The Iran Talks

Rich Goldberg:

Thanks for coming on in and of course excited to have you all on a very important day to have this discussion on what’s going on in Vienna and the next steps, and honored to be joined as well by Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Rich Goldberg:

We are both actually sanctioned by the Islamic Republic of Iran, both Mark and myself. So you are in an Iranian-sanctioned Clubhouse room, I guess, by extension. So come and listen at your own Iranian sanctions peril, I suppose, but nothing they can do to you in the Clubhouse because Clubhouse rules are in effect.

Mark Dubowitz:

Richard, it occurs to me that if they actually sanctioned our Clubhouse, that would do wonders for viewership.

Rich Goldberg:

One can only imagine. And of course anybody can wander into a room like ours. So who knows who will join us? Maybe we’ll get a live interaction from Vienna midway through..

Rich Goldberg:

Welcome again to the ‘Iran Talks’ room. I think you all have come on in. We’re going to have folks streaming on in here. We got 27 already, other folks coming in. I’m seeing a lot of friendly faces, different people we know, some people we don’t know. So thanks for joining us in here and looking forward to your comments and questions.

Rich Goldberg:

I am Rich Goldberg, senior advisor at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, joined by my very good friend and colleague, Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies. As I said a couple minutes ago for those that weren’t in the room, both Mark and I are officially sanctioned by the Islamic Republic of Iran. So you are in an Iranian sanctioned Clubhouse room now. So that is something you probably never have said before, but you can after today.

Rich Goldberg:

We’re here to talk about what’s going on in Vienna this week. The restart of indirect talks between the United States and the rest of the, as some would say, P4+1 without the United States, but really it’s a passage of messages between two rooms in a hotel in a nice chateau in Vienna between the US diplomatic delegation and the Iranian nuclear delegation over whether or not the United States and Iran would come back into compliance with the terms of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which is more colloquially known as the Iran nuclear deal, or whether something else may occur going forward.

Rich Goldberg:

A little bit of background context, level-setting for where we find ourselves today, and then I want to bring Mark in to the conversation for his thoughts, as well. And then I look forward to bringing some of you up on stage here to have your questions answered. Please feel free to raise your hand as well if you have a question. We’ll work to get as many as we can, obviously respecting each other’s views. Looking forward to questions. If you want to make a comment please be brief and respectful, and we’ll ensure that any respectful dialogue as Clubhouse goes is definitely enabled here in this room.

Rich Goldberg:

We look now at about 10 months since the Biden administration came into office, and really just a shift of momentum from historic sanctions pressure at the end of 2020 at the tail end of the Trump administration. The IMF data showing that Iran was down to about $4 billion in accessible foreign exchange reserves, and just a reversal of fortune for the Islamic Republic, where 10 months have gone by of the United States not only not enforcing those sanctions, but actually lifting those sanctions in certain narrow cases, allowing Iran access to billions of dollars of those locked up escrow accounts to repay foreign debts and to expand certain other bilateral trade that it has with other countries, particularly in Asia.

Rich Goldberg:

We’ve seen attacks, UAV and rocket missile attacks launched by militias and terrorist organizations backed by the Islamic Republic at their direction against US forces and US allies in the Middle East go on from months without any military retaliation from the United States.

Rich Goldberg:

And we’ve seen a steady expansion, a very robust expansion in Iran’s nuclear program. It is an amazing thing to say that despite all the criticism the Trump administration sustained on the maximum pressure campaign that Iran responded with during that 2019 to 2020 period, the vast majority now of the escalation and expansion of Iran’s nuclear program has happened under the Biden administration, not under the Trump administration. It’s happened under what I like to call the maximum deference campaign. I think Mark would call the maximum carrots campaign or the maximum concessions campaign, not under maximum pressure.

Rich Goldberg:

And instead of holding Iran accountable, not just for its wild expansion ramp-up of its enrichment first to 20% purity levels, then 60% purity levels, not just for its production of Iranian metal, a core component of nuclear weapons development, not just for starting to deny the IAEA inspectors access to certain sites, holding videotapes hostage, et cetera, and also for three years now denying any answers, cooperation on an investigation into undeclared nuclear activities and materials inside Iran, rather than using all of that as a basis to put pressure on Iran at the IAEA in Vienna at the quarterly board meetings center resolutions as was passed last summer, a referral to the UN Security Council for potential non-compliance with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, not just the JCPOA, the Biden administration opted not to do any of that and instead pull back European allies who were poised do so earlier this year to not censure Iran now four times, including just last week at the IAEA board meeting.

