President Joe Biden is allowing Iran to flout the “red line” expected to limit the regime’s nuclear program, according to Israeli officials alarmed by a potential breakthrough in the talks.
“We are against this agreement, because it is a bad one,” Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said Wednesday. “Because it cannot be accepted as it is written right now. In our eyes, it does not meet the standards set by President Biden himself: preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear state.”
Lapid’s protest followed days of direct diplomacy with Western officials, with U.S. and European leaders poised to finalize an agreement. The European Union, which has a significant role in mediating the “indirect talks” between U.S. and Iranian officials, is pressing for a final answer on a draft agreement proposed by the European bloc, though even that demand has been subjected to an apparent back-and-forth between Iran and the West.
“As you know, we received Iran’s comments on the EU’s proposed final text through the EU,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters. “Our review of those comments has now concluded. We have responded to the EU today.”
IRAN SOFTENS DEMAND ON MAJOR NUCLEAR DEAL STUMBLING BLOCK, US OFFICIAL SAYS
Now that response is under “a detailed review” in Tehran, according to the regime. “The Iranian side has received a response through the EU coordinator on Wednesday evening. We [Iran] have begun a detailed review of the American proposals and will additionally inform the coordinator of our opinion on them.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team is laboring the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, four years after former President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the pact and Iranian officials accelerated their illicit nuclear research. Proponents of the process, which has been mediated chiefly by the European Union, see the talks as a way to postpone a nuclear crisis in the Middle East.
But the negotiations have proceeded slowly, as Iran reportedly attempted to use the prospect of a deal as leverage to force Biden to lift terrorism-related sanctions imposed by Trump and to close a separate international investigation related to nuclear materials detected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog of the United Nations.
“This negotiation, it is true … as at times languished, and it has languished at times for months and months because of the action or, oftentimes was the case, inaction from Iran,” Price said Monday. “We are encouraged by the fact that Iran appears to have dropped some of its nonstarter demands, such as lifting the FTO designation of the IRGC. But as you’ve heard from us over the past couple days, there are still some outstanding issues that must be resolved, some gaps that must be bridged if we are able to get there.”
U.S. officials have continued to pursue a deal despite warning for nearly a year that Iran’s nuclear progress could render the pact a dead letter. The latest exchange is emblematic, according to Lapid, of a process that some senior Democrats and U.S. allies have characterized as an Iranian effort to manipulate the negotiations while continuing to advance toward a nuclear weapon.
“They declared it was ‘take it or leave it.’ The Iranians, as always, did not say no. They said ‘Yes, but,” Lapid said. “The Iranians are making demands again. The negotiators are ready to make concessions again. This is not the first time this has happened. The countries of the West draw a red line, the Iranians ignore it, and the red line moves.”
That barb is an apparent reference to Barack Obama’s pledge to punish any use of chemical weapons by Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, a threat that went unfulfilled after Russian officials intervened to broker an agreement to eliminate Assad’s chemical weapons stockpiles. (That agreement reduced Assad’s chemical arsenal, but it did not eliminate his ability to carry out future attacks, as the unfolding civil war showed.)
“The terrible deal with Iran … casts a heavy shadow on our security and our future,” Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who earned the dislike of the Obama administration by partnering with congressional Republicans to try to block the adoption of the 2015 pact, said Wednesday.
Lapid and Netanyahu, rivals as they are, agreed that the deal “would give Iran a hundred billion dollars a year,” as the prime minister put it.
“It will be used to strengthen Iran’s nuclear program,” Lapid said. “Iran will assist other nations facing sanctions to evade them. They will be able to create a direct route for financing terror.”
That statement was an apparent reference to a report that Russia and Iran plan, following the lifting of sanctions on Iran’s energy industry, to circumvent Western sanctions on Russia’s energy sector. Under the scheme, Iranian officials have implied, Tehran will take custody of Russian oil and “use it for domestic consumption and then we deliver oil in the same quantity to their customers in the south,” as a senior Iranian official put it recently.
“Iran is a good partner in this endeavor,” an unnamed Western diplomat told Politico’s European affiliate. “Russia has a difficulty and Iran has a capability.”
The news of the diplomatic exchanges over the nuclear deal was followed quickly by reports that “Israeli F-35 stealth fighters penetrated Iranian airspace on multiple occasions in the last two months,” according to the Times of Israel and other media outlets, which would seem to reinforce Lapid’s threat to act unilaterally against Tehran if Biden agrees to a deal that Israeli leaders deem inadequate.
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“If a deal is signed, it does not obligate Israel,” Lapid said. “We will act to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear state. We are not prepared to live with a nuclear threat above our heads from an extremist, violent Islamist regime.”
