Chairman Menendez, Ranking Member Risch, members of the committee, on behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, thank you for the opportunity to testify. I am honored to present my analysis and recommendations and those of my colleagues from FDD’s Iran team.

After a year of talks in Vienna, the negotiations between the Biden administration and the regime in Iran have stalled over an Iranian demand that Washington remove Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list. If the talks get back on track and an agreement emerges, President Joe Biden will have fulfilled his campaign promise to take America back into a new version of the 2015 nuclear deal — albeit a shorter and weaker version of the already fatally flawed accord negotiated by President Barack Obama’s administration and abandoned in 2018 by President Donald Trump. The new deal aims to place Iran’s nuclear program “back in the box it was in,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it on March 27.

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