Is Blinken blinking on Iran?
I hope I am not reading too much into Secretary Blinken's pessimistic report on the status of the Vienna negotiations on re-joining Obama's Iran nuclear deal. But it does not sound good  for two reasons, one obvious, the other less so. Obama's 2015 "deal," from which President Trump withdrew in 2018, was rotten to the core, as it gave the ayatollahs the legal right to enrich uranium all they want after 2030. Blinken's admission that "it remains unclear whether Iran is willing and prepared to do what it needs to do to come back into compliance" is not in itself particularly troubling; the world is much better without that deal than it is with it. What's worrisome is his analysis of the potential consequences: "What we do know, unfortunately, is that meanwhile [Iran's nuclear] program is galloping forward[.] ... It has lifted restraints imposed on it by the agreement including the amount of enriched material that it has; material that's now, in some cases, enriched up to 20% and even a small amount to 60%. It has started to deploy some more advanced centrifuges. ... [T]he longer this goes on, the more their breakout time gets down. The agreement had pushed it to a year or more ... it's now down  by published reports  to a few months at best. And if this continues, it will get down to a matter of weeks, exactly what we sought to avoid and what the agreement stopped." In other words, as was clear right in 2015, Obama's "deal" was based on a simple premise: Iran was to get an atom bomb anyway  so let's at least buy some time and negotiate a 15-year hiatus, so some other administration deals with that eventuality. It is in this context that Blinken's conclusion is highly concerning: "We have a real incentive if we can to at least put that back in the box." After all, the ayatollahs demand that U.S. pay compensation for damages to the Iranian economy incurred due to U.S. sanctions since 2018 and removal of non-nuclear-related sanctions. Iran is very good at playing the game of chicken. There is an unrelated report that the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, expressed serious concerns that Iran keeps withholding an explanation on the presence of nuclear material at the sites that it did not declare to the IAEA. Clandestine nuclear work is a clear-cut Iranian violation of the "deal" and should leave other signatories with no option but to "snap back" sanctions and stop pretending the "deal" is in effect. Yet Iran is not worried and is willing to needle and antagonize not just the U.S., but also the Europeans who are mortally afraid that the "deal" will fall through and therefore act as Iran's faithful lapdogs. Clearly, the ayatollahs are engaged in extortion in Vienna. They sense the U.S.'s urge to get back into the deal, so they up and up the price for readmission. I am afraid I find it hard to interpret his words any other way. I only hope I am wrong. The news that Iran keeps getting closer to the bomb is only one bad aspect of it. The news that the U.S. may conclude that surrendering the sanctions regime may be worth getting Iran's program "back in the box" for the next 10 years is even more worrisome. Image via Flickr, Public Domain.