Despite dangerous new concessions offered to Iran by the Biden administration to get a deal to revive the deeply flawed 2015 nuclear agreement (the JCPOA), negotiations held in Doha, Qatar last week were a flop.
Iran again refused to negotiate in good faith and made new demands.
After over a year of failed nuclear talks with Tehran and an ever-increasing number of U.S. concessions, it is time for President Biden to end this charade and implement a "Plan B" strategy of tough sanctions to counter Iran’s surging nuclear weapons program.
President Donald J. Trump wisely withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018 because of its serious flaws, especially the agreement’s weak verification provisions and mounting evidence of Iranian cheating.
The Biden administration has been determined to reverse this decision even though the Iranian nuclear program has significantly expanded since President Biden entered office, and Iran refuses to cooperate with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigations of its covert nuclear weapons work.
Two days of multilateral talks on Iran’s nuclear program last week in Doha followed eight unsuccessful rounds of talks between April 2021 and March 2022 in Vienna.
Like the previous rounds, these were "indirect" talks because Iran refuses to meet in the same room with American diplomats.
The talks stalled last March after Russia threatened to block a new agreement unless Russian trade with Iran was exempted from sanctions related to its invasion of Ukraine.
Russia quickly dropped this demand, possibly in response to a secret agreement with the United States.
A more serious obstacle to a new nuclear agreement has been Iran’s demand that the Biden administration reverse President Trump’s decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).
Several Biden officials hinted this past spring that the U.S. might give in to this Iranian demand. However, after strong criticism from Republican and Democratic Members of Congress, Politico reported that President Biden made a "final" decision in late May not to take this action.
However, Biden administration officials indicated over the last few weeks that there was no final decision, and they are still prepared to trade taking the IRGC off the FTO list to get a new nuclear agreement with Tehran.
For example, Robert Mallery, the chief U.S. negotiator at the talks, said during a June 24 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that there are conditions outside of the JCPOA that Iran would need to meet for the U.S. to remove the IRGC from the FTO list.
And then, just before the Doha talks began, the Biden Administration loosened some U.S. restrictions on the IRGC by a rule change that allows former IRGC members to visit the United States.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, the Department of Homeland Security amended federal immigration laws to allow foreigners who provided "insignificant material support" to designated terror groups to receive "immigration benefits or other status."
Although State Department officials claimed this rule change was intended to address Afghanistan, its broad language and timing strongly suggested it was a concession to Iran to make the Doha talks productive.
That didn’t happen. Iran showed no interest in negotiating and instead used the Doha meeting to withdraw agreements it made in previous talks and make new demands outside the scope of the negotiations.
A State Department spokesman said about the outcome of the Doha talks:
"In Doha, as before, Iran raised issues wholly unrelated to the JCPOA and apparently is not ready to make a fundamental decision on whether it wants to revive the deal or bury it."
With the nuclear talks deadlocked for 15 months, it is time for the Biden administration to end them and initiate an alternative policy it has referred to as "Plan B."
Biden officials began discussing a Plan B policy last September to be implemented if a new nuclear agreement with Iran was impossible.
According to the Associated Press, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid discussed a Plan B approach and "other options" during an October meeting in Washington.
Although Blinken and Lapid did not say what these other options were, they probably included sanctions and military and covert actions.
This proposal may also have meant the Biden administration would drop its opposition to Israel’s efforts to sabotage Iranian nuclear sites and might start supporting them.
It’s now clear Biden officials were not serious last fall about a Plan B option since they quickly dropped this idea and instead offered a series of new concessions to Iran in January that were so extreme that three senior members of the U.S. negotiation team resigned.
The Biden administration must stop fooling itself.
Iran has no interest in negotiating in good faith. It is, however, willing to participate in endless talks to buy time to develop its nuclear program and press the United States with increasingly extravagant demands for concessions.
This means the Biden administration must withdraw from the nuclear talks and immediately turn to a non-diplomatic strategy to pressure and punish Iran until it is prepared to negotiate a bona fide agreement to halt its nuclear weapons program.
Ironically, this would mean returning to a policy similar to "Maximum Pressure" — President Trump’s approach to Iran’s nuclear program, which many Biden administration officials criticized as a failure.
But given the abject failure of President Biden’s Iran policy during his first 18 months in office, President Trump’s Maximum Pressure policy is looking pretty good.
Fred Fleitz is a Newsmax TV Contributor and vice-chair of the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security. He previously served as National Security Council Chief of staff, CIA analyst, and as a member of the House Intelligence Committee staff. Read more reports from Fred Fleitz — Click Here Now.
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