Back to Iran’s Nuclear Future Israel defends itself as Biden courts Tehran to return to the flawed Obama deal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/back-to-irans-nuclear-future-11618354043?mod=opinion_lead_pos4
‘America is back” has been a mantra of the early Biden Presidency, and back how is the question. So far regarding Iran it seems to mean back to the future of 2015-2016 and another bad nuclear deal.
The U.S. on Wednesday will resume talks in Vienna to revive the nuclear agreement, but the bigger news is the explosion over the weekend at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. No one has taken credit, but Israel has been notably public in saying it will do whatever it must to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
Unlike past cyber attacks, the U.S. was quick to say it had nothing to do with the Natanz attack. A fair conclusion is that Israel feels it must act because it sees President Biden rushing back to a deal that clearly hasn’t stopped Iran from continuing to make progress toward a nuclear breakout.
Washington and Tehran are so far speaking through European intermediaries, but the focus of the talks is also back to the Obama future. The Iranians, who outmaneuvered the same American negotiators six years ago, are demanding the removal of all sanctions as the price for a return to the deal. Donald Trump’s sanctions have increased domestic economic pressure on the mullahs, who want access to global oil markets and investment.
Iran has spent two years slowly ramping up its violations of the deal—restricting nuclear inspections, activating advanced centrifuges, enriching uranium at a higher purity and stockpiling more of it. This can be reversed, but the increased nuclear knowhow can’t be undone.
The focus on such minutiae points to the real problem with the Vienna talks. The 2015 nuclear deal didn’t address other issues like Iran’s missile program and malign behavior in the Middle East. And its nuclear limits were temporary and far from comprehensive.
Another set of parallel talks proves the point. Iranian diplomats have been negotiating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), though the talks have been delayed. The United Nations nuclear watchdog had discovered evidence of processed uranium at three previously undeclared nuclear sites in Iran. There could be as many as nine such sites, and the world knows little about them. There’s no reason to return to a deal meant to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions if it can’t even cover the full extent of Iran’s nuclear activities.
Yet Team Biden’s concessionary courtship of Tehran continues. The U.S. has removed Patriot anti-missile batteries defending Saudi Arabia and curtailed support for Riyadh’s fight against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. The White House ended the Trump Administration’s fight to “snap back” sanctions on Iran at the U.N. and its limits on Iranian diplomatic personnel. It hasn’t rejected a multibillion dollar International Monetary Fund loan to Iran like Mr. Trump did.
Don’t count on the Europeans to push Mr. Biden in the right direction. Desperate to do business in Iran and not as threatened as Israel and Saudi Arabia—countries that oppose the deal—they’re likely to accept a flawed accord to open Tehran up to European firms. Once Iran gets sanctions relief, it has little reason to negotiate new limits on its behavior.
As the rush to return to a bad deal continues, expect Israel and the Gulf Arabs to do more to protect themselves from what they rightly judge is a flawed deal that will eventually allow a nuclear Iran.
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