March 16, 2021 | National Review
Joe Biden Shouldn’t Return to the Iran Deal
But he probably will anyway.
March 16, 2021 | National Review
Joe Biden Shouldn’t Return to the Iran Deal
But he probably will anyway.
Although President Biden has demanded that Iran reenter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action before it receives economic relief, he will probably soon start green-lighting billions of dollars in assistance and lifting sanctions. Tehran will undoubtedly remain in violation of the atomic accord and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran is a signatory. Biden will do so for the same reason that Barack Obama repeatedly gave ground in negotiations with the Islamic Republic: fear of risking war or publicly conceding a nuke to the clerical regime. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who has an autarkist streak and despises the United States, has been ratcheting up the pressure.
Tehran has increased the quantity and quality of its enriched uranium and started to construct and deploy advanced centrifuges faster than what the JCPOA allowed. The clerical regime is also preventing the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency from accessing Iran’s nuclear facilities, which is in violation of the NPT. And for the fourth time under the Biden administration, an Iran-guided Shiite militia has rocketed an American base in Iraq. The president responded to one of the attacks with a limited strike in Syria.
Khamenei has been point-blank — more so than he often is when he wants to give himself wiggle room: “We have no sense of urgency, we are in no rush to see the United States return to the JCPOA; this has never been a concern for us. . . . What is our entirely reasonable demand is the lifting of sanctions; this is the usurped right of the Iranian nation.”
Although senior officials in the administration are loath to say this publicly, they need the credible threat of U.S. military power and the pain of sanctions to drive the supreme leader back into negotiations. As punishing as sanctions had been for two and a half years under Donald Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign, they did not crack the fortitude and faith of Iran’s ruling elite.
For Khamenei and his security forces, the decisive moment came in the winter of 2019 when they crushed nationwide, anti-regime protests, initially provoked by a rapid increase in fuel prices. By 2020, after using machine-gun fire against the poor, the supreme leader had overcome three years of increasingly severe demonstrations. In his mind, he’d overcome American provocations.
Addicted to arms control, with a uranium clock ticking, dreading the thought of another conflict or Iranian-orchestrated violence against U.S. forces, President Biden is probably meditating most on this: How can his administration choreograph nuclear extortion as a mutual de-escalation that makes it seem Tehran has given something substantial for the billions of dollars that the White House will release? The Europeans, especially the French, have been similarly focused, serving as a middleman in an effort to resuscitate what they regard as a diplomatic triumph.