Secretary Antony J. Blinken With Nadia Bilbassy of Al Arabiya
01/29/2023
Secretary Antony J. Blinken With Nadia Bilbassy of Al Arabiya
01/29/2023 01:55 PM EST
Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
Cairo, Egypt
U.S. Embassy
QUESTION: (In Arabic.) Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for giving us this exclusive interview. We appreciate your time.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: It’s very good to be with you.
QUESTION: I wanted to start with Iran. The administration said that this is not the right time to go back to the JCPOA. Your President described it as dead. Yet, you don’t prefer the military option. How can you stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: First, Iran had an opportunity to get back into the JCPOA at the end of this past summer. Unfortunately, they rejected what was on the table and had been agreed to by everybody. Their either wouldn’t move forward with it. Now our focus is on the many things that have happened since, including the horrific repression of the Iranian people on the streets of Iran as young people, women in particular, have been standing up for their basic rights, and very important communities across Iranian society are doing the same thing and are being repressed violently by the regime.
At the same time, we’re also seeing Iran support Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine, providing it with drones and potentially other weapons systems. So that’s where the focus is and that’s the concern of many countries around the world.
