President Joseph Biden is fixated on concluding a nuclear deal with Iran; essentially at any price. He has reportedly invited Russians to adjudicate a new deal, which will likely lead to an Iranian nuclear weapon. In 2012, President Barack Obama invited Russians into the Middle East after a 40-year absence, as a prelude to his disastrous 2015 Treaty of Catastrophe. Biden will trump that disaster by enabling Vladimir Putin to become the nuclear protector of the old Obama goal of an Iran-Hezbollah-Muslim Brotherhood Axis, from Iran to the Mediterranean, as counterbalance to US traditional allies in the Middle East: Israel, Egypt and the Arab monarchies.
The 2015 Obama-orchestrated nuclear agreement with Iran is a catastrophe. The treaty ended international sanctions against Iran, and permitted Iran to develop advanced centrifuges. It did not stop the creation of nuclear weapons by Iran, but feebly attempted to slow Iran down. It removed obstacles to ballistic missiles and made the technology attainable. It enabled Iran to become a nuclear weapon capable power, and allowed Iran to reach anywhere in the world with its missiles. It also got the ayatollahs money.
The Obama deal gave the ayatollahs over $150 billion. Biden’s deal, as reportedly negotiated, will give Iran up to $130 billion from sanctions relief. Just as Iran and its terror proxies massively escalated their attacks following their cash windfall in 2016, with the implementation of the 2015 nuclear deal, the Biden windfall will essentially ensure that Iran and its terror emissaries will attack US troops and allies in the region.
Moreover the Biden administration’s unyielding commitment to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran has been overtaken by events. According to Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Iran has already stockpiled a sufficient quantity of uranium to produce a nuclear weapon. Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Iranian regime lied to UN nuclear inspectors about all aspects of its nuclear program.
Since Iran already has sufficient quantities of uranium to build a bomb, Iranians must have taken extraordinary steps to hide the extent of their program from UN inspectors; Iran probably has larger stockpiles of enriched uranium than is currently known. Furthermore, any agreement that requires Iran to limit its nuclear capabilities or activities cannot be a credible non-proliferation deal, because Iran lacks credibility.
The 2015 deal is also irrelevant because the economic benefits Iran will gain from the abrogation of US economic sanctions, even though significant, are unnecessary. Iran is already doing very well financially, due to Biden’s refusing to enforce key components of the sanctions regime. Iran’s unsanctioned oil and gas exports have already reached their pre-sanctions level. Moreover, Biden slashed oil production in the US and destroyed US energy independence, which caused energy prices to skyrocket. Biden’s doggedness to his campaign vow to terminate the production of fossil fuels in the US during his tenure, means the world’s autocratic regimes exporting oil are getting richer every day: Russia, Iran, etc.
In April 2021, the Biden administration began its nuclear talks with Iran in Vienna. The declared objective of Biden’s nuclear diplomacy is the same as the declared purpose of the Obama administration’s nuclear talks with Iran that led to the 2015 Treaty of Catastrophe: Preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. But the leaks of the content of the deal that the Biden regime has been negotiating, as well as the content of Obama’s nuclear agreement, made clear that rather than preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear armed state, they intended to enable Iran to become a nuclear armed state, with the economic means and military power to dominate its neighbors.
Under the 2015 deal, Iran supposedly was to curb the quantities of low-enriched uranium it was permitted to stockpile. Whereas, Iran was developing advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to bomb grade levels. Those capabilities are permanent; however, the restrictions Iran accepted on the nuclear activities it was carrying out were temporary.
Moreover, the inspections regime left much of Iran’s nuclear program outside the purview of UN nuclear inspectors; making the inspections regime ineffective. Obama admitted that at the end of the deal in 2030, Iran’s breakout time would be zero. Optimistic assessments of Biden’s nuclear deal claim Iran will be 4-6 months from nuclear breakout from the moment the ayatollahs decide to cross the nuclear threshold.
