The utter futility of the Biden administration’s obsession with reviving the Iran nuclear deal has been laid bare by the latest damning assessment by the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog.
US President Joe Biden has indicated to Tehran that he is willing to rejoin the deal so long as Iran agrees to fall back into compliance with the terms of the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the former Obama administration in 2015.
The Biden administration and the European Union are trying hard to appease the Iranian regime in order to revive a nuclear deal that will provide the ruling mullahs of Iran with additional billions of dollars of revenue, enhance the regime’s legitimacy on the global stage, and actually open the path for Iran to have a nuclear arsenal.
In the shadow of Russia’s appalling war against its peaceful neighbour, misguided efforts to revive the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal have continued. The dangerous naiveté among Western leaders that left Ukraine outside NATO also underlies efforts to make deals with Tehran. We should hope that negotiators do not return to Vienna and that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) process with Iran is abandoned for good.
When it to comes to the Iranian regime, all the Biden administration seems to care about is appeasing the ruling mullahs, reaching a weak nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, and enhancing the global legitimacy of a country that the US itself called “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.”
These US rewards to Iran for terrorism, destabilizing the region, treating its own people with brutality and cheating on 2015 nuclear deal would significantly increase Iran’s revenues; these, in turn, will doubtless be funneled into the pockets of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Quds Force and their militia and terror groups including Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah for still more expansionism and terror.
The Biden administration and the European Union might do well to understand that revolutionary and authoritarian regimes such as the Islamic Republic — as we are seeing now with Vladimir Putin’s Russian invasion if Ukraine — do not alter their malign policies through appeasement and concessions. If anything –as there are no negative consequences for unneighborly behavior, and sometimes there are even rewards — they regard appeasement and concessions as green lights and double down, go twice as bad.
The debate over whether to delist Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) has evolved. President Joe Biden appears to have ruled out an unconditional delisting of the IRGC in whole. The deliberations now are over whether Washington and Tehran will be prepared for a middle ground solution, that involves retaining the IRGC’s extraterritorial arm, the Quds Force, while removing the rest of the IRGC’s units from the FTO list in exchange for undefined concessions. But this kind of arrangement would invent an artificial distinction in the IRGC that does not exist.
Why would any administration in its right mind permit an official state sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to have nuclear weapons, as well as billions of dollars that will assuredly not be used for a “GI Bill for returning members of the Revolutionary Guard”?
Just this week, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called Iran, a “sponsor of terrorism.”
Don’t bother asking Joe.
If we closely examine the Iranian regime’s nuclear file, it reveals that no deal will stop the ruling mullahs of Iran from pursuing their nuclear ambitions.
A few years after the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic appeared to make the advancement of a nuclear program a top item on its agenda after consolidating power in 1984. In the decade after, the Islamic Republic began its nuclear program with the help of some intermediaries such as Russia, China and Pakistan.
At the time, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, acknowledged that Pakistan assisted Tehran. He pointed out “I do have information that some years ago, through intermediaries, we received pieces for centrifuges”. According to the United States intelligence, A.Q. Khan, who was known as “the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb”, sold expertise and equipment to North Korea, Libya and Iran, and made more than $50 million.
Iran’s fleet of “ghost ships” has ferried at least $22 billion worth of illicit oil to China since 2021, providing the hardline regime with a major source of revenue and raising questions about the Biden administration’s lax enforcement of sanctions.
In the first three months of 2022 alone, Iran shipped an average of 829,260 barrels of oil per day to China, according to new figures published by United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), an advocacy group that closely tracks Tehran’s fleet of illegal tankers. A total of 337,882,520 illegal barrels—worth approximately $22 billion—have made their way to Beijing since President Joe Biden took office.
Since the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Tehran has focused on expanding its cyber operations and digital surveillance capabilities. Iran sees its ally, Hezbollah, as a key part of its enhanced cyber program. The Iranian government has provided cyber training and technology to Hezbollah operatives and recently helped the Lebanese-based Shia terrorist group build its own counterintelligence cyber unit. This is a new development: in 2018, a Carnegie Endowment for Peace report noted how “there has been little prior evidence of direct sharing of [cyber] tools” between Iran and Hezbollah. After the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate, Hezbollah has taken on the mantle of being the most sophisticated and influential Middle Eastern terrorist organization in cyberspace.
Russia is receiving munitions and military hardware sourced from Iraq for its war effort in Ukraine with the help of Iranian weapons smuggling networks, according to members of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and regional intelligence services with knowledge of the process.
RPGs and anti-tank missiles, as well as Brazilian-designed rocket launcher systems, have been dispatched to Russia from Iraq as Moscow’s campaign has faltered in the last month, the Guardian has learned.
An Iranian-made Bavar 373 missile system, similar to the Russian S-300, has also been donated to Moscow by the authorities in Tehran, who also returned an S-300, according to a source who helped organise the transport.
“Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it,” Winston Churchill said. This is exactly what is happening as the Biden administration and the European Union continue relentlessly to appease the ruling mullahs of Iran and attempting to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.
The Biden administration and the European Union appear to believe that rewarding the Iranian regime will make it act as a constructive and modern nation-state. This idea first surfaced and was acted upon during the administration of then US President Barack Obama, who, on concluding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, pointed out that he was “confident” it would “meet the national security needs of the United States and our allies”.
The world is seeing Vladimir Putin’s clear plan to reestablish the Russian Empire. It also is hearing rumblings from Asia about restoration of a Chinese dynasty, and in the Middle East, a return to when Persia — now an extremely different Iran — dominated the region.
For any of these empires to expand, they need to take control of other states or groups of people. Those states can either be overrun and annexed, or they can be controlled and remain smaller, more manageable political units. Today, Russia in Ukraine is the focus, but the aspirations of China and Iran must not be ignored.
Russia, China and Iran are all totalitarian regimes with authoritarian leaders. Russia by its actions in Syria and Ukraine, as well as Iran for its actions in the Middle East, easily can be identified as terrorist states. China — with its genocide against the Uyghurs, its illegal seizure of Hong Kong, and its continuing threats against Taiwan — should also be designated that way.
Why Is the US Bankrolling Them?
Thanks to the Biden administration’s ill-judged obsession with reviving the flawed nuclear deal with Iran, the world can soon look forward to the creation of a new “axis of evil” between Russia and Iran.
In recent months, as negotiations over reviving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deal’s official title, have continued in Vienna, Western negotiators have expressed concern about the negative support Iran is receiving from Russia in the talks.
The Biden Administration’s Never-ending Appeasement of the Mullahs
To appease the ruling mullahs of Iran, the Biden administration in January 2021 first suspended some of the anti-terrorism sanctions on Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthis that the Trump administration had imposed. Soon after, the Biden administration revoked the designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group. Since then, the Houthis have been attacking their neighbors, as recently as this week.
Now, the Biden administration is considering also removing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), called the “Mother of All Terrorist Groups,” from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
The Biden administration, then, wants to preserve — by sparing it from the terrorist list — an organization that has killed hundreds, no thousands of Americans “before and after 9/11”
