No Good Alternative to JCPOA 

European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said he has not given up on efforts to rescue the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Borrell said, “As far as I know, there is not an alternative to this deal to try to avoid Iran becoming nuclear.”
Tehran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and has no military aspects. 
Borrell—who is the coordinator of the nuclear negotiations—has found himself under attack from opponents of the pact. They see him as personifying Europe’s attachment to the deal, which lifted international sanctions on Iran in exchange for temporary restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear program.
France, Britain and Germany—who negotiated the 2015 deal alongside the US with Iran—remain supportive of reviving the deal. However some European diplomats are gloomy about the agreement’s survival.
The veteran Spanish politician is also under pressure from Tehran. Iran has warned that EU sanctions on Iran and a German proposal to list Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps as “a terrorist organization” could lead to a collapse in ties and risks to European security.
In the US, the ranks of skeptics about the diplomacy have swelled recently to include some people who strongly supported the deal in 2015.
The odds of reviving the deal currently appear to be minimal. Former President Donald Trump in 2018 withdrew the US from the deal, contending that it was “a horrible, one-sided deal.”
Iran later started to go beyond the limits on its activities under the accord. It is currently producing high-grade 60% uranium.
The Biden administration has set reviving the 2015 deal as a key foreign-policy goal. A deal was close last spring, but it stalled. New talks in August in Vienna produced what Borrell’s team called a final draft text for Tehran and Washington to accept.
On western allegations that Iran could sell ballistic missiles to Russia for use in the Ukraine war, Borrell said, “I have to say that every time I talk with the Iranians, they insist that they will not do it.”
“But then I have to advise them, if you do that, everything will be much more difficult, including the JCPOA,” he said, using the abbreviation for the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Borrell said given recent protests in Iran and Tehran’s support for Russia, he does not know if Washington would agree to revive the nuclear deal now if Iran scaled back its deal-related demands.
US officials have been saying since the protests erupted in September that Washington’s focus is on the domestic situation in Iran and not the talks. But they have not ruled out a diplomatic revival.
Borrell said that if Iran took a further step in its alleged military assistance to Russia, the incentive for Europe and the US to restore the deal “would be much less.”