President Biden is eyeing an urgent restoration of the international nuclear deal with Iran as a first step to deal with a range of threats from that country, new national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Friday, suggesting a faster timeline than the administration has previously outlined. Sullivan did not mention Biden’s oft-stated precondition that Iran make the first move by rolling back nuclear activities to come back into compliance with terms of the 2015 deal. Iran is closer to building a bomb now than it was when President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal, and putting the nuclear program “in a box” is the first imperative, Sullivan said.

“We are going to have to address Iran’s other bad behavior, malign behavior, across the region, but from our perspective, a critical early priority has to be to deal with what is an escalating nuclear crisis as they move closer and closer to having enough fissile material for a weapon,” Sullivan said. “And we would like to make sure that we reestablish some of the parameters and constraints around the program that have fallen away over the course of the past two years.”

Containing Iran’s ability to produce bombmaking nuclear material was the central rationale the Obama administration applied in seeking the deal that Sullivan helped to shape.

A decision about whether or when to return to the deal, as well as a potential ­follow-on agreement that could include new concessions or promises to Iran, is one of the first major foreign policy tests for the new administration.

As a 2020 presidential candidate, Biden committed to returning to the international compact that Trump had run in 2016 on reversing. After Trump pulled the United States out in 2018, Iran began breaking its obligations under the agreement formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Biden set the condition that Iran would have to return to complying with the agreement first and said a restored deal would then be a starting point for negotiation of a larger agreement that addresses long-standing concerns over Iran’s ballistic missile capability, its support for terrorism, and aggressions toward Israel and Persian Gulf neighbors.