Rich Goldberg:

Even after the director general of the IAEA had gone to Iran, asked Iran to cooperate with the IAEA, Iran refused, didn’t even try to play for time with some sort of deal or commitment that it had in its last go around right before the September IAEA board meeting. No pretense anymore from this regime. If you want to give us money, that’s fine, just know we’re going to keep expanding our nuclear program and never cooperate with the IAEA on investigations into past nuclear activities.

Rich Goldberg:

And under all of that, that is the posture under which the United States has entered this new round of indirect talks in Vienna, potentially, in my view, one of the weakest negotiating postures the United dates has ever assumed going into talks directly or indirectly with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Rich Goldberg:

That’s sort of the last 10 months lead up to where we are today. Mark, I know you have a lot of views about what could be on the table. Obviously the President has said he wants to go back to the JCPOA, the nuclear deal. That has been come increasingly unlikely, though still possible, still remains the goal, but I think there’s something else in the [inaudible 00:08:46] potentially that’s even more dangerous than the JCPOA, and you’ve been talking about that even as recently as this weekend and quoted in The Wall Street Journal editorial just yesterday on it.

Mark Dubowitz:

Yeah. Thanks, Rich, and thanks to all of you for coming on. Look, I think a lot of people are pessimistic that there’s going to be no deal coming out of Vienna. I’m pessimistic that there’s going to be a really bad deal coming out of Vienna and I think even worse than a mutual return to the JCPOA.

Mark Dubowitz:

Where I think we’re heading is what I’ve called ‘less for more’, which will be an interim agreement, shorter, weaker, where we get far fewer nuclear restrictions on Iran’s program than we even got under the JCPOA and we give up more in terms of sanctions relief and economic relief. And there’s been a lot of sort of misunderstanding about why this should be less for more or not less for less, which is sort of the preferred terminology that Iran Envoy Rob Malley and others are using.

Mark Dubowitz:

And the reason it’s less for more is because, Rich, as you know because you’ve spent 18 years working on sanctions in the White House and in Congress, that if you’re not enforcing existing sanctions, if you are suspending or lifting specific economically consequential sanctions, and if you’re not passing new sanctions, then what happens naturally is the economy recovers and billions of dollars of investment flow in and GDP increases and inflation stabilizes and currencies strengthens, and a country is able then to withstand pressure because economic resilience is building. Well, that’s exactly, Rich, what’s been happening over the past nine months or so as you explained, because the Biden administration has not been enforcing existing sanctions. They have been not passing new consequential sanctions and it’s going to get worse. So I think we’re heading for this interim agreement less for more, shorter and weaker. And I fear that this interim agreement will become the final agreement because I don’t believe the United States will have leverage to negotiate, “ a longer and stronger agreement” which has been the commitment by President Biden and Mr. Malley. I don’t think the Iranians feel any incentive to get a longer and stronger agreement because they’re going to get everything they need under the less or more deal.

Rich Goldberg:

Well, I agree with that. To use a football metaphor for those who have been watching over the weekend, Iran was backed up in my view towards it’s one yard line coming into this year and they’ve managed to drive deep into our red zone in just 10 short months. It is quite the reversal of fortunes. And I think it’s important to step back and also from a strategic national security perspective, have some accountability for where we have gone at the White House level. If you’re at the National Security Council, if you’ve been laying out what the strategy for the United States is under this new administration. And obviously, there’s a change administration. They have a policy review. That policy is directed with the strategic vision from the president United States and then implemented on down. And we look at what the policy objectives have been over the last 10 months, they have evolved, which I think is usually your signal of a policy failure.

Rich Goldberg:

It started with: we want to go back to the JCPOA to negotiate a longer stronger deal, and then there was all these different privations of longer and stronger, wider whatever, up down, but this idea that we’re going to be having a follow on agreement because the JCPOA is flawed, we’ve all become accepted of that truth, and we need to cover missiles, we need to cover terrorism, we need to extend the sunsets, which have already started kicking in last October with the arms embargo lifting, additional sunsets coming 2023, 2024, 2025, et cetera, that shifted, I would say, middle of the year. And you saw this in the form of responses from the state department spokesperson, where the formulation of go back to the JCPOA to negotiate a longer, stronger deal shifted to, we just need to get back to the JCPOA, period. That’s the end objective. That’s the end state. That has now shifted to the reports, as you’re talking about.

