Biden’s New Iran Nuclear Courtship The White House wants to push the issue past the 2024 election.
Here we go again. The same people who gave us the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 are trying to pull off a new version that would send Iran cash on day one in return for promises down the road.
The deal taking shape, per press reports in the U.S. and Israel, isn’t the “longer and stronger” agreement President Biden promised. He held that out for months but Iran refused. Now, in a remarkable retreat, the Biden Administration is pursuing an unwritten “understanding” with Iran to get to the brink of a nuclear breakout but go no further.
Iran has enough uranium enriched to 60% purity for several nuclear weapons, and it can get to weapons-grade quickly. But the U.S. isn’t asking Iran to turn over enriched material. The deal mooted in the press offers financial relief for Iran via sanctions waivers, plus a promise of no new sanctions or International Atomic Energy Agency censures, while requesting only that Iran not enrich uranium beyond 60%.
Color us skeptical that an unwritten agreement, without clear technical restrictions, would compel Iran to reinstall monitoring equipment, turn over data or submit to enhanced inspections. It isn’t clear what role the IAEA would play, and the U.S. would risk Iranian withdrawal if it insisted on real verification or responded meaningfully to Iran’s foreign aggression or domestic crackdowns.
“Trust but verify” is being turned on its head. There’s no trust and little verification. The new strategy is hope and pay.
Last week the U.S. gave Iraq a sanctions waiver to pay Iran $2.76 billion for gas and electricity. This looks like the kind of goodwill gesture—a bribe to keep talking—that the U.S. ruled out in October 2021. The Biden Administration says the waiver is unrelated, citing past payments driven by Iraqi energy needs, but this one is five times as large.
The Administration says Iran will spend the Iraqi funds only on food and medicine, as if money isn’t fungible. In reality the U.S. is freeing up billions of dollars that will finance the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its imperialism across the Middle East.
Iran wants billions more in return for releasing some American hostages. In the event of a deal, expect the White House to insist that these aren’t ransom payments.
Iran could take tens of billions of dollars and still accumulate more highly enriched uranium, expand its tunnels to protect nuclear facilities from attack, and otherwise prepare to develop nuclear weapons. When the “understanding” inevitably crumbles, Iran would face the world from a stronger position.
The agreement looks like it is being arranged in such a way that President Biden will claim it can avoid a vote in Congress. This violates the spirit, and possibly the letter, of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act that passed before the 2015 deal to block President Obama from circumventing Congress entirely.
This mini-deal is less a restraint on Iranian nuclear ambitions than an effort to put those ambitions on hold until after the U.S. presidential election in 2024. Mr. Biden wants one less security crisis as he runs for re-election.
But Iran isn’t putting its antipathy to the U.S. and its allies on hold. The country is sending drones to Russia to use against Ukraine, and its proxies in Iraq and Syria have killed Americans with Tehran’s approval as recently as March. This latest effort at nuclear appeasement won’t work any better than the last one.
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