The Biden administration has decided to revisit the Iran Nuclear Deal — Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA — in some form, as indicated in the Administration’s statements in the last few days.
The details of the hot-button issue remain relatively obscure. Still, the administration stated that it demands Iran make the first step toward reconsidering such a deal or a new one in keeping with its predecessor.
Behnam Taleblu, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy who is an expert on Iranian security and political issues, gave NewsMax an objective assessment of what the Biden administration’s signaling means in its appropriate geopolitical context.
“The Iranian strategy here is to continue to grow the violations in scale and scope because they believe that the U.S. does not want to issue more sanctions and that the U.S. does not have the resolve to continue this nuclear game of chicke,” he told Newsmax. “They are trying to grow the program rather than cheating privately. Since May of 2019, they have been cheating publicly, and the point is to grow the risk over time and thereby put the ball back in the Biden administration’s court. So far, they haven’t fallen for that, but the Iranian violations are mounting. There have been relatively bipartisan calls to address the full range of Iranian activities.”
Taleblu also voiced his concern with the Biden administration’s caving to these mounting Iranian violations. As he put it, “The fear that I have is that the Biden administration