Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
“Diplomats from major powers met separately on Wednesday with Iran and the United States to discuss how to bring both back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal that Washington abandoned three years ago.” Reuters
Read our recent coverage of airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias and sanctions on Iran. The Flip Side
The right opposes rejoining the deal, arguing that it was flawed to begin with and that Iran’s recent hostile actions should not be rewarded.
“The translation of sanctions ‘that are inconsistent with the 2015 pact’ isn’t very hard to figure out. Biden is going to lift all of the additional sanctions imposed by Donald Trump’s State Department as part of his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign, leaving in place only the ones that were imposed under Obama/Biden prior to 2017. What we see here is yet another example of the new president undoing everything that was done during the Trump administration, whether it was working or not…
“Stop and consider that it hasn’t been very long since Iranian-backed militants launched a rocket attack against our installations in Iraq. They’ve also been up to some very aggressive maneuvers at sea, threatening American Navy vessels and commercial shipping. Is this really the sort of behavior that merits lifting sanctions?”
Jazz Shaw, Hot Air
“There is another set of negotiations taking place in Vienna — between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran. They involve three undeclared sites where the agency’s inspectors have found traces of processed uranium… All of this stems from revelations brought to the world’s attention in 2018 by Israel after the Mossad raided a Tehran warehouse and purloined an archive of blueprints and files that disclosed a huge nuclear weapons program dating to the 1980s…
“Because of a last-minute U.S. concession in 2015, Iran never had to disclose the sites in question or other possible military dimensions of its program… At the very least, this is a major failure of the JCPOA. That deal was supposed to give the world confidence that Iran could not and would not produce a nuclear weapon. That it missed a huge weapons program is a sign of incompetence on the part of the Western countries that negotiated the pact…
“More important, this weapons program is a sign of Iran’s duplicity. Even as it negotiated the JCPOA, Iran was not only holding blueprints for a nuclear weapon, but also maintaining a constellation of physical sites where it could eventually build one.”
Eli Lake, Bloomberg
Regarding the negotiation process, “‘indirect talks’ means bringing other countries into the negotiation process. This… only weakens Washington’s hand as those other parties – Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany – all favor a quick return to the JCPOA, with no corrective changes. Here is what is likely to happen. After months of talks, the Biden team will likely find itself right where it is now: facing a Hobson’s choice of just giving in to Tehran or sticking with the current course of sanctioning Iran for noncompliance…
“Team Biden would be smart to just cut loose of the failed Iran deal… There is, after all, so much more that the U.S. can and should be doing in the region. Washington could redouble efforts on Israel-Arab cooperation. It should also ramp up efforts to support a stable Jordan, recently rocked by a coup attempt…
“Meanwhile, the U.S. should escalate pressure to isolate and punish Iran. There should not even be a discussion of sanctions relief until Iran has stopped proxy attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and deescalated its uranium enrichment. Finally, the U.S. should insist on nothing less than direct talks with Iran.”
James Jay Carafano, Fox News
The left supports rejoining the deal, arguing that the priority should be preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
The left supports rejoining the deal, arguing that the priority should be preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
“The stakes are high… Iran will hold a presidential election in June to replace incumbent President Hassan Rouhani, who cannot run for a third consecutive term. Rouhani was considered by some analysts to be less of a hardliner than the conservatives who now dominate the Iranian parliament; his successor could be more resistant to complying with the agreement even if the U.S. lifted sanctions…
“Constraining Iran’s nuclear program is too important an objective to be blocked by a dispute over whether Iran or the U.S. makes the first move. Surely diplomats are ingenious enough to arrange for simultaneous declarations by the two countries that they are taking steps to return to compliance.”
Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times
“Both sides too have been doing what they can to prepare -- or place obstacles on -- the ground for Vienna. The Biden administration has been calm, and relatively unfussed by Iran's screaming deadlines and declarations of further nuclear activity. Biden took singular and swift military action when US military lives were lost and threatened in Iraq, by bombing Iran-backed militia. But it then swiftly started calling them ‘Shia-backed militia’, as if to give everyone an option to step away from the smoking craters…
“The Iranians have deftly trod a line between enrichment actions that can terrify if you choose to let them, or be interpreted as symbolic and reversible if you prefer to remain calm. Enriching uranium to 20% purity -- as they have done -- rings alarm bells, because it is a closer step to the 90% needed for a bomb… But they have been making that metal from low-grade uranium, so the step is mostly a show of a technical ability many experts already thought they had.”
Nick Paton Walsh, CNN
“Hawkish Sens. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., last month led a group of 41 senators… [to push] for a comprehensive agreement ‘that prevents Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons’ but also ‘meaningfully constrains its destabilizing activity throughout the Middle East and its ballistic missile program’ and frees U.S. citizens held in Iranian prisons while preventing ‘attacks on important U.S. security partners.’…
“All laudable goals. But achieving those in one grand bargain is like hunting unicorns. Such a deal is simply impossible… [the Iran deal] won nearly universal praise from experts, military leaders, diplomats and former national security officials — including some Israeli military leaders… Every other issue we have with Iran is much more difficult to resolve if Iran has nuclear weapons. While we care deeply about our regional allies, human rights in Iran and American prisoners, we must prioritize threats to the U.S. itself. A nuclear Iran is an existential danger.”
Joseph Cirincione, NBC News Think
“The original deal took around two years to negotiate, and avoiding Iran’s missile program and other military activities was part of the cost of reaching any deal at all; raising new issues now and expecting an agreement in two months is a pipe dream. If Biden wants to deprioritize the Middle East and focus on other diplomatic agendas in the years to come, the best possible outcome is a mechanism for restoring the JCPOA more or less as it was before Trump tore it up.”
Jonah Shepp, New York Magazine
