The US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, said she doubts the Iranian leadership wants to return to the nuclear agreement, saying if the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei "doesn't take the deal, we're going have to increase the pressure, of course."
Nuland recalled the benefits Iran could reap if it agreed to the deal US President Joe Biden offered.
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Nuland said it is up to Iran to agree to the deal that has been on the table.
"It would get their oil back on the market. It would get them some relief from some of the sanctions that have come on. But for so far, they haven't chosen to go in that route," she stated, adding that Iranians are paying the price with high prices and inflation.
Nuland suggested that Tehran is still interested in reaching an agreement, noting that "they haven't thrown over the table yet" and "they haven't walked away when they could have done that over these many months where the deal has been ready and sitting there."
Meanwhile, the head of MI6, Richard Moore, recently said that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is "the best means still available" to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions, adding that he is skeptical that Khamenei would agree to it.
"I'm not convinced we're going to get there," Moore said at the forum.
"It could be a bit academic having that discussion because I don't think the supreme leader of Iran wants to cut a deal, so the Iranians won't want to end the talks either so that they could run on for a bit."
Moore argued that even if the deal did pass, there would still be "plenty of work" because Iran continues to work at "destabilizing activity around our region."
"What they're doing in Iraq, in Syria, even down in Yemen through sponsoring the Houthis," he said.
"They're still assassinating or attempting to entrap dissidents overseas, so there's plenty to do."
CIA Director William Burns noted that under the nuclear deal, "which the last administration pulled out of several years ago, that breakout time to produce that amount of fissile material was a little more than a year."
He said Friday that the "same breakout time can be measured not in a year-plus, but weeks."
Meanwhile, Tasnim Agency said Saturday that the repeatedly setting of deadlines by Western powers for Iran to reach a nuclear agreement has become an "empty threat."
Tasnim ridiculed Western diplomats and governments for repeatedly threatening that just a few weeks were remaining for concluding a deal to revive the 2015 nuclear deal or else they would walk away from the negotiations.
"Setting deadlines has been one of the main tactics used by Westerners" in nuclear talks, Tasnim said, "but they used it so often that today it has turned into an empty threat."
Tasnim cited for the first time Washington's deadline in December 2021, when National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US and others had not publicly set a date on the calendar, "but behind closed doors, there is a deadline, and it's not far away."
In the coming weeks, the participants in the Vienna talks will discover "whether Iran is ready for a diplomatic solution."
In February, US State Department spokesman Ned Price said that time had become "very, very short" to restore the JCPOA, arguing that once Iran reached a certain degree of enrichment, there would be no point in returning to the nuclear deal.
CNN quoted US officials saying three weeks are left to reach an agreement.
The Biden administration believes it has until the end of February to salvage the Iran nuclear agreement, otherwise, the US will have to change tack and launch aggressive efforts to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to three administration officials.
After 11 months of talks in Vienna, negotiations stalled in early March, but Western governments continued to say there were still "a few weeks" to salvage the deal while Iran continued to enrich uranium to 60 percent.
In July, the US refused to give a deadline saying the time to conclude that negotiations would be when Iran's nuclear program was technically determined to have passed the point when restoration made sense.
