In an interview in the Israeli press, the recently retired deputy head of the Mossad—that is, the person not picked to take over from the outgoing director—opined that Israel’s situation vis-à-viz Iran is worse now than it was in 2015. The former intelligence officer, known only as “A,” went on to criticize Jerusalem’s handling of the nuclear threat from the Islamic Republic, asserting that the ayatollahs would be further from getting the bomb if Prime Minister Netanyahu had not encouraged the U.S. to reject the 2015 nuclear deal. Jacob Nagel, a former Israeli national-security adviser, disagrees:

From the signing of the deal to the American withdrawal from it three years later, Iran has used every lifting of restrictions provided by the accord to push forward its uranium enrichment, bolster its technological capabilities, and produce advanced centrifuges. . . . The continued production of advanced centrifuges (allowed by the 2015 deal) essentially let Iran go underground with its operations. It later emerged that the accord did not take into consideration the storage of materials and production methods, which led to a miscalculation in the time it would take Iran to reach a nuclear tipping point.

Blaming Israel’s conduct or President Trump’s withdrawal from the accord is absurd.

A return to the 2015 deal would allow Tehran to install new advanced infrastructure at its covert facilities and obtain enough enriched uranium needed for the bomb. There is no way back to the old accord.

As [its critics] predicted, the deal failed, but not because of Israel, but rather because the accord failed to achieve the very goals it set out to accomplish. . . . Recommendations on returning to it and upgrading it down the road are a serious misjudgment.

In an interview on Sunday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stated that the Biden administration remains committed to nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic, even as it pursues its brutal crackdown on the protests that have swept the country. Robert Satloff argues not only that it is foolish to pursue the renewal of the 2015 nuclear deal, but also that the White House’s current approach is failing on its own terms:

[The] nuclear threat is much worse today than it was when President Biden took office. Oddly, Washington hasn’t really done much about it. On the diplomatic front, the administration has sweetened its offer to entice Iran into a new nuclear deal. While it quite rightly held firm on Iran’s demand to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from an official list of “foreign terrorist organizations,” Washington has given ground on many other items.

On the nuclear side of the agreement, the United States has purportedly agreed to allow Iran to keep, in storage, thousands of advanced centrifuges it has made contrary to the terms of the original deal. . . . And on economic matters, the new deal purportedly gives Iran immediate access to a certain amount of blocked assets, before it even exports most of its massive stockpile of enriched uranium for safekeeping in a third country. . . . Even with these added incentives, Iran is still holding out on an agreement. Indeed, according to the most recent reports, Tehran has actually hardened its position.

Regardless of the exact reason why, the menacing reality is that Iran’s nuclear program is galloping ahead—and the United States is doing very little about it. . . . The result has been a stunning passivity in U.S. policy toward the Iran nuclear issue.