At the start of 2022, US officials said negotiations with Iran were in their “final stretch," optimistic that a restored nuclear deal was within reach. One year on, that same deal looks doomed. 

President Joe Biden said as much in a newly surfaced video from early November, telling a member of the public that the nuclear accord he campaigned on restoring was “dead.” And although the administration quickly walked back his comment, Biden acknowledged what some experts have been saying about the deal for months. 

There is increasing pessimism in Washington that an agreement can be reached to revive the deal abandoned by former President Donald Trump, under which Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear activity in exchange for economic sanctions relief. Already stalled talks to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) have taken a backseat to the anti-government uprising sweeping Iran. 

To quell the unrest, Iranian authorities have unleashed a bloody crackdown on the peaceful protests that erupted over the Sept. 16 death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish Iranian woman arrested for an alleged violation of the compulsory hijab. More than 500 people, many of them children, have since died in the protests, according to the watchdog group Human Rights Activists in Iran.