To say talks in Vienna aimed at resuscitating the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran are “on life support” might be a tad overoptimistic.
Perhaps a better description would be they’re on a “death watch.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been saying there are only “a few weeks left” to bring Iran and the United States back into mutual compliance — and he’s been saying that for a few weeks now.
“The longer this goes on, which is why it can’t go on much longer, the more Iran will continue to advance its nuclear program,” Blinken
said recently in Berlin
. “And the shorter and shorter the so-called breakout time will become, that is the time it would take Iran to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.”
Former President Donald Trump exited the Iran deal in 2018, insisting it was fatally flawed by a weak inspections regime, short 15-year sunset provisions, and a lack of any restraint on Iran’s ballistic missile programs.
The goal of the agreement with six world powers, which Trump called “the worst deal ever,” was to keep Iran perpetually one year away from building a nuclear bomb.
The Biden administration has been desperately trying to put Iran back in that box, to no avail.
Initially, there was modest progress until the negotiations came to a grinding halt in August after Iran elected a new hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi.
When a new negotiating team arrived in Vienna in December, Iran was no longer willing to make concessions agreed to by the previous government. They added a new, impossible demand: an assurance Iran wouldn’t get Trumped again.
“One of the things that Iran has asked for is guarantees that we won’t pull the rug out again,” Blinken said in
a podcast appearance
. “In our system, you can’t provide that kind of hard and fast guarantee. President [Joe] Biden can certainly say what he would or wouldn’t do as president as long as Iran remains in compliance with the agreement, but we can’t bind future presidents.”
With talks seemingly at an insurmountable impasse, Iran has been aggressively enriching uranium to 60% purity, beyond what is needed for a peaceful nuclear energy program.
Soon it will be too late to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle, and the U.S. could be faced with another North Korea, whose status as a nuclear state is a fait accompli.
“Iran already could produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium in as little as three weeks and test a crude nuclear device in six months,” wrote Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council in a recent
op-ed
in the Wall Street Journal. “It might take a year or two to fashion a functioning nuclear warhead that is deliverable on a missile, but once the clerical regime has enough weapons-grade material, the game is over.”
“We are not where we need to be,” Blinken admitted. “And if we don’t get there very soon, we will have to take a different course.”
Despite the criticism from Republicans that Biden has been soft on Iran, his administration has left most of Trump’s “maximum sanctions” in place, which means more sanctions are unlikely to budge the mullahs in Tehran.
So that “different course” is shaping up as some form of military action to cripple Iran’s nuclear capacity before it can actually build and test a bomb.
And the U.S. and Israel are the two nations with the capacity either to sabotage or bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.
At a meeting at the Pentagon on Dec. 10, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Israeli counterpart Benny Gantz
reportedly
discussed “possible military exercises that would prepare for a worst-case scenario to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities should diplomacy fail and if their nations’ leaders request it,” according to Reuters.
Afterward, Austin did not dispute the report.
“We are completely aligned in our commitment to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he said, stressing that diplomacy should be the first option. “The president has made clear that if the policy fails, we are prepared to turn to other options.”
Israel has long stated it cannot live with a nuclear-armed Iran as a neighbor, given that the country routinely issues threats to destroy Israel.
Twice, against Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007, Israel has acted alone to destroy nuclear reactors it saw as a direct threat to its security.
But this time, Israel is hoping for help from the U.S. — as was the case early in the Obama administration when the two allies reportedly cooperated on the Stuxnet computer worm that caused uranium processing centrifuges to spin wildly out of control at Iran’s Natanz nuclear plant.
In an attempt to shield its program from U.S. bunker-buster conventional bombs, such as the 30,000-pound
GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator
, Iran is building a new underground complex at Natanz, much more extensive and deeper than its uranium enrichment site at the Fordow, which is said to be 260 feet deep, according to a
new report
from Institute for Science and International Security.
“There is little doubt the Pentagon can destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities (even those that are deeply buried and hardened),” wrote Dubowitz and Kroenig, who argued Biden should order high-profile exercises to send a clear message to Tehran that it is flirting with disaster.
“Biden should publicly ask the Pentagon to update military plans and, alongside allies and partners, conduct exercises targeting mockup Iranian nuclear facilities. He should also ensure that U.S. allies and bases in the region are protected against Iranian counterstrikes,” the co-authors wrote.
As for retaliation, Dubowitz and Kroenig believe the lesson from Trump’s strike on Gen. Qassem Soleimani two years ago is that Tehran’s response will likely be “muted.”
“The ruling clerics still fear a major war, which could lead to the destruction of their military and the end of their regime,” they said. Still, in any event, they argued that the risks of war pale in comparison to the nightmare scenario of living with a nuclear-armed Iran for decades to come.
“Backed by the threat of nuclear weapons, Iran would step up its regional aggression and support to terror and proxy groups,” they said. “With Washington deterred by fear of escalation — including the risk of a nuclear strike against Israel — the clerical regime would have a freer hand. Eventually, as Tehran’s intercontinental ballistic missile program advances, the U.S. itself would be vulnerable to Iranian nuclear attacks and coercion.”
“Military options are most effective when they don’t have to be used,” they added. “If all else fails, Mr. Biden should be prepared to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
