The war of words between the White House and Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress Tuesday intensified Friday after the Israeli embassy lampooned a potential Iranian nuclear deal in a mock New York Times headline from the future.
The Embassy of Israel’s official Twitter account, @IsraelinUSA, on Thursday sent out a tweet that included a fake New York Times front page from March 2025 with the headline: ‘How We Duped The West: Iranian Pres. Declares.'”
The headline not so subtly suggests that the U.S. and other P5+1 countries, including Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany, are pursuing a bad deal with Iran and will live to regret it. The embassy highlighted its skepticism of elements of a potential deal’s “sunset clause” and reports that the Obama administration had accepted the Iranian demand that any restriction on its program be time-limited.
In a Friday column in the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer pointed out that the sunset clause would end in 2025 when the “mullahs can crank up their nuclear program at will and produce as much enriched uranium as they want.”
Asked about the tweet Friday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said he didn’t see it and isn’t “really sure what message they are trying to portray.”
But, he noted, the Israelis also were harshly critical of the beginning of the nuclear negotiations when all sides agreed to a Joint Plan of Action to begin the more concrete talks.
“They said that the Joint Plan of Action would be a historic mistake and a sweetheart deal of Iran,” Earnest said. “It certainly hasn’t turned out that way.”
In fact, Earnest argued, the negotiations have succeeded in rolling back aspects of Tehran’s nuclear program and have eliminated Iran’s large stockpile of uranium that had been enriched to 20 percent.
“That stockpile no longer exists,” Earnest said. “Some of it has been dispensed with and some of it has been turned into a form of uranium that’s difficult to weaponize.”
Earnest also pointed out that Netanyahu wrongly predicted that Iran would get $50 billion in sanctions relief by engaging in the negotiations, but only about $6 billion or $7 billion of sanctions relief was provided.
“I guess I would encourage all of you to be a little skeptical when they’re saying bad things about the deal that hasn’t been completed,” he said.
