Former President Barack Obama was proud of his 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Citing the snapback provisions that the president falsely claimed “America can trigger … on our own,” Obama called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action “the strongest nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated.”
On this, too, he was wrong. Because the JCPOA fell short of requiring Iranian ratification of the Additional Protocol that strengthened the original Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the JCPOA was actually weaker than the nuclear inspections regime agreed to by 133 other countries. This was why Obama was never able to get a simple majority of senators to support the agreement, let alone the two-thirds necessary to ratify it as a treaty. Perhaps there was something to the logic of the snapback. However, when Iran prevents a strategy from succeeding, it makes sense to revert to the status quo ante.
When Obama chose Joe Biden as his running mate, the ayatollahs cheered. Biden was long the Islamic Republic’s favorite senator. Biden wholeheartedly supported Obama’s outreach to Iran and returned some of its top architects, including Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Jon Finer, Wendy Sherman, and John Kerry, to top national security posts in his administration. During the campaign, Biden made clear his desire to rejoin the JCPOA, even after the International Atomic Energy Agency reported Iran had cheated around the margins of the deal and the Israelis revealed Iran’s secret nuclear archive showing that, at a minimum, Tehran had never come clean with the IAEA.
Former President Donald Trump responded to the nuclear accord’s ineffectiveness by walking away from the deal, and Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran to raise the cost of its nuclear defiance. The campaign succeeded. Iran’s foreign reserves plummeted from $122 billion in 2018 to $4 billion when Trump left office. The decrease in hard currency made it difficult for Iran even to meet the payroll of its various regional terror groups, including Hezbollah. In contrast, Biden’s accession and the accompanying loss of fear in Tehran convinced Iranian leaders they would suffer no meaningful consequence for putting their nuclear program on overdrive. Nor does Trump’s exit from the JCPOA exculpate Tehran since Iran remains a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and subject to its restrictions that it now violates.
Biden and his team have been incredibly generous to Tehran. Special envoy Rob Malley’s mother, Barbara, an activist with Algeria’s virulently anti-Western National Liberation Front, radicalized him from an early age. Throughout his career, Malley’s core assumption has been that the United States and Israel bear original sin and must make amends to ameliorate the grievances of groups ranging from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Islamic Republic. While studiously polite, Malley is ideologically intolerant, surrounds himself with like-minded men and women, and purges those who do not toe his line. From the start, Malley has offered Iran increasingly generous sanctions relief augmented further by the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce existing sanctions.
His strategy has backfired. Iran has replenished its foreign reserves. Its hijacking of ships and hostage-taking have resumed. Its proxies struck ever deeper at critical infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and its nuclear program is at risk of a breakout. Iranian diplomats avoid meeting their American counterparts directly. At the most recent talks in Qatar, Iranian diplomats showed zero interest in reaching an agreement.
Frankly, why should they when Biden’s strategy is desperation wedded to a financial windfall, when there are zero consequences for following North Korea’s strategy into the nuclear club, and when nonenforcement against the backdrop of record oil prices nets Iran tens of billions of dollars?
If there ever was reason for a snapback, it is now with the U.S. diplomatic strategy. It’s time to resume maximum pressure.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
