What is this – Dance to the Oldies Week in Oman? Let’s hope nostalgia for the good ol’ days of Barack Obama’s Iran deal hasn’t clouded minds in the White House.
On Friday, talks broke down between the US and the mullahs in Oman when the Iranian negotiators declared everything but their pursuit of nuclear weapons off the table. The US countered that any sanctions relief first had to address all security concerns, including Iran’s ballistic missiles and their terror proxies. At that point, everyone went back home for “consultations,” while Iran rattled its sabers at American forces in the region:
Tehran unleashed a barrage of around 500 missiles that struck civilian and military locations in Israel last June but did little strategic damage. Though Israel pounded Iran’s missile launchers and storage sites during a 12-day war in June, the regime emerged from the bruising conflict with much of its remaining arsenal intact.
More important, Iran learned how to get more of its missiles past Israeli and American defenses as the war went on.
It is threatening to fire them again on a broader set of targets around the region if Trump orders an attack. That has raised the pressure on the White House, forcing it to worry about Iran’s ability to target Israel and U.S. forces, as well as friendly Arab countries in the Persian Gulf and the wider region.
Ahem. If Iran wanted to impress upon this White House the importance of demanding new restrictions on their ballistic missile systems, they could hardly have chosen a better strategy. This capability is precisely why the US insists that Iran provide serious concessions on all of its threats, including these ballistic missile systems as well as their more traditional terrorist threats – Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. The US has also insisted that internal reforms must take place, especially after the massacres of thousands of Iranians by IRGC and Basij forces last month.
Tehran still hasn’t moved off of its position. In fact, they doubled down on it today. The US went into these negotiations demanding that Iran surrender all of its highly enriched uranium to a neutral country (Russia offered to take it at one point). Instead, the Iranians now propose that they just dumb it down a bit instead, and that we trust them not to re-enrich it later:
Iran could agree to dilute its stockpile of uranium highly enriched to 60% in exchange for the lifting of all sanctions imposed against its nuclear program, Tehran’s atomic chief Mohammad Eslami said on Monday, according to state-run ISNA.
The chutzpah of this offer is demonstrated in the fact that Iran still won’t allow the IAEA to inspect the facilities where that uranium was held before the Twelve Day War:
In November, the IAEA reiterated that Iran still has not let inspectors into the nuclear sites bombed in June, adding that accounting for Iran’s enriched uranium stock is “long overdue.”
The IAEA’s own guidelines stipulate that it should verify a country’s stock of highly enriched uranium, such as the material enriched to up to 60% purity in Iran, a short step from the roughly 90% of weapons-grade, every month.
The IAEA has been calling on Iran for months to say what happened to the stock and let inspections fully resume quickly. The two sides announced an agreement in Cairo in September that was supposed to pave the way for a full resumption, but progress has been limited, and Iran later said that the agreement is void.
In a report, the IAEA reiterated that the quantity of highly enriched uranium Iran has produced and accumulated is “a matter of serious concern.” The IAEA has lost so-called continuity of knowledge of Iran’s enriched uranium stocks, it added, meaning re-establishing a full picture will be long and difficult.
And at the same time, Iran today rejected another core demand from the US to cease all enrichment activities. Russia again has offered to conduct enrichment activity for Iran and to certify levels below that required for weapons, but Iran flatly refuses:
Iran has pushed back firmly against renewed US pressure to curb its uranium enrichment programme, signalling that military threats and fresh sanctions will not force a policy reversal in Tehran. Speaking at a public forum in the Iranian capital on Sunday, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made it clear that enrichment remains a red line for the country, even as indirect talks with Washington resume after years of hostility. …
Addressing an audience that included international media, Araghchi said Iran would not accept external dictates on its nuclear programme, framing enrichment as a matter of sovereignty rather than bargaining leverage.
“Why do we insist so much on enrichment and refuse to give it up, even if a war is imposed on us? Because no one has the right to dictate our behaviour,” he said.
Double ahem. The peoples of Lebanon, Syria, and especially Israel have now entered the chat.
It has become clear that Iran wants a JCPOA do-over, not a serious step toward peace. They need to get sanctions lifted so that they can re-fund their terror networks and attempt to re-establish their encirclement strategy in the region. The mullahs and the IRGC want Donald Trump to get Iran Deal Fever like Obama and Joe Biden did, as a way to burnish his claims to a Nobel prize at some point that will never come. The regime needs the terror networks and nuclear weapons to survive and will not negotiate in good faith on any of those components of power.
Hopefully, the White House sees this clearly and is using the time to position its full defensive assets to counter the Iranian ballistic-missile threat. The mullahs will not cede power without a fight, and they will fight on their terms just as soon as they have a nuclear weapon and the forces in the region readied for a regional war. The time to deal with that reality is now, rather than wait for the mullahs to set the field themselves.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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