Rich Goldberg:

Even floated in some of the news media by the national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, to Israeli counterparts, some other tea leaves we’ve seen as well of this idea of maybe we can’t even go back to JCPOA and that’ll be okay. We’re going to negotiate something even less than JCPOA and give the Iranians more, as you’re saying, ‘less for more’. So we have gone from longer and stronger, the JCPOA is flawed, that can’t be the end result, to the JCPOA would great on its own, to we’re not even going to try to get back to JCPOA, we just need to get any deal. That to me over 10 months is a demonstration of a policy failure. The question now is what do you do about it? What do you do about it? Let’s assume, Mark, there is no policy shift going on. There’s no plan B, this is the plan A. They’re just going to continue down this road until some deal is agreed to, some set of sanctions are lifted. We should talk about what those sanctions are.

Rich Goldberg:

What in your view should Congress be thinking about, should the private sector be thinking about? I think there’s other actors out there that we could talk about as well, but if that’s sort of the course we’re on, what do you do about it?

Mark Dubowitz:

Yeah, Rich. I mean, you’re exactly right. I mean, you’ve watched this administration go actually from longer, stronger and broader to longer and stronger, to maybe longer and stronger, to less for less, to now less for more. And you’ve watched the administration do so because let’s face it, the architect of this administration’s Iran policy is somebody who doesn’t believe in pressure. I mean, Rob Malley has spent his career, again, rightly or wrongly, but he has spent his career very publicly making the case against pressure, particularly pressure against adversaries. I think Rob has show own through his career that he is willing to use leverage against allies, but he has said repeatedly that pressure doesn’t work, maximum pressure was a failure. And even back in the Obama administration, he was a voice inside the administration who was very much opposed to the kind of pressure that President Obama put on Iran between let’s say 2009 and 2013. So that’s sort of a reality that we’re dealing with and Rob has owned this policy.

Mark Dubowitz:

And so after 10 months, this policy is failing. So what should be done? Well, I think the White House needs to sort of reevaluate who’s leading their policy and perhaps put in place somebody who has the credibility that when they threaten pressure, the regime in Iran takes that seriously. And when they try to assure our allies, our allies take those assurances seriously. I think that’s not where we’re at and I think there needs to be a major shake up in the Iran team. The second question is, what else can we do about this? And Rich, I know you’ve written on this a lot about this concept of sort of market deterrence and this operates in many levels, but ultimately when it comes to sanctions relief and economic relief, we tend to focus too much on Washington, too much on diplomats, not enough on the private sector, on the thousands of CEOs and chief legal officers and chief risk officers who are going to be making independent decisions about going back into Iran.

Mark Dubowitz:

And the focus I think of the Trump administration when you were in the White House was to really re-architect the sanction’s regime and to predicated these powerful sanctions on the realities, the actual realities of the illicit conduct that the regime was engaged in and predicate these sanctions on terrorism and on missile proliferation and on human rights abuses. I think it’s going to be very difficult for President Biden, regardless of what he does legally and technically with respect to sanctions, to assure markets and assure these thousands of market actors that it’ll be safe to go back into Iran. And I think you and I have written about this. We should talk a little bit more about market deterrence, political deterrence and what can be done.

Rich Goldberg:

I think that’s a great segue. It’s 2:45. Just want to welcome anybody who’s come in while we’ve been talking. This is a group on the Iran talks, indirect talks now between the United States and Iran via the P4+1 out of Vienna. We’re monitoring the news of the day. We could talk a little bit more about what we’re seeing. We’re talking about how we got here and where we’re going from here. If you have questions, please raise your hand. You’ll be in the queue when we get there. As always, on Clubhouse, welcome respectful questions, brief, and we will obviously provide respectful responses. Obviously, if this was in the Islamic republic, you would fear for your life to raise anything remotely critical and quite frankly, you wouldn’t even be on here because this would all be censored. But here on the Clubhouse room on the Iran talks, we welcome all views and look forward to the conversation. I would say, Mark, it’s important for us to step back and ask the question of what is on the table in Vienna from the United States.

