Joe Biden's man for the Iran conundrum

THE TIMES PIECE I WROTE FOR TODAY: Jake Sullivan who is to be appointed national security adviser when Joe Biden becomes president in January must have winced when he read that President Trump had sought military options for attacking Iran’s nuclear plants before leaving the White House. For at the top of Mr Sullivan’s list of priorities as soon as he moves into the West Wing of the White House will be to reengage with Tehran with a view to the US returning to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal from which Mr Trump had unilaterally extracted American participation in 2018. Mr Sullivan, 43 and with a curriculum vitae that makes him the ideal choice for a diplomatic rather than military response to the Iran conundrum , will face a huge challenge not just in Tehran where the anti-US mood has increased under the severe sanctions regime imposed by the Trump administration but also in Congress if the Republicans retain majority control of the Senate. “Assuming the Republicans hold the Senate, the new president will likely run into some strong headwinds on this issue,” a former senior US official said. The Republicans and many Democrats opposed the deal. There is little doubt which direction the president-elect wishes to take on Iran. Mr Sullivan was a behind-the-scenes leading architect of the early stages of the 2015 nuclear deal. A brilliant Yale-educated lawyer and one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides when she was secretary of state, he lay the groundwork, in secret, for the breakthrough telephone call between President Obama and President Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian leader, in September 2013. The 15-minute call led two years later to the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA) signed by Tehran along with the US, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany, under which phased relief from economic sanctions imposed in 2006 were agreed in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme. Has Mr Trump improved the president-elect’s negotiating position by his decision to impose even tougher sanctions on Tehran? “I think Jake is mindful that the Trump people will have bequeathed the future Biden administration a lot of leverage,” another senior former US official said. However, a simple re-entry into the deal would be tricky, he said, “particularly because the Iranians are so far out of compliance and then you have the Iranian election coming up in June where the hardliners are likely to come back”. “Iran’s behaviour in the region has been so bad that Jake and his colleagues understand that things are not the same as when they left office,” the former official said. “How they traverse this obstacle course will be interesting to watch,” he said.