survive and they’ll be successful in their lives, in their professions,” Hummel added. “But their lives will be much poorer.”
At the Face and Neck University Institute in Nice, Dr. Clair Vandersteen wafted tube after tube of odors under Forgione’s nose after he had rooted around in her
nostrils with his camera.
“Do you perceive any smell? Nothing? Zero? OK,” he asked, as she repeatedly and apologetically responded with negatives.
Only the last tube provoked an unequivocal reaction.
“Urgh! Oh, that stinks,” Forgione yelped. “Fish!”
Test complete, Vandersteen delivered his diagnosis.
“You need an enormous amount of an odor to be able to smell something,” he told her. “You haven’t completely lost your sense of smell but nor is it good.”
He sent her away with homework: six months of olfactory rehab. Twice daily, choose two or
three scented things, like a sprig of lavender or jars of fragrances, and smell them for two to three minutes, he ordered.
“If you smell something, great. If not, no problem. Try again, concentrating hard on picturing the lavender, a beautiful purple bloom,” he said. “You have to persevere.”
Losing the sense of smell can be more than a mere inconvenience. Smoke from a spreading fire, a gas leak, or the stink of rotten food can all pass dangerously unnoticed. Fumes from a used diaper, dog’s dirt on a shoe or sweaty armpits can be embarrassingly ignored.
And as poets have long known, scents and emotions are often like lovers entwined.
Evan Cesa used to relish meal times. Now they’re a chore. A fish dinner in September that suddenly seemed flavorless first flagged to the 18-year-old sports student that COVID-19 had attacked his senses. Foodstuffs became mere textures, with only residual hints of sweet and saltiness.
Five months later, breakfasting on chocolate cookies before classes, Cesa still chewed without joy, as though swallowing cardboard.
“Eating no longer has any purpose for me,” he said. “It is just a waste of time.”
Cesa is among the anosmia sufferers being studied by researchers in Nice who, before the pandemic, had been using scents in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. They also used comforting fragrances to treat post-traumatic stress among children after a truck terror attack in Nice in 2016, when a driver plowed through holiday crowds, killing 86 people.
The researchers are now turning their expertise to COVID-19, teaming up with perfumers from the nearby fragrance-producing town of Grasse. Perfumer Aude Galouye worked on the fragrant waxes that were wafted under Cesa’s nose to measure his olfactory impairment, with scents at varying concentrations.
“The sense of smell is a sense that is fundamentally forgotten,” Galouye said. “We don’t realize the effect it has on our lives except, obviously, when we no longer have it.”
The examinations on Cesa and other patients also include language and attention tests. The Nice researchers are exploring whether olfactory complaints are linked to COVID-related cognitive difficulties, including problems with concentrating. Cesa stumbled by picking the word “ship” when “kayak” was the obvious choice on one test.
“That is completely unexpected,” said Magali Payne, a speech therapist on the team. “This young man shouldn’t be experiencing linguistic problems.”
“We have to keep digging,” she said. “We are finding things out as we see patients.”
Cesa longs to have his senses restored, to celebrate the taste of pasta in carbonara sauce, his favorite dish, and a run through the fragrant wonders of the great outdoors.
“One might think that it is not important to be able to smell nature, trees, forests,” he said. “But when you lose the sense of smell, you realize how truly lucky we are to be able to smell these things.”