Tony Blinken
speaker
307 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Tony Blinken’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Right.
Because I would have told him this is a catastrophic mistake.
The agreement that we reached, that I worked very hard on with a number of my colleagues, and obviously the Secretary Kerry, Wendy Sherman, Jake Sullivan, Bill Burns, others, and President Obama concluded with Iran.
Almost by definition, anytime you're negotiating something with an adversary, negotiation means you don't get everything you want.
But we got a good deal.
And in particular, what were we trying to do?
We were trying to, at the very least, take the prospect of Iran having a nuclear weapon
off the table and to do that we looked at this and we said well you know there are three things that it needs it needs fissile material the gasoline if you will for a weapon it needs the weapon itself and then it needs some way to deliver it and the thing that has the most visible
production chain is the fissile material.
And so the agreement that we reached basically put that in a box.
And it had in it constraints on Iran such that if it had chosen to break out of the agreement, it would have taken it at least a year to produce enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon, plenty of time to then if we had to use a military option, because that was never off the table.
And people complain that the agreement, parts of the agreement expired after a certain period of time.
Well, many arms control agreements do.
And then you either renew them, extend them, renegotiate them, or if the other side refuses, we still have the military option.
President Trump back then just tore it up, said he didn't like it, tore it up and replaced it with nothing.
And then Iran started moving closer to a bomb.
They were at least producing the material that it needed to make one.
That's what he kind of created as his own inheritance.
With President Biden, we tried to get back to the agreement for a whole variety of reasons that we can get into, but we may not have time to.
We couldn't get there.
Showing 81–100 of 307 · page 5 of 16
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