By Sarah N. Stern | July 30, 2021 

Giant fissures are emerging from just beneath the surface throughout the Middle East and Israel is bracing for the inevitable eruption. The United States had better wake up too, because the aftershocks will be felt here and they will not be mild.

In a briefing this week to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies’ Professor Manuel Tratjenberg stated that Tehran has accumulated greater levels of highly enriched uranium and is operating more advanced centrifuges for uranium metal production. He also expressed concern that the talks in Vienna are leading nowhere, buying more valuable time for Iran.

Iran, in the meantime, has insisted that there will be no more talks until their new hardline President, Ebrahim Raisi, assumes office on August 5th. In order to sweeten the pot to induce Iran to sit down at the negotiating table, we have already rewarded the Islamic Republic. Robert Malley, the U.S. Special Envoy to Iran, gave a rather revealing interview on the PBS news hour on April 2nd, basically blaming the United States for leaving the deal during the Trump years.

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Douglas Feith is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute, where he heads the Center for National Security Strategies. He is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. He was a professor of national security studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. As Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from July 2001 until August 2005, he helped devise the U.S. government’s strategy for the war on terrorism and contributed to policymaking for the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns.