After more than two years of crippling sanctions, the Islamic Republic got “a new lease on life” once Joe Biden entered the White House, write Richard Goldberg and Jacob Nagel. The current administration, hoping to return to the 2015 nuclear deal or renegotiate a “longer and stronger” version, has unfrozen Iranian assets and shielded the ayatollahs from international censure over their nuclear program. But, argue Nagel and Goldberg, it’s not too late to change course:
In coordination with U.S. allies in Europe, the Biden administration should request an immediate special meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board—before its November meeting—to hold Iran accountable for its wide range of illicit conduct. This should be followed quickly with a formal resolution, at next month’s quarterly board meeting, that censures Iran not just for its [elevated uranium] enrichment and the limited access [it has allowed] to inspectors, but also for its non-compliance with a now three-year-old safeguards investigation.
Biden and his senior advisers need to recognize that after more than eight months of squandering U.S. economic leverage and allowing Iran vastly to increase its nuclear leverage, [any further attempt to appease Iran] leads back neither to the 2015 nuclear deal nor to a longer and stronger deal. Instead, it leads to something even worse: the so-called path of “less for less,” where the U.S. provides “partial” sanctions relief for “partial” Iranian nuclear concessions.
“Partial sanctions relief” for “partial nuclear steps” may sound appealing on its face but when dealing with a regime whose expertise is hobbling along with limited financial resources, partial sanctions relief is the very outcome the mullahs now seek. It will allow them to continue their supporting terror all over the world and bag their nuclear advances as a new baseline for future negotiations. As we saw in 2013, an interim agreement that grants partial sanctions relief and removes all U.S. leverage ends up becoming a flawed final deal.
The Biden administration is fond of saying that U.S. leadership at multilateral institutions like the IAEA “is back.” The world will be watching . . . to see if that’s really true.
Read more on Dispatch: https://thedispatch.com/p/its-decision-time-on-iran