(Screenshot via the Council on Foreign Relations)

Despite Iran’s continued aggression, many in Washington—including President Joe Biden—still believe that the United States needs to appease the Islamic Republic to de‑escalate the situation.

At the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East Director Michael Doran engaged in an open debate with CFR’s Ray Takeyh and the Stimson Center’s Barbara Slavin on Biden’s failed Iran diplomacy, the prospect of a nuclear Iran, and the threat Tehran poses to the global order. Excerpts from Doran’s answers are below.

Key Insights

1. Biden’s Iran diplomacy has failed.

“I think we can look around now and see it very obviously has failed. Nuclear Iran is much closer than it has ever been before. [The Biden administration was] going to pull Iran back from the nuclear precipice. Iran is within one week of having enough fissile material to build a nuclear weapon. . . . It’s also a much bigger threat in the region. Its drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles have created an offense-dominant regime in the region. [The Iranians’] weapons, given to their proxies . . . can hit the national critical infrastructure of every American ally, and they can also overwhelm the defenses of the United States. They are using those weapons in five different arenas in the region and one outside the region.”

2. Israel cannot live with a nuclear Iran.

“I just want to emphasize . . . how profoundly odd it is to have a regime that openly calls for the destruction of Israel, denies the Holocaust, and delivers drones, missiles, and ballistic missiles to all of its proxies around the region, and attacks every one of its neighbors with the exception of Turkey and Azerbaijan with these things. This is not normal behavior. This is not a normal regime. And one of the reasons that the Israelis cannot tolerate it is that [Tehran is] openly calling for obliterating Israel.”

3. Iran poses a threat to the global order.

“The American policy, by failing to support our allies against Iran or offering them only purely defensive measures, is actually pushing them to Beijing to moderate Iran. And we are strengthening the axis among Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and North Korea. That’s how we need to understand it, and if we want to pull Iran away from that alliance, we have to hit it. We have to hit it hard. And we have to make it pay a price for all of the aggressive policies that it is carrying out. . . . There’s a kind of paradox in Iran: Iran is weak. It’s very weak, but [its] aspirations are global. The supreme leader sees himself not just as the leader of Iran, but as the leader of the entire Islamic world. The Iranians are working in Venezuela. Iranians now are working with North Korea. They’re working with China. They have shut down 80 percent of the shipping going through the Suez Canal. It is ridiculous for a superpower to tolerate this from a power that is so objectively weak.”

Quotes may be edited for clarity and length. 

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