MS KELLY:  Thank you for making the case for hope.  Iran, you mentioned – stay there.  They just held presidential elections of their own.  What opportunities do you see with this new reformist president, President Pezeshkian?

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  Well, I think we’ll of course look to see what policies Iran pursues.  But the reality is, the bottom line is the supreme leader continues to call the shots.  So I can’t say that we have any great expectations, but let’s see what he and his team actually do once they’re in office.

As you know, when this administration came in, we tried to pursue again nuclear diplomacy with Iran, because if you can at least take one problem off the board, which is Iran potentially with a nuclear weapon, that’s inherently a good thing.  We had, as you know, well, an agreement reached during the Obama administration that actually put Iran’s nuclear program in a box.  And one of the biggest mistakes that we’ve made in recent years, was throwing out that agreement and allowing Iran to get out of the box that we put it in.  So we were testing the proposition about whether we could at least recreate something that looked like that, but —

MS KELLY:  Every time I’ve interviewed you as Secretary, I have asked you the same question:  Is U.S. policy still that Iran must not be allowed to get a nuclear weapon?

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  It is, resolutely.

MS KELLY:  Which is what you always answer.  And then I always ask:  So how are you going to stop them?  How are you going to stop them?

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  Well, there are – by far, the preferable way to do it would be through diplomacy.  Where we are now is not in a good place.  Iran, because the nuclear agreement was thrown out, instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, is now probably one or two weeks away from doing that.  Now, they haven’t developed a weapon itself —

MS KELLY:  Just one or two weeks, that’s what —

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  One or two weeks is probably what the realistic breakout time is.  They are – they haven’t produced a weapon itself, but that’s something of course that we track very, very carefully.  And you put those two things together – the fissile material, an explosive device – and you have a nuclear weapon.

So we’re focused on that.  What we’ve seen in the last weeks and months is Iran that’s actually moving forward with its program.  So the first thing we need to see if Iran is serious about engaging is actually pulling back on the work that it’s doing on its program.

Second, we of course have been maximizing pressure on Iran across the board.  We’ve imposed more than 600 sanctions on Iranian persons, entities of one kind or another.  We haven’t lifted a single sanction.  And we have much closer coordination now with European partners and allies.

MS KELLY:  I guess that gets to my question, though.  You’re applying every tool in the toolkit, and yet you just told us they are moving forward.

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  Well, they’re moving forward in terms of the capacity to break out in producing fissile material.  We’re looking very carefully at anything they might be doing on weaponization.  But it’s important here as well to make sure that in doing this, we’re acting in close concert with partners in Europe, in the region, and we’ve built that kind of approach in ways that we didn’t have a few years ago.