The Iran deal could easily have been maintained had it not been for a series of perverse policy choices by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Now, with the deal scrapped, Israel and the US are once again threatening to attack Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After a seemingly never-ending will-they-won\u2019t-they on the US-Iranian revival of the Iran nuclear deal, we seem to have an answer: they won\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As of today, officials<\/a> from the United States, Europe, and Israel<\/a> all say that the deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is dead, at least for the foreseeable future. Reentering the deal was a major campaign promise of Joe Biden\u2019s, it was something he didn\u2019t need Congress<\/a> to do, and it would have meant restoring one of the signature achievements<\/a> of his Democratic predecessor, whose accomplishments Biden virtually treated as his own on the campaign trail. So how did it fail?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hopes for renewing the agreement were, at first, raised after Tehran in August dropped<\/a> its opposition to what seemed like the last sticking point in US-Iranian talks, namely the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps\u2019s (IRGC) terrorist designation. That had been a poison pill deliberately issued by Donald Trump to complicate the deal\u2019s revival, making Iran\u2019s compromise on the matter significant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But since then, new roadblocks arose. On the Iranian side, its hard-line government demanded<\/a> extra guarantees to minimize the effects of a future US administration violating and pulling out of the agreement, which Trump had done in 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also made ending the International Atomic Energy Agency\u2019s (IAEA) probe<\/a> into old nuclear traces found at undeclared Iran sites a precondition of reentry, evidence that could embarrass Tehran by indicating its nuclear ambitions weren\u2019t purely for civilian energy needs as it claimed for decades. For their part, Washington and EU governments have squarely blamed Iran, calling<\/a> its last negotiation response \u201cnot at all encouraging\u201d and a step \u201cbackwards\u201d and charging<\/a> they have \u201cserious doubts\u201d about its sincerity in rejoining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the other side of this story is an Israeli campaign to sabotage the deal. Both the hard-right former prime minister Naftali Bennett and current, more centrist prime minister Yair Lapid have privately<\/a> and publicly<\/a> urged<\/a> Biden and other US officials<\/a> to scrap the deal<\/a> all of this year. Lapid, who is up for reelection in November, has been particularly strident, lobbying European governments<\/a> and demanding<\/a> a \u201ccredible military threat\u201d against Iran, most recently claiming credit<\/a> for swaying Washington on the matter. He\u2019s been joined<\/a> in his efforts by David Barnea, the head of the Mossad, Israel\u2019s spy agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These efforts at persuasion have been paired with military threats and outright violence. Under Bennett, Israel assassinated<\/a> a series of Iranian scientists and military officials as the negotiations went on. Lapid, meanwhile, recently publicly threatened<\/a> Iran while standing in front of a fighter jet and has insisted<\/a> Israel \u201cwould not be obligated\u201d by any renewed deal and would \u201ccontinue to do everything to prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear capability.\u201d Barnea has similarly said<\/a> that \u201cMossad operations\u201d would continue against Iran even if the deal comes back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More alarming still are the signs that the Biden administration is tacitly backing Israel\u2019s military threats and even seems to be preparing possible military action of its own. Back in July, Biden signed<\/a> a joint pledge with Lapid stating that Washington \u201cis prepared to use all elements of its national power to ensure\u201d Iran doesn\u2019t get a nuke, one day after Biden told reporters he would \u201cnot allow Iran\u201d to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since then, Israeli officials have claimed<\/a> the administration gave them \u201cgood hints\u201d it was preparing joint military action against Iran, and the administration inked a nearly $1-billion deal<\/a> to supply Israel with refueling planes that it would need to attack Iran. Just last week, Biden\u2019s national security spokesman warned<\/a> that the president\u2019s patience was \u201cnot eternal\u201d and that he\u2019s preparing \u201cother available options\u201d to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps this is all saber-rattling from two leaders trying to get reelected. But the Israeli government has shown it\u2019s more than willing to violate another country\u2019s borders and carry out strikes \u2014 as its killing of Iranian officials, last month\u2019s preemptive attack<\/a> on Gaza, and its regular bombing<\/a> of Syria have shown \u2014 suggesting that, campaign posturing or not, idle threats can quickly become very real. The Biden administration\u2019s lack of pushback to these Israeli actions meanwhile suggests it\u2019s fine with giving Israel its quiet assent. As Lapid told the press in front of that fighter jet, \u201cAs President Biden and I agreed, Israel has full freedom to act as we see fit to prevent the possibility of Iran becoming a nuclear threat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Biden administration and its supporters will naturally point to Iran\u2019s behavior as the cause of the breakdown, but that is far from the whole story. The deal for Iran was not just to get a respite from US sanctions but to forestall a long-threatened military attack from both countries or either one. Yet as the negotiations were reaching their climax, Iranians were being told in no uncertain terms that not only would they still be targeted for attack by a regional US proxy, with Washington\u2019s consent, but that Washington itself was also reserving the right to launch a war against it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But well beyond these recent developments, at the root of the failure to revive the deal are a series of political choices by the Biden administration and US policy toward Iran more generally. First was Trump\u2019s flagrant violation of and pullout from the deal and his campaign of \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d to inflict as much suffering on ordinary Iranians as possible throughout his term, damaging what little trust and goodwill existed between the two states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But arguably just as culpable is the current US president. Rather than reenter the deal immediately with the stroke of a pen, Biden treated<\/a> Iran as if it, and not the United States, had violated the deal. He then chose to use US sanctions to extract more concessions<\/a> from Tehran, dragging out what could have been a quick and uncontroversial restoration of the pre-Trump status quo into endless negotiations, with all the raised prospects for new sticking points and disagreements that come with it. Both Trump\u2019s<\/a> and, especially, Biden\u2019s actions<\/a> had the added consequence of undermining Iran\u2019s reformists and putting into power its JCPOA-skeptical hard-liners, whose claims that Washington couldn\u2019t be trusted regardless of who was in power seemed to have been proven correct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet despite bending over backward to please Israel, the Biden administration isn\u2019t necessarily winning its loyalty. The Lapid government looks as if it\u2019s about to sign<\/a> a free-trade deal with the country Washington views as its chief geopolitical rival, China, which has tried for years to escalate its economic involvement in the Middle East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If one day the United States ends up in a war with Iran over its nuclear program, you\u2019ll hear a familiar story: that peace-loving Biden administration officials did everything to resurrect the deal, but, alas, the obstinacy of Iran\u2019s imperialist<\/a> and authoritarian<\/a> government made that impossible. In reality, Washington\u2019s policy choices will have played a central role \u2014 and a different set of choices could have prevented it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n jacobin.com <\/p>\n\n\n\n