Restart, Reset or Renew? The Strategy against Iranian Nuclear Ambition
by Peter Schweizer • January 14, 2021 at 5:00 am
Even if the deal negotiated in 2015 by the Obama administration were worth the effort, it is impossible to imagine the Iranians willingly recommitting to enrichment levels they have long since blown past. No one believes in their professed "peaceful use" of nuclear energy. So why does a return to the deal make any sense?
The killing of top terror-funding IRGC official Qasem Soleimani by the US military and Iran's relatively toothless retaliatory attack against two US bases in Iraq suggest that the regime fears what an escalation of tensions would mean to its own future more than it desires to stab at the "Great Satan." The regime may finally be on the verge of collapse.
Those sanctions are the only leverage the U.S. really has against Iran, and they may finally succeed, much as the Reagan administration was able to do to the USSR in the 1980s. Now is not the time to reduce or remove them in exchange for paper promises born of a campaign slogan, from a regime whose movements suggest it fears its days are numbered.
Through covert operations, hidden diplomacy, an intense military buildup, and a series of actions designed to throw sand in the gears of the Soviet economy, American policy destroyed the USSR from its fingertips to its heart. Former Soviet leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev have admitted it with grudging admiration. The only ones who were wrong were those in the liberal foreign policy establishment who pretended it was all just a coincidence.
President-elect Joe Biden ran on a slogan to "restore the Iran nuclear deal." For those voters desperate to undo every accomplishment of the Trump administration, which abandoned the deal and imposed sharp sanctions on Iran's oil and financial sectors, it must have sounded attractive.
But now that Biden will be responsible for American security and not just criticizing Donald Trump, he would do well to slow down and consider alternatives.
The mullahs in Iran, claiming to be freed from the deal by Trump's 2018 decision to pull the United States out, have openly accelerated their nuclear research, and recently boasted that they have achieved uranium enrichment levels of 20%. The JCPOA restricted them, on paper at least, to 3.67%. Iran has vastly increased its stockpile of ballistic missiles, a grave concern to other countries in the region, particularly Israel.