Rich Goldberg:

Because I think it’s core to this question on market deterrent and it’s core of the question of what Congress can and should be doing and what other actors, my view, governors, state legislatures, et cetera, could also be doing on this market deterrence piece you’re talking about. There is a whole range, right? Thousands of actors, companies, banks, people, ministries, instrumentalities that are subject to US sanctions, right? In Iran or actors that have done business in violation with certain codes of conduct, subject to sanctions around the world. Think of Chinese actors, elsewhere in the Gulf, Turkey, et cetera. We as a US government look at the conduct of these actors and we have certain authorities that have been provided, issued by the president, some mandated by Congress. But in this case, several executive disorders, especially post 911 that have been modernized to give the US government, especially the treasury department tools to try to disrupt the flow of finances, dry up resources for certain actors who are involved in illicit activities.

Rich Goldberg:

We have an executive order that provides authorities to impose sanction for entities involved in supporting terrorism or financing terrorism. We have another executive order that provides the same authorities to impose sanctions for actors involved in the proliferation or development of weapons of mass destruction. Now that could be nuclear, that could be missiles, that could be other types of WMD as well in the chemical or biological realm.

Rich Goldberg:

Of WMD as well and the chemical or biological realm. It was important to understand that going into the JCPOA, Congress had mandated many sanctions on some very high value. When I say high value, economic value institutions, banks, companies in Iran sectors because of everything that Congress didn’t like about Iranian behavior, the nuclear program, it’s support for terrorism, it’s proliferation of missiles, its human rights abuses, and there were specific sort of criteria that Congress had imposed that all of those things had to change, specifically terrorism and development of weapons of mass destruction all had to sort of cease for these sanctions architectures to ever sunset in the future.

Rich Goldberg:

What changed post JCPOA for the United States during the Trump administration was the specific use of authorities, particularly under terrorism, to target these same institutions via the authorities that the president has via the Treasury Department to impose sanctions for support for terrorism, not for the nuclear program for terrorism, and obviously, in a regime where the IRGC, the revolutionary guard core controls at least 40% of the economy by some estimates and has permeated all the major financial institutions, including the central bank of Iran, this becomes a major flash point here in the negotiations in Vienna because today, the central bank of Iran, the national Iranian oil company, the tanker company, the petrochemical company.

Rich Goldberg:

Many other large financial institutions and large economically driven companies and sectors of Iran’s economy are subject to US terrorism sanctions, not nuclear sanctions, and the Iranians want those sanctions lifted at the table here in Vienna. Now obviously, we talked at the beginning that these sanctions aren’t actually being enforced, which is why the Iranians have had so much runway suddenly established over the last year and how they have their economy starting to recover, stabilize, their access to foreign exchange reserves going up, but they want them formally lifted so that the market has a go signal to actually go from zero to 60 on trade, on foreign direct investment, on import exports, have their oil exports really start booming beyond just Chinese imports that don’t get sanctioned by the United States.

Rich Goldberg:

And to do that, they need these terrorism sanctions lifted. What are they offering at the table? They’re offering some semblance of nuclear concessions and we can argue over their value. Arch and I obviously believe they’re not high value. This administration may try to spin that they are, but what we know they are not offering is any halt to the sponsorship of terrorism and certainly any change in behavior of these institutions in their financing of the IRGC or other terrorism activities. So United States is being asked to lift terrorism sanctions or suspend terrorism sanctions in exchange for no consent or changing behavior on terrorism. That creates a huge problem in the market and it’s an area where Congress needs to focus on, where states need to focus on, and the private sector needs to focus on because what they’re telling you is we will suspend sanctions for banks and companies that support terrorism with full knowledge they continue to support terrorism. Go enjoy your transaction. Go enjoy having business. Are you kidding me? Mark, I mean, am I setting that up right?

Mark Dubowitz:

No, Rich, I mean, you set it up right, but I mean, let’s sort of go back and look at some of the details. I mean, Javad Zarif, former foreign minister, was quoted in the Iranian media after giving a briefing to the Iranian parliament, to the Majlis, and you’ve always got to worry about Zarif. For me, he’s a mendacious fellow so one never knows whether he’s telling the truth about anything, but he said that US negotiators had agreed to lift or de-designate approximately 1100, 1200 entities of maybe the 1700 entities that are on the US treasury and state department lists. He also said that the chief negotiator, Rob Malley, had agreed to de-designate all of the Iranian banks except for one.

Mark Dubowitz:

He didn’t name which bank would stay on the list, but it’s clear that the central bank of Iran is one of the banks that’ll be taken off the list despite the fact that the US government has designated the central bank of Iran for supporting the IRGC and Quds Force and Hezbollah. So if we believe Zarif, and I would caution people not to believe Zarif because you never know what Zarif is trying to do here, but if we believe him before the negotiations were suspended, it is entirely conceivable that the US had already given up on most of the major sanctions, economic sanctions, including many of the terrorism sanctions that are most important to the regime. If that’s the case, that is shocking.

