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The Biden administration says time is running short for Iran to agree to restore the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear accord.
The Islamic Republic of Iran doesn’t appear convinced.
It’s not hard to blame the mullahs. They’ve been playing games with the JCPOA negotiations in Vienna since those negotiations began. And the Biden administration’s patience appears infinite. In July 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Tehran that the negotiating “process cannot go on indefinitely.” Then, last October, Blinken warned Iran that “time is running short.” This January, Blinken warned that Iran had only “a few weeks left” to agree to a deal.
We’re now well into June and Iran has happily ignored all of these warnings. The regime senses that time is on its side. Indeed, Iran is standing by its disregard for international security.
Last Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Iran was removing 27 surveillance cameras from various nuclear facilities. The IAEA confirmed that the cameras involved included ones at Iran’s most sensitive nuclear sites, such as its underground Natanz enrichment facility. At the same time, Iran also disconnected other monitoring systems at Natanz and pledged to bring online advanced centrifuges. Put simply, last week, Iran made it much easier for it to enrich uranium far more rapidly and to do so in much greater secrecy.
This is a big problem.
Combined with existing uranium stocks that could be enriched to weapons-grade purity, Iran would now likely need a matter of weeks, perhaps less than four, to collect enough highly enriched nuclear material for a nuclear weapon. While it is unclear and unlikely that Iran has yet developed a warhead to deploy any such weapon, its covert warhead activity and overt ballistic missile research leave no room for complacency.
One might expect the United States to be treating this situation for what it is: a very serious crisis that threatens its allies and international security.
Sadly, no. On the contrary, team Biden’s reaction to Iran’s latest escalations has been unreservedly pathetic. The Biden administration was scared even to refer Iran’s latest actions to the U.N. Security Council. Instead, the U.S. responded only with a collective censure vote at the IAEA.
Iran must be laughing.
The strategy of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, seems obvious. With good reason, they appear to believe that by dragging the world to the nuclear brink, they can extract grand concessions from a weak American president. We know what Iran wants from President Joe Biden: immediate and massive sanctions relief, removal of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ designation as a terrorist organization, and a weakened enforcement regime to ensure that Iran holds to its nominally restored nuclear word.
Biden must wake up. Iran is dangling a nuclear dagger over the U.S., Israel, and other allies, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The president has only two choices: Either he can move to increase pressure on Iran dramatically, making clear that its brinkmanship will have the reverse effect of that which it intends, or he can allow Iran to keep escalating. That will mean either Israeli military action against Iran (Prime Minister Naftali Bennett does not share his predecessor’s risk aversion and will not risk a second Holocaust) or a Saudi rush to develop its own nuclear weapons. The risks from American weakness are now too great to contemplate.
To increase the pressure, Biden should immediately suspend U.S. participation in the Vienna talks, warning that those talks will not recommence until Iran reactivates the cameras and other monitoring systems. The president should also make clear to Iran, whether privately or publicly, that if it fails to restore monitoring systems within seven days (the minimum time the Navy would need to prepare), the U.S. will begin a naval enforced embargo of Iranian oil exports. The Harry S. Truman carrier strike group is currently in the Mediterranean Sea, so means of U.S. action are present.
Regardless, the current U.S. stance of doing nothing is patently unfit for purpose. Biden should remember President Harry Truman’s old adage: “The buck stops here.”
