{UAH} IT WOULD BE MADNESS FOR FRUAD PRESIDENT TO RETURN TO THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL

It would be madness for Joe Biden to return to the Iran nuclear deal

by Washington Examiner, 

 

November 13, 2020 12:00 AM

 

This week’s news that Iran has amassed a huge stockpile of enriched uranium beyond the limits it agreed to makes it all the more absurd that President-elect Joe Biden wishes to return the United States to the disastrous Iran nuclear deal.

The truth is that thanks to the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, Iran is much weaker today than it was when the nuclear accord was enacted. Refusing to engage in talks toward a more robust agreement, Iran has suffered crippling sanctions. These restrictions have depleted Tehran's ability to fund terrorist groups such as its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Kata'ib Hezbollah in Iraq. The peoples of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Sunni-Arab monarchies have benefited most from this restraint. As an extension, Iran now faces a short-term choice between sanctions relief and the growing possibility of regime collapse. Domestic economic pressures have fueled the young Iranian population's desire for a better, freer future. Unless Iran's theocratic elite can give their people a respite, their people may well give them a revolutionary riposte. For all their hectoring rhetoric, Iran's leaders are aware that they have a big problem.

Yet, it's not simply the Trump administration's pressure campaign that defines why Biden should pause before throwing the regime a lifeline. It's the fact that Iran is now in active and varied breach of the 2015 deal. The International Atomic Energy Agency this week declared that Iran has now acquired an enriched uranium stockpile 12 times larger than that which it agreed to store under the nuclear deal. Iran is also restricting inspections access and trumpeting its installation of increasingly advanced centrifuges. To accept these activities without sanctions action, as the remaining signatories to the deal and the Biden camp appear to support, isn't just folly — it's dangerous. It would enable Iran to gain sanctions relief alongside a stockpile of material that could quickly be enriched to a higher, weapons-grade quality.

Why would Biden wish to give this struggling regime a return to the golden days of 2015?

A far better course of action would be to offer Iran the same basic parameters that President Trump has said would result in sanctions relief. For a start, the demand of Iran's acceptance of an inspections protocol that allows for rapid IAEA access to sites of concern. This would remove the current absurdity of Iran being given 30 days to provide access. Trump has also rightly demanded that Iran's ballistic missile program be included in any updated accord — a demand, we note, that Britain and France support. They recognize that Iran's ballistic missiles are singularly designed to give Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the means to launch a nuclear strike against Israel, Saudi Arabia, or even Europe itself.

Iran today is weaker and more desperate for a new deal than it ever has been. Its nuclear threat can be corralled. Regrettably, we observe that the incoming Biden administration seems determined to give Iran as much inducement for a return to compliance as is possible. Biden's foreign policy team is now hinting not just at sanctions relief, but at a financial bailout for Tehran. That would mean a massive cash injection for the Revolutionary Guards.

This weakness in negotiating strategy does not portend well for Middle Eastern stability or security. Such appeasement would only induce Iran's escalated aggression and, in turn, Saudi Arabia's race to develop its own nuclear program. That means a nuclear arms race in one of the most politically paranoid and unstable regions on Earth.

There is a better course. Biden should hold firm and negotiate from strength. Recognizing the 2015 agreement's shortcomings and the desperate state in which Iran's regime finds itself today, he should force Iran to the table and give its leaders no more slack than is necessary to advance the interests of the U.S. and its regional allies.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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