Mark Dubowitz:

It’s shocking because essentially, what they’ve done is green lighted the continued support for terrorism by the regime. I think the market response to that is going to be very different than the regime expects. I think that the market response to that is that most of the world’s financial institutions are not going to want to be doing business with a central bank of Iran and with 30, 40 Iranian banks that have been designated in the past for terrorism and missile proliferation, given the fact that those illicit conducts continue, but I think it’s just a window into the possibility that the US has already given up a lot and the regime understood that.

Mark Dubowitz:

And they’re just trying to squeeze the United States for more and more concessions, really to humiliate Washington, and at the last moment, when they realize they’ve pretty much gotten everything they want or almost everything they want, that’s when they’ll agree to a deal and whether that’s a return of the JCPOA or the less for more deal that I described earlier remains to be seen, but on the sanction side, on the economic relief side, the regime has learned a great deal from 2015 and 2016 and understand now that they need to eviscerate our sanctions regime, particularly those entities that have been designated for non-nuclear illicit conduct as you describe.

Rich Goldberg:

I’ll make two comments, and then, Mark, if it’s okay with you, I think we’re starting to have some people queued up for questions and we look forward to that. Again, if you’re just joining us at 2:55, we’re talking about the Iran talks in Vienna that restarted today, indirect talks between the United States and the Islamic Republic in Iran over whether or not they would go back into compliance with the JCPOA, the old Iran nuclear deal or something less, something less for more as Mark has put it. We’ll still stay tuned to see what we can glean out of there. We are seeing some comments come from the Iranians today on wanting to put on the agenda first, going forward, what sanctions will be lifted by the United States. They’re claiming that they’ve achieved a victory by having that on the agenda for tomorrow.

Rich Goldberg:

And so our discussion that we’re having right now on these sanctions is actually very, very pertinent to those talks because it’s examining what sanctions in particular would the United States be formally lifting beyond the non-enforcement we’ve seen to date? One thing I would say is that Congress has bipartisan history on coming together on terrorism sanctions, and it’s not just… I would note for some people, I see a couple people who were around and covered it back then. Josh Eli, you’ll remember this, this week is the 10 year anniversary of the Senate passing the Menendez, Kirk amendment 100 to nothing. I can’t believe it’s been 10 years, but it was 10 years ago, passed on December 1st.

Rich Goldberg:

And then went to the president eventually through the conference report of the NDA that year to impose sanctions on the central bank of Iran. These were the general Congress mandated sanctions prior to the CBI being designated, as Mark mentioned, as a terrorist entity by the Treasury Department in 2019, but even more recently, during US participation in the JCPOA, 2017, first year of the Trump administration, bipartisan, Robert Menendez, now the chairman of the foreign relations committee, led an initiative in the Senate, passed the Senate. Then was passed by bill chambers, a bill to impose sanctions on entities tied to the IRGC.

Rich Goldberg:

And I would note, a lot of the key officials who are now in the Biden administration signed an op-ed in foreign policy that opposed that bill and said, oh, this would disrupt the JCPOA. Maybe it’s compliant because we said you can impose sanctions for non-nuclear reasons, but the Iranians won’t like it. Don’t do this. It could really end the deal. Well, the Senate ignored that, Menendez and many other Democrats ignored that, they pushed for it and they passed it into law and we had that right now, which we can build upon. So in my view, Congress should build on that legislation from 2017 and send a message to the president.

Rich Goldberg:

… Legislation from 2017 and send a message to the president that we will mandate the imposition or the re-imposition of sanctions on any bank, any entity, any company, and any sector tied to the IRGC. You lift sanctions, suspend sanctions on CBI, we are reimposing those sanctions. It’s as if CBI has not halted its support for terrorism. And so goes for NITC and the petrochemical company on down. That should win overwhelming bipartisan support if it was brought for an up or down vote in the US Senate. I would say one other thing, states need to modernize their laws on Iran. Back in the 2000s, before we had gone into these very robust sanction regimes on Iran, when we were just targeting upstream investment in Iran’s oil sector, states had started passing pension divestment laws to target companies that were involved in a certain dollar threshold and upstream investment in Iran. It was basically a couple of Chinese firms just as it is today. And it never amounted to much of impact on Iran’s economy or on the market.