In May 2018, then President Donald Trump withdrew the US from Obama’s Treaty of Catastrophe due to Iran’s breaches of the nuclear deal. In May 2019, Iran announced that it was renouncing its commitment to the limitations on its nuclear activities it had accepted under the deal.
Despite its announcement, Iran did very little to expand its nuclear operations, because it feared a harsh response from Trump. Moreover, Iran wanted to empower the Democrats that had officially committed to reinstating Obama’s nuclear deal upon retaking the White House. Furthermore, the frequent attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the assassinations of Iran’s generals and senior nuclear scientists compelled Iran to devote its main efforts to defense, rather than enhancing nuclear capabilities.
In early January 2021, a few days before Biden’s inauguration, Iran quashed its agreement to the most significant aspects of the nuclear deal’s inspections regime, and increased its level of uranium enrichment from the 3.67 percent purity permitted under the 2015 deal to 20 percent. In February 2021, Iran began producing uranium metal, which is mainly used to produce the core of nuclear weapons. In April 2021, around the start of Biden’s nuclear negotiations, the Iranians increased their level of enrichment to 60 percent enrichment, which is 99 percent of the way to weapons grade enrichment levels. They enriched the uranium with advanced centrifuges they developed after agreeing to the Obama-orchestrated deal in 2015.
Biden and his handlers failed to respond to Iran’s actions. If their goal was to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, they would have strengthened existing sanctions and imposed additional ones. Contrariwise, the Biden administration stopped enforcing key sanctions, and transferred to the ayatollahs billions of dollars of Iranian government funds frozen under US sanctions imposed by Trump’s maximum pressure campaign.
Biden stopped enforcing bans on Iranian oil and gas exports. Now Iran reportedly earns as much from oil and gas exports as it did before Trump barred the sale of Iranian fuels on international markets.
The Biden administration blocked the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency from publishing a harsh report condemning Iran’s massive breaches of the 2015 nuclear deal and outlining its illicit nuclear activities. The State Department released watered-down reports on Iran’s breaches of its nuclear limits, to make Iran’s behavior seem acceptable.
In the first days of his presidency, Biden removed Iran’s Yemeni proxy the Houthis from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations and has kept the Houthis off the list despite their escalating attacks on US forces and on Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Even worse, Biden continues to court Iran and contemplates removing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, even as the IRGC has deployed cells to assassinate former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former national security advisor John Bolton, and former Iran coordinator Brian Hook. The three former Trump administration officials receive around the clock protection.
Furthermore, Biden appears willing to see Iran become a nuclear-power state outside an agreement. If Iran crosses the nuclear threshold outside a nuclear deal, Biden and his handlers hope to blame Trump for the outcome. Since taking office, Biden has been insisting that Trump is responsible for Iran’s actions, despite the fact that Iran began to increase its nuclear operations only after Biden was elected, and significantly since Biden entered office.
Recent polling indicated 63 percent of Americans believe that Biden’s nuclear deal is a graver threat to US national security than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That was a tough call between Biden’s foreign policy catastrophes and Russians killing Ukrainians. Meanwhile, Biden reportedly has asked Putin to adjudicate the Iran deal.
The reported content of the nuclear deal that Biden seeks to achieve and his permissive responses to illicit Iranian nuclear and terror operations indicate that Biden’s real objective is to facilitate Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and hegemonic power, even at the expense of US strategic interests, national security and allies.
Moreover, before the November 2022 US midterm elections, resuscitating the Treaty of Catastrophe, has become critical for Biden to show anything of substance after series of foreign policy disasters: his chaotic withdrawal and abject surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban; his aggravation of the Ukraine crisis, etc. Thus, Biden’s peddling of massive disinformation: demonizing Putin as a “bully,” “killer,” and “war-criminal,” while promoting Putin as the suddenly vital rescuer of a new Iranian deal that almost certainly will birth an Iranian-fossil-fueled nuke.
Dr. Sheyin-Stevens is a Registered Patent Attorney based in Florida, USA. He earned his Doctorate in Law from the University of Miami.