Another deadline, another failure by the Iranian regime and the Obama administration to reach a nuclear agreement. This deadline was described Monday as “a real deadline” by State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf — as opposed to the previous deadlines, which proved not to be so “real” after all.
But this new delay in reaching a resolution acceptable to all parties should be especially troubling, as the late tells in the negotiations cast doubt upon both Iran’s intentions and Obama’s competence in preventing a terrorist-sponsoring regime from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The most disturbing development this week was Iran’s last-minute pullback. The pullback itself is not the problem, but rather the issue cited as its cause. Negotiations to this point had included a requirement that Iran begin shipping its stocks of 5-percent enriched uranium to Russia. Without any warning, this has suddenly become a big hangup.
There are not many innocuous reasons for the Iranians to balk now at this particular provision. It is not an impediment to a peaceful nuclear energy program, for which uranium need not be enriched as far as 5 percent. The provision for shipments to Russia is designed to give the West and Iran’s neighbors at least a year’s worth of breathing space before Iran can potentially make a nuclear bomb, in the event that the Islamic Republic decides to “break out” and develop weapons anyway. Iran’s current stockpiles and centrifuges would leave only a couple of months’ breathing room before it could make a bomb.
Bear in mind that if Iran acquires the bomb, its use of a nuclear weapon is not the only possible undesirable result. It would also embolden Iran’s use of the conventional paramilitary forces it has funded and deployed in the region for years, causing instability from Lebanon to Syria to the Palestinian territories to Yemen. It will add teeth to Iran’s increasingly aggressive challenges to the leaders of Sunni Muslim world, to say nothing of its repeated threats to wipe Israel off the map. Further, it would surely set off an arms race in the world’s worst neighborhood.
Iran has come to the table now because it wants desperately to end international and U.S. sanctions against it, which were imposed as punishment for its transparent nuclear ambitions. But given its past and even its recent behavior, Iran’s intention to pursue peace and friendship cannot be — and in retrospect probably should not have been — taken at face value.
The question now is whether the White House speaks the truth in maintaining that “the president won’t sign a bad deal, that he’ll walk away, that no deal is far better than a bad deal.” Obama has not so far shown so much sense. Americans can only hope it is not already too late for him to start.
