President Biden is eager to reconnect with Iran and return to the nuclear deal. Yet the murderous regime has no interest in changing its ways. It is driving its nuclear weapons development and its network of deadly militias across the Middle East in its constant pursuit of hegemony.
Biden said during the campaign that he would rejoin the nuclear deal “as a starting point for follow-up negotiations” if “Iran returns to strict compliance,” works to strengthen and expand the provisions of the nuclear deal, while also adding other points. of concern. , “Such as Iran’s ballistic missile program, human rights violations and” destabilizing activities. ”
That was always naive, and Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, confirmed it on Friday: “There is no renegotiation,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. “Iran’s defense and regional policy was not in question,” as the West is not withdrawing from the region and will stop selling weapons to its allies.
Zarif proudly stated, “Iran has significantly increased its nuclear capabilities,” and indeed, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed in a confidential report this month that Iran took a crucial step in December by starting a production line to make uranium metal, a major nuclear weapon component banned by the nuclear deal. France, Germany and Britain jointly warned of the “serious military consequences”, noting that the metal “has no credible civilian use”.
Earlier this month, Tehran said it produced 20 percent enriched uranium, well above the 3.67 percent agreed in the nuclear deal, and exceeded what even the calming Europeans considered a red line. The IAEA said in November that Iran had accumulated 12 times a stockpile of low enriched uranium permitted under the accord. Iran kept the agency from visiting for months last year and is pledging permanently to bar inspectors if US sanctions are not lifted on Feb. 21.
The problem isn’t all nuclear weapons either. Tehran’s multi-day military exercises this month included tests of ballistic missiles and bombers targeted by “hypothetical enemy missile defense” and “hypothetical enemy bases,” according to Iranian state television. Some missiles landed just 100 miles from the USS Nimitz, their debris flew after exploding. A missile hit the water 20 miles from a commercial ship.
Newsweek recently reported that Iran is supplying “suicide drones” (advanced unmanned aerial vehicles) to its Houthi proxies in Yemen. With a range of 2,000 kilometers, they can hit Israel, Saudi Arabia and even US targets in the region.
All of this should be a wake-up call for the new president, but Biden appears to be holding on to reconciliation. His choice of CIA director, William Burns, played a key role in the Obama administration’s secret talks with Tehran in 2013 that led to the 2015 nuclear deal. And Biden is reportedly looking for Robert Malley to be his special envoy to Iran. .
Malley was pushed out of the 2008 Obama campaign after news broke that he had met members of the Hamas terror group, but he became President Barack Obama’s Middle East Director of the National Security Council. Last year he even condemned the murder of top Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
A dozen former Iranian hostages and human rights activists sent a letter to Biden’s designated Secretary of State urging him not to put Malley in the government, as this would be “ a chilling signal to Iran’s dictatorship that the United States is solely focused on . rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran and ignore regional terror and domestic crimes against humanity. “
That was exactly the Obama-era approach, and Biden seems eager to repeat that deadly mistake.