A foreign policy adviser to former Vice President and current presidential candidate Joe Biden downplayed the role that Iran’s presidential elections next year will have on Tehran’s potential willingness to revive the flailing nuclear deal.

“The election of [President Hassan Rouhani] was not irrelevant toward the outcome of nuclear diplomacy, but it’s also not dispositive,” Jake Sullivan, an informal adviser to the Biden campaign, said in a virtual Center for Strategic and International Studies interview today. “At the end of the day, the Iranian calculus is going to be driven more out of a combination of where the Supreme Leader and the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and the Supreme Council on National Security are than where the president’s office is,” he added.

Sullivan acknowledged that a conservative hard-liner replacing Rouhani would “have an impact, but I don’t think it’s going to be the key,” noting that there’s “a diversity of opinion within the Iranian leadership.”

Why it matters: Biden has vowed to re-renter the nuclear deal and lift Washington’s crippling sanctions on Iran if he wins the US elections in November and if Tehran returns to compliance with the accord.