Rich Goldberg:

But notably, the JCPOA, at Iran’s insistence, has a clause that commits the United States government to work against any state-based laws that could interfere with the JCPOA. They’re very afraid in Tehran of the states and of federalism. And they know that a robust pension divestment bill could be a deterrent factor to the market. I would say look at all the sectors that we at FDD and others have identified as being connected to the IRGC, all the sectors of Iran’s economy, that the administration, the Treasury Department, the State Department has exposed as permeated by the IRGC, starting with the financial sector, the energy sector in its entirety, the construction sector on down. And update your pension divestment laws to say, “Any company that we find doing business with these sectors, these terrorism-permeated sectors, we will divest our pension funds from.” That would be a major deterrent coming from the states on top of something Congress could do on a bipartisan level from the Congress. Just a couple ideas for action.

Mark Dubowitz:

Well, yeah, it just got me thinking, I was sort of thinking about what’s going on in Vienna. And this obviously is very technical, very granular, important for folks to understand. But just getting back to the negotiations. It would be so simple for the regime to actually conclude a reasonable nuclear deal. Even on the sanctions issue that we’re talking about. All they have to do is stop their financial institutions from financing terrorism and missile proliferation. The Central Bank of Iran is like the Federal Reserve. Our federal reserve is not a transactional bank. The federal reserve today is not involved in financing, the purchase or sale of fighter jets. It’s primarily concerned with monetary policy. If the Central Bank of Iran was actually a real central bank, it would not be engaged in transactional financing of terrorism, of supporting Hezbollah and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic jihad and transferring funds to the Houthis, funding missile proliferation through the region. This is why we’ve always called it Iran’s terror bank and missile bank. It’s a transactional bank.

Mark Dubowitz:

So they would agree. Central Bank of Iran will not be engaged in financing terrorism. Our dozens of other banks will be engaged in commercial transactions that are in accordance with international standards as set out by the Financial Action Task Force, which is sort of the UN of the financial sector. Our banks will act like regular banks. You could go down the list of entities and, and institutions in Iran that if they just engaged in normal behavior, there really wouldn’t be a negotiation or a big debate in Vienna. It’s because the regime is so insistent on using its instrumentalities and institutions to continue to forward its revolutionary agenda throughout the Middle East and globally and to finance this kind of illicit conduct that these sanctions have been put in place, by the way, since Jimmy Carter. These are sanctions that have been put in place for decades by Republicans and by Democrats in order to try and change the conduct of the regime.

Mark Dubowitz:

So it would be a fairly simple negotiation if you had a regime committed to being a responsible global stakeholder and changing its illicit conduct. The reason it’s a tough negotiation is this regime has no desire to change its conduct, is using nuclear blackmail to try and extort the world, and is trying to get out from under sanctions that are both legitimate and based in evidence. And the Biden administration’s problem, the conundrum that Rob Malley has today, is that Rob is going to have to try to figure out a way to help the regime out from under these terrorism and missile sanctions when all of the evidence from the professionals of the US Treasury Department, State Department, and our intelligence community, and the reams of intelligence information that’s being declassified and published on the websites of the State Department and Treasury underscore that this activity continues.

Mark Dubowitz:

And the market response to that, one would hope, is to look at those reams of declassified information and say, “We’re not going to touch this regime with a 10 foot pole.” So that’s where I see the negotiations today in Vienna. And I’m deeply worried, again, without a commitment to pressure, without a commitment to using instruments of American power, this US negotiating team is going to head to a deal that’ll be more fatally flawed than the JCPOA, will provide Iran with patient pathways to nuclear weapons and will give it the economic relief and the economic resilience to withstand US peaceful pressure in the future. So, in my mind, it’s not going to be this deal or war, it’s going to be this deal and war. And when that war comes, the regime will be much stronger, richer, its nuclear program will be much bigger. Its missile all program will be much more highly developed. It’s regional presence will be that much more dominant. And the consequences of that war for US national security will be that much more severe.

Rich Goldberg:

I think that that’s well said. I would note, I think people know this, or maybe you don’t know this, but Rob Malley has been going around as recently as this week sort of just telling people privately, “Listen, I don’t think anything’s going to happen in Vienna. We don’t expect much in Vienna. We’re going to go through the motions in Vienna.” Now, it’s lowering expectations in case something does happen. So that’s one thing. Their goal still is to go back to JCPOA. You never know. But the question of course is sort of, okay, well, what are you going to do next?