Former US national security adviser John Bolton has urged Republicans to derail president-elect Joe Biden’s plan to take the US back into the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and other world powers. In an article, Mr Bolton, a Republican who served in the Trump administration, called on conservative politicians to play "hardball" against Mr Biden’s efforts to revive the Obama-era agreement once he takes the White House on January 20. Mr Biden, a Democrat, has said the US will rejoin the deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which traded sanctions relief for curbs on Iran’s nuclear programme, if Tehran “resumes strict compliance” with the pact. "So doing would only reward Iranian malevolence," Mr Bolton and co-writer John Yoo, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor, said in the conservative <em>National Review</em> magazine this week. “The mullahs have never given up their nuclear ambitions; they lied repeatedly to conceal their covert nuclear-weapons programme and greeted European efforts to save the JCPOA by building up Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpiles beyond approved limits.” According to the authors, Mr Biden would likely “emulate” former president Barack Obama’s decision to present the deal as an international accord rather than a treaty, and thus avoid the need for approval from Congress. If this happens, Congress “should deploy its own constitutional powers by imposing mandatory sanctions on Iran, beefing up military spending in the region, withholding appropriations to the State Department and other agencies and refusing to confirm nominees to national security positions,” they wrote. Tension has been growing between Iran and the US since 2018, when President Donald Trump exited the deal between Iran and six world powers and reimposed “maximum pressure” sanctions that have destroyed Iran’s economy. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Friday that Tehran was not “in a hurry” for the US to return to the deal, but added that Washington’s sanctions on Tehran must be “lifted immediately”. Iran said on Monday it had <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/iran-says-it-is-going-ahead-with-20-per-cent-uranium-enrichment-1.1139028">resumed enriching uranium to 20 per cent purity at its Fordow underground nuclear facility</a>, a JCPOA breach that puts Tehran closer to being able to build nuclear warheads. According to the authors, the 2015 deal led to heightened tension in the Middle East, and Tehran did not use the economic boost of sanctions relief to improve life for ordinary Iranians. “The mullahs funded terrorists in Lebanon and Iraq, [President Bashar Al] Assad’s regime in Syria and Yemeni rebels,” the authors said. “The ability of Iran to foment terrorism and employ conventional forces to undermine our allies in the region, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, has suffered, but it remains deeply threatening.”