A New Iran Deal Leaves Us Meeker and Weaker

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A New Iran Deal Leaves Us Meeker and Weaker

NY times – March 22nd 2022

Opinion by BRET STEPHENS

What does President Biden think he will get out of a new nuclear deal with Iran?

A year ago, the answer seemed reasonably clear to the administration: Tehran had responded to Donald Trump’s decision to walk away from the original 2015 deal — known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A. — by enriching uranium to ever-higher levels of purity, bringing it increasingly close to a nuclear bomb, or at least the capability to build one quickly. Barring a new deal that put limits on enrichment, Iran seemed destined to cross the nuclear finish line sooner rather than later. Hence the urgency of a deal.

But today we live in a different world. It’s a world in which Russia and China — parties to both the J.C.P.O.A. and the current negotiations — are definitely not our well-wishers, and a world in which Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates wouldn’t answer Joe Biden’s phone calls in the midst of the greatest geopolitical crisis of the 21st century. Maybe the administration needs to think through the broader implications of a new deal a little more carefully before it signs on again.

So far, that isn’t happening. The deal is said to be mostly finalized, barring last-minute haggling over whether the United States will remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps — which Washington has said is responsible for killing hundreds of Americans — from the list of sanctioned foreign terrorist organizations.

Asked earlier this month whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would affect the nuclear negotiations, Antony Blinken was definitive: “These things are totally different and are just, are not, in any way, linked together,” the secretary of state told Margaret Brennan of CBS.