Is this for real? Clearly, the video itself is real enough, and that’s Joe Biden doing what he normally does — telling people what they want to hear. The clip comes from a midterm election rally six weeks ago, but has only surfaced overnight:

بایدن: برجام مُرده.

در ویدئویی که به دستم رسیده، بایدن صریحاً می‌گوید به #برجام بازنمی‌گردد، ولی دولت آمریکا فعلاً اعلام نخواهد کرد.

این ویدئو که برای اولین بار منتشر می‌شود، حاشیه‌ی رویداد انتخاباتی ۴ نوامبر در کالیفرنیا را نشان می‌دهد.

با زیرنویس فارسی و انگلیسی#انقلاب۱۴۰۱ pic.twitter.com/OerHZav9Kb

— دامون مقصودی (@DamonMaghsoudi) December 20, 2022

Here’s the Twitter translation of the Farsi text above:

Biden: The outcome is dead.

In a video obtained by me, Biden clearly says that he will not return to #برجام , but the US government will not announce for now.

This video, which is being released for the first time, shows the sidelines of the November 4 election event in California.

with Farsi and English subtitles

Axios picked up on the video this morning. This sounds much more definitive than the White House had been before or since on the prospects of a nuclear deal with the mullahs, but their previous public statements had become significantly pessimistic in recent months anyway:

President Biden said on the sidelines of a Nov. 4 election rally that the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is “dead,” but stressed the U.S. won’t formally announce it, according to a new video that surfaced on social media late Monday.

Why it matters: It’s the strongest confirmation so far that the Biden administration believes there’s no path forward for the Iran deal, which leaves key questions about the future of Tehran’s nuclear program.

In late October, U.S. envoy for Iran Rob Malley said that the administration is not going to “waste time” on trying to revive the Iran nuclear deal at this time considering Tehran’s crackdown on protesters, Iranian support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and Iran’s positions on its nuclear program.

This comes at the same moment in which the EU has begun pressing the Biden administration to return to the table with Iran. Reuters reported yesterday that neither Washington nor Brussels had “closed the door to diplomacy,” and the EU publicly urged a return to talks last week:

“I think that we do not have a better option than the JCPOA to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons,” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said last week in Brussels after a meeting of EU officials. Under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action under which Tehran reined in its nuclear program in return for relief from economic sanctions.

“We have to continue engaging as much as possible in trying to revive this deal.”

The uphill climb to revive the pact has grown steeper this year. Iran has brutally cracked down on popular protests, Iranian drones have allegedly made their way to aid Russia’s war in Ukraine and Tehran has accelerated its nuclear program, all of which raise the political price to giving Iran sanctions relief.

“Every day you see more and more pundits saying this is the worst time for reviving the deal and we should just be putting pressure on the wretched regime there,” said Robert Einhorn, a nonproliferation expert at the Brookings Institution think tank.

“There is a kind of resignation, even among the strong proponents of revival. Their hearts would be for paying the political price for a revival, but their heads tell them it would be really tough,” he added.

All of this might be true if the JCPOA indeed prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. It didn’t, however; even if Iran had complied with Barack Obama’s deal, it only limited them for ten years in pursuing weapons from their supposedly peaceful nuclear program. There was plenty of evidence that Iran wasn’t complying at any point, which Benjamin Netanyahu put together in an extraordinary public briefing in 2018.

Now, with revolution brewing in the streets, the West may have an opportunity to facilitate a real prevention policy. Toppling the mullahs and the IRGC in a popular revolt at least would derail the development of new weapons systems. A successor government based on actual democratic principles would likely be far friendlier to the West, especially if the West refrained from propping the mullahs up as legitimate in the way Obama did in 2009 in the short-lived Green Revolution and again in 2015 with the JCPOA. That gave the mullahs $150 billion in assets to fund outward terrorism and inward police-state expansion, against which the Iranians are now revolting.

The only real question from this video is whether Biden actually meant what he said. We can hope that is the case, but Biden has a long-ingrained habit of mouthing whatever he thinks will benefit him in the moment. Let’s not forget his promise to George Stephanopoulos that he wouldn’t pull out of Afghanistan before getting all Americans out — and then promptly abandoning 14,000 of them to the Taliban. This is a president entirely without principles or honor, so take everything he utters with a Lot’s wife-sized grain of salt.