As we went to press on Sunday, reports abounded in the Israeli media that Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett plans to make Iran, not the Palestinians, the main focus of his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Monday. He reportedly will tell the world body in most urgent terms that the time has come to take action against Iran’s nuclear program. And well he should.
This is a theme this page has sounded ever since the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was concluded with its laughable inspection regime, and as it became even clearer to us that Iran has always viewed the idea of negotiations as a means of forestalling punitive action by the West while giving Iran time to steadily progress in its march to nuclear weapons capacity.
So, once again we draw attention to what a senior Iranian leader had to say this past Friday about negotiations. Iran’s new foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, said Iran would return “very soon” to negotiations in Vienna. But, he said, Iran would be demanding a far higher price for returning to the 2015 deal. Most ominous was his statement that Iran “will not have a so-called ‘longer and stronger’ deal.”
The U.S. firmly believes, with good reason – as evidenced by the post-2015 experience – that without subjecting Iran to enhanced restrictions over an extended period of time frame, any new deal would be worthless. Also, keep in mind Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent caution that, at all events, “with every passing day, as Iran continues to take actions that are not in compliance with the [2015 nuclear] agreement – particularly building larger stockpiles of highly enriched uranium to 20 percent, even to 60 percent, and spinning faster centrifuges” its nuclear program moves toward a place where restrictions on further development would be meaningless.
As we have said in the past, for the life of us we cannot fathom what part of Iran’s tap dance the Biden team doesn’t get. A real deal with Iran is just not in the cards. They should deal with it.