President Joe Biden is in danger of allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons under the cover of the lengthy diplomatic process, according to a senior Senate Democrat.
“We cannot allow Iran to threaten us into a bad deal or an interim agreement that allows it to continue to build its nuclear capacity,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez said on the Senate floor. “Nor should we cling to the scope of an agreement that it seems some are holding on to for nostalgia’s sake.”
The New Jersey Democrat aired that warning as “indirect talks” about a U.S. and Iranian return to compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, have reached their “endgame,” as a senior State Department official put it on Monday. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team announced Monday that the latest round of meetings — “the most intensive that we’ve had to date” — had led to a climactic juncture.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SAYS IRAN’S WINDOW FOR NUCLEAR DEAL IS NARROWING
“Now is a time for political decisions,” the senior State Department official told reporters. “In other words, we will know sooner rather than later whether … the U.S. is back in the JCPOA and Iran is back in fully implementing its obligations under the JCPOA or whether we’re going to have to face a different reality, a reality of mounting tensions and crisis.”
The crisis already has arrived, Menendez countered, given the rapidity with which Iran could have a nuclear weapon within a month. “Iran’s breakout time is now a mere three to four weeks,” he said. “Once they hit this breakout period, which is four weeks away, then to get their second bomb, we are talking about four months.”
Blinken’s team has worked to reverse former President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear pact and renew sanctions on Iran, but they refused to make a unilateral return to compliance. Instead, they hoped that the offer of sanctions relief would induce Iran to agree again to curb their nuclear program. Iranian officials continued to pursue nuclear weapons, according to U.S. officials, while slow-walking negotiations.
“We’re not going to agree to a worse deal because Iran has built up its nuclear program,” State Department special envoy Rob Malley told the New Yorker in an interview last month. Menendez quoted Malley’s aversion “to trying to revive a dead corpse” in his floor speech.
Yet Blinken’s team also has acknowledged that an unpleasant choice looms for American officials, as well, one that has prompted multiple public criticisms of the Trump administration.
“The U.S. strong preference is … full return to the JCPOA,” the senior State Department official said Monday.
Menendez cited Malley’s aversion “to trying to revive a dead corpse” in his floor speech on Tuesday, as he suggested that the 2015 deal is no longer worth the effort to “salvage.” He urged Biden and European officials to unite around the “snapback” of all the international sanctions imposed that were waived when the deal first took effect, a show of trans-Atlantic unity that evaded Trump’s team and might intensify international pressure on the regime, while raising the prospect of a broader deal that extracts more reliable guarantees from Iran in exchange for even more extensive sanctions relief than the 2015 deal envisioned.
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“Our goal must be the right deal, not just any deal,” Menendez said. “We must not again agree to an arrangement that merely delays the inevitable.”
