The US will soon have nothing left to capitulate to Iran
Washington remains committed to an agreement that Iran has no intentions of abiding by
By: Ahnaf Kalam
June 14, 2022
Washington’s foreign policy apparatus has been deeply committed to reviving the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka, the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’) ever since the Trump administration decided to withdraw from it in 2018. So committed, in fact, that its proponents in congress seem to be completely content in negotiating with people who publicly threaten them and say overtly that they want them dead. It was in April of 2002 that President Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, reminded the world that no nation should ever negotiate with terrorists. Two decades later, that is exactly what Washington is doing.
Once it was announced that Washington had reached a deal with Tehran in 2015, it didn’t take long at all for the Islamic Republic to circumvent, ignore, and otherwise make a complete mockery of the promises it had just made to America and the world.
As soon as the sanctions were lifted and the $150 billion of frozen assets became available, the Islamic Republic went to work straight away in continuing to do what it has done for decades: provide state-sanctioned support to terrorist organizations across the region and continue its pursuit of a nuclear bomb.
In Syria and Iraq, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp. (IRGC) continues its assault on insurgents and civilians alike, as well as engaging American and Israeli targets. In Yemen, Iranian-backed Houthi militias have devastated that country in a proxy war with Saudi Arabia. In Lebanon, Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters launch endless attacks on Israel from Syria and Lebanon, further causing unrest and destabilizing those countries.
In addition to sponsoring terrorism and financing civil wars abroad, Iran has also made little to no effort to conceal its radical nuclear ambitions. Under the agreement, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium to 3.67%, just over the standard commercial limit of 2–3%. As it stands, Iran’s uranium at its Natanz and Fordow facilities has been enriched to 60%; nearly thirty times the permitted level, and more than halfway to the 90% enrichment level necessary to produce a nuclear weapon. IAEA Director-General, Rafael Grossi, has said bluntly that “only countries making bombs” have a need to enrich uranium to this level, and officials in Germany, France, and the UK have further reiterated that there is absolutely “no credible civilian need for such levels of enrichment.”
All of this should be more than enough cause to completely abandon any prospective deal with Iran, but the Biden Administration remains absolutely committed to reaching a renewed agreement with Iran. And as Iran negotiates with Washington, it has also been testing the world to see just how much it can get away with.
Earlier this month, Iran announced that it would be turning off all 27 of the tamper-proof cameras installed by the IAEA to monitor Iran’s nuclear facilities and ensure their compliance with the terms of the JCPOA.
In April, Mohammad Pakpour, a senior commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp., stated publicly that “not even the deaths of all American leaders would avenge the death of Qassem Soleimani” (the top commander of the Iranian Quds Force who was killed by a US drone strike in 2021 in Baghdad).
In the same month, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, pledged his nation’s continued support for the Palestinian terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the Houthi militias in Yemen. He warned Riyadh that the Saudis “will not win in Yemen,” thus painting no end in sight for that disastrous conflict, which has claimed over 370,000 lives to date.
In late May, Iran revealed to state media a secret underground base full of high-tech military drones — drones that are currently being used to scale up the regime’s attacks on targets in Iraq, Syria, Israel, and over two dozen attacks against the United States in Iraq and Syria in recent months.
This is all in addition to the fact that Iran is one of Russia’s strongest allies, and has been providing them with political and logistical support during a time when most of the entire world has imposed sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. The last thing the world needs right now is to capitulate to and empower Iran and cause a shift in global hegemony away from the West and towards a new (nuclear-equipped) Russian-Iranian-Chinese axis of evil.
Given Iran’s recent behavior and elevated promiscuity with international law, Washington must come to terms with the fact that before long, there will be nothing left to capitulate to a rogue state actor who has no intention of playing by the rules. Even if the White House is able to negotiate some semblance of an agreement with the Mullahs, what exactly does it seek to gain from it? Truth be told, any efforts to continue these negotiations can only further damage America’s reputation with the world and erode away at any sense of trust that any of our allies can depend on us to keep them safe from threats by a rogue state, nuclear or conventional — though to be fair, much of that faith in the US was already lost when the world watched the Biden Administration damn the people of Afghanistan to a now handsomely equipped Taliban.
In July, President Biden is set to take a trip to Saudi Arabia, presumably to discuss oil production amid the crisis in the US. How much goodwill should he expect from the Saudis while he continues to negotiate with their regional rival with whom they have been in a proxy war for nearly a decade? He is also set to visit Israel — and again — how charitable can this Administration expect the Israelis to be while the White House negotiates with Iran and turns a blind eye to the Ayatollahs’ age-old genocidal ambitions to wipe the Jewish state off of the map?
Whether or not a deal is reached, Iran will continue to brutally repress its own people, continue to violently destabilize the Middle East, continue to provide material support for terrorist organizations, and it will continue down its path toward developing nuclear weapons.
Any agreement reached between the powers will not stop Iran from doing any of the things that it is already doing. Rather, the Islamic Republic will simply have an internationally brokered permission slip and an enormous amount of money to keep pursuing and fulfilling its interests.
As it currently stands, the main point of contention that is holding up progress for the revised Iran deal is the status of the IRGC. Tehran has stated that it will not move forward with any agreement that does not include the condition of removing the IRGC from the US list of designated international terrorist organizations. For most sensible administrations, this stalemate should have been more than enough cause to tear up the entire deal and walk away, as the IRGC is perhaps the most prominent and most threatening terrorist organization to the US and our allies in the Middle East. It should, instead, have been our cue to radically adjust our posturing, just as the Saudis, the Israelis, and Emiratis have in recent months, to actively and tangibly prevent the rogue Iranian regime from obtaining the bomb.
If Iran is successful in developing a nuclear weapon, then there won’t be a single treaty or any set of agreements in the world that will stop Iran from doing whatever it wants to do next. Who’s going to stop them at that point? The UN? The IAEA? The United States? It’s worth remembering that to the theocratic Mullahs in the Iranian government, “mutually assured destruction” sounds like a rather great idea.
Given the recent actions of the Biden administration, particularly in its foreign policy, it’s not at all inconceivable that this president would carelessly gamble away the security — and indeed, the survival — of those threatened by the prospects of a nuclear Iran just so he can politically spite his predecessor.
Ahnaf Kalam is a counter-extremism analyst from Denver, Colorado, and writer at the Middle East Forum.