Special envoy to Iran Rob Malley is at it again.
While the White House promises to isolate Russia, Malley turns to Russian diplomats to find a magic formula to get Iran’s signature on an agreement. Never mind that Russia will gain billions of dollars from any deal. Call it the meth addict school of diplomacy: The desperation for a fix is so great that there is no debasement too low for one more hit.
Consider the record so far.
The Biden administration already reversed the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy and allowed Tehran to replenish its coffers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. What sanctions it could not relieve, the White House chose not to enforce. In cases like Iraq, where the Trump-era Treasury Department engineered an escrow account to keep the billions of dollars Iraq spent on Iranian gas from Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps diversion, the White House scrapped the fail-safe mechanism.
Iranian-backed militias continue to destabilize Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, while Iranian military advisers are complicit in Syrian war crimes. Tehran has seized foreign ships and demanded billions of dollars in ransom money for a growing stable of hostages. Meanwhile, Tehran openly flaunts not only the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — for which some partisans would give it a pass, given that President Donald Trump walked away from the agreement — but also the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The timeline shows Iran accelerated its nuclear enrichment to near-weapons grade not when Trump left the JCPOA but rather after Biden entered the White House and began telegraphing weakness.
To rejoin the JCPOA never made much sense. It’s like paying for a full week at the shore but only going to the house six hours before the rental ends. What Biden and Malley may now do, however, is far more destructive.
The sticking point in the current negotiations is the Iranian demand that the International Atomic Energy Agency end its open investigations into Iranian cheating. Remember: The whole reason why Iran is in this mess is both because of the exposure of a secret, illegal enrichment program and because subsequent IAEA inspections caught the regime in several lies. Indeed, this is the main reason why the current situation with Iran is not analogous to the faulty intelligence that predated the 2003 Iraq War. With Iraq, the problem was that late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein bluffed his generals. Polygraphs of defectors showed no deception because they believed Saddam’s bluff, while signals intercepts of his top aides confirmed the faulty intelligence. Iran, however, is different. Almost every IAEA report highlights how Tehran changed its story after inspectors disproved earlier explanations.
While the JCPOA largely buried concern about the so-called “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program until that point and agreed not to dig too deeply into evidence that Iran had experimented with warhead design, detonators, and mathematical modeling for nuclear explosives, more recent inspections have elevated concern within the IAEA about Iranian activity at three suspicious sites. What Iran now demands is the effective closure of this file.
Biden and Malley may feel this would enable an agreement. But at what cost?
The IAEA is an independent, technical agency that should stand aloof from political pressure. The late IAEA Secretary-General Yukiya Amano failed when, under pressure from President Barack Obama, he reversed decades of counter-proliferation precedent. Should the IAEA again cave, it will show itself to be completely meaningless, an organization that plays politics but ignores the substance of its mandate.
Biden may be desperate and Malley deluded, but that should not be the IAEA’s problem. Should the IAEA acquiesce, the consequence will not be a renewed deal but a collapse of its credibility and, with it, the entire infrastructure surrounding the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
