The Iran nuclear deal that world powers are negotiating in Vienna will make it harder to stave off a nuclear Iran, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned at the opening of Sunday’s cabinet meeting.
“Foremost among the threats to the State of Israel is Iran,” Bennett said. “We, as the cabinet, are responsible for taking on the Iranian nuclear [threat], and are closely following what is happening in the talks in Vienna.”
Bennett said, “The agreement and what appears to be its conditions will damage the ability to take on the nuclear program.
“Whoever thinks an agreement will increase stability is wrong,” he added. “It will temporarily delay enrichment, but all of us in the region will pay a heavy, disproportionate price for it.”
According to The Jerusalem Post, it is a very clear sign that the United States is trying to close a return to the deal by mid-February when the IAEA issues its next report or by March 7, 2022, when the IAEA Board of Governors meets. These are opportunities that only come up once every three months to exercise additional pressure on the Islamic Republic.
Put simply, Washington's leverage to get the ayatollahs to return to the nuclear limits is the existing sanctions leverage. If the US starts to lift sanctions before Iran has given anything up, why should the Islamic Republic show any readiness to compromise?
This goes along with other recent signs, such as a split in the US negotiating team in which three members resigned over their view that the Biden administration's approach to the negotiations was too flexible and lenient toward Tehran.
For one, leaks to the Wall Street Journal last week indicated that those resigning were unhappy with a return to the JCPOA which would leave Iran closer to six months away from crossing the uranium enrichment threshold as opposed to the deal's original 12-month goal.
The waiver from this weekend covered the conversion of Iran’s Arak heavy water research reactor - which relates to its potential plutonium path to a nuclear weapon, delivering to it enriched uranium for its Tehran nuclear research reactor and facilitating the transfer of spent and scrap reactor fuel abroad.
None of these sanctions relief helps Iran's economy one iota. They also do not advance its nuclear program at all. Rather, all of these items were part of the JCPOA itself and were actions that either kept or maintained Iran's ability to have a civil nuclear program, while cutting it off from military options.
The truth is that the Trump administration's decision in May 2020, only a few months before the November 2020 presidential election, to cancel these sanctions waivers was bizarre. It served no purpose other than to remove an exit ramp for Iran to return to the nuclear deal if it wanted to.
Essentially, it was an attempt to preemptively sabotage the Biden administration from being able to return to the JCPOA given that Biden was leading Trump in the polls.
These items are all basically part of the machinery of how the JCPOA operates at a civil nuclear level completely within the nuclear limits.
For example, the provisions regarding the Arak reactor actually prevent Iran from advancing a plutonium path to a bomb, transferring spent and scrap reactor fuel abroad prevents Iran from using it at home, and even transferring a tiny amount of non-weaponized enriched uranium keeps Iran under the 300 kilogram and 3.67% enrichment level limits of the deal.
Tactically, this is the Biden administration trying to show it is eager to facilitate the machinery of the JCPOA and it can box Tehran into needing to show good faith on its part, or risk being blamed for the failed negotiations.
Of course, this is not the result that the Israeli government wants , though a rising number of voices in the Israeli defense establishment want a deal if only to slow and freeze Iran's march to the 90% uranium weaponization level.
It does signal Washington's desperation for a deal and all other signs are that the new deal will be weaker than the JCPOA had been.
But of all of the recent signs pointing in this direction, this sanctions waiver was actually the least significant and the smallest concrete negative change from an Israeli government perspective.
Signs of an imminent full or partial deal would involve sanctions waivers to countries like China, India, Greece, Italy, Taiwan, Japan, Turkey and South Korea.
These were eight countries that even the Trump administration granted exemptions to from sanctions during May 2018 to May 2019.
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