Yesterday the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced that the Islamic Republic is enriching uranium to levels necessary only for the production of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Washington is still trying to negotiate a revival of the 2015 nuclear deal. But any agreement will depend on the IAEA’s inspectors to ensure compliance, and Iran has all the while been preventing these inspectors from doing their jobs. Andrea Stricker writes:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran agreed on Monday to extend for one month a monitoring agreement that was set to expire over the weekend. . . . Under the Iran-IAEA arrangement reached in February, Tehran would destroy the IAEA’s data and monitoring records if Iran did not receive sanctions relief from the United States and other world powers within 90 days. Now, Iran essentially threatens to erase the data around June 24 if Washington does not lift sanctions.

The Islamic Republic’s threats to destroy safeguards data amount to unprecedented extortion of the IAEA. Tehran has also put the agency in the position of permitting Iran to pick and choose which safeguards obligations it will fulfill. This sets a negative precedent for other states, which may also seek piecemeal safeguards.

The Biden administration should not grant Iran sanctions relief, which would reward and incentivize the clerical regime’s nuclear extortion. Lifting sanctions would effectively foreclose any chance that the regime will cooperate with the IAEA’s ongoing safeguards investigation, which is examining Tehran’s undeclared use of nuclear material at covert sites.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.