Tehran is awaiting “an effective end to all sanctions imposed after Trump came to power” as a sign Washington is serious over returning to Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, foreign ministry spokesman Saaed Khatibzadeh said in his press briefing Monday [February 1].

Khatibzadeh responded to remarks made by Jake Sullivan, United States National Security Advisor, on Friday [January 29] stressing that the Biden administration saw the revival of the agreement as a priority, given the need, Sullivan said, to “reestablish some of the parameters and constraints around the [Iranian nuclear] program that have fallen away over the course of the past two years.”

“What we wait for is not the opinion of this or that [official],” retorted Khatibzadeh, as reported by Fars news agency. “The capital [frozen abroad] of this nation must be available. Oil should be sold and the money to be returned … Whenever we see these steps by America, we will respond…America’s return [to the 2015 agreement] is not an automatic process. They exited with one signature, but they cannot return with [just] another signature.”

Khatibzadeh reflected the lingering sense in Tehran that the US had signed the nuclear deal, voted for a resolution endorsing it in the United Nations Security Council, and then simply abandoned the commitments through an executive action. “A signature on a piece of paper is not enough,” Khatibzadeh said. “The answer to that will be a signature on paper.” He insisted that the US should ease sanctions “in an effective way” and with Iran seeing tangible results.

While President Joe Biden and his new team have stressed their commitment to revive the 2015 agreement, known as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), something welcomed by other signatories meeting in December, there is as yet no plan as to how the US removing sanctions might be sequenced with steps taken by Iran.

After President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 and imposed draconian sanctions on Iran’s financial sector and oil exports. Iran since 2019 has expanded its nuclear program beyond limits imposed by the JCPOA, including enrichment beyond 3.67 percent and using more advanced centrifuges. The Trump administration explained its sanctions as a means to force Iran to accept a set of 12 demands, including ending all uranium enrichment and scrapping its missile program. Trump officials justified a wave of new sanctions at the end of his presidency as a means of complicating Biden’s task in reviving the JCPOA, although many were ostensibly not linked to the nuclear program.