A long-awaited nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran will “do nothing” to enhance security in the Middle East, a senior Senate Democrat told Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“It will do nothing about the destabilization of the region,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez of New Jersey said Tuesday. “At the end of the day, it’s not going to meet the essential challenge that we have with Iran.”
Blinken’s team has been working to rehabilitate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal since President Joe Biden took office, even as Iran continues to develop important aspects of its nuclear program. Those protracted talks have faced numerous delays, culminating in a reported impasse over the Biden administration’s hesitance to rescind former President Donald Trump’s designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization.
“The decision to pull out of the agreement and the effort to exert maximum pressure on Iran, whatever the intent, did not produce results,” Blinken told Menendez in reference to Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the pact. “We continue to believe that getting back into compliance with the agreement would be the best way to address the nuclear challenge posed by Iran and to make sure that an Iran that is already acting with incredible aggression doesn’t have a nuclear weapon or the ability to produce one on short notice.”
That posture drew bipartisan fire, as Idaho Sen. James Risch, the top Republican on the panel, observed that “there is little, if any, daylight” between his position and that of Menendez, but Blinken touted the potential benefits of a deal that could see Iran agree to suspend “critical” aspects of its nuclear weapons program.
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“And if we were to resume [the deal], compliance would continue to stop and would buy us a decade on the critical sunsets in terms of the stockpile of missile material, in terms of the enrichment level,” he said. “At the same time, their efforts to actually weaponize based on — on public information paused, stopped some years ago. But of course, we look very carefully to see if they resume. So we would be focused on this like a hawk either way.”
Risch suggested that the prospective nuclear agreement has been rendered redundant by Israel’s hawkish leadership.
“The Iranians do believe the Israelis when they say what’s going to happen if they move towards weaponization,” he said. “If that’s the case, then we really need to focus on the other bad activities that Iran engages in as were laid out by [Menendez]. And this — this agreement, I think you would have to agree, doesn’t cover that. And it seems to me that that’s really where we ought to be focused.”
Israel long has opposed the deal, in part on the grounds that the financial advantages provided to Iran by the lifting of economic sanctions empower Iran to conduct more aggressive operations. “It is us here in the region that will have to deal with that afterward,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett reportedly told Blinken in March.
Blinken found an ally in Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who insisted that the nuclear deal would deprive Iran of the ability to pose those conventional threats under the protection of a nuclear arsenal.
“The whole world has watched how difficult it is to craft a Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine given Russia’s status as a nuclear power, and I simply cannot imagine why we would wish for a policy that will allow Iran to be weeks, maybe months away from a nuclear weapon given all of their malevolent activity in the Middle East,” Murphy told Blinken.
Menendez, to the contrary, argued that it is the restoration of the deal at this juncture that would establish a scenario in which a hostile Iran stands on the threshold of a nuclear bomb.
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“It has its missile capacities, which is one of the third parts of the bomb delivery, it has the fissile material capability, whether we push it back six months or not … but with the knowledge that it has [gained], that six months will be nothing,” he said. “When you look at the totality of it, you know, 2022 is not 2014 or 2015, and the sunsets are on the horizon, even if a deal was to be made. And that’s part of the challenge that I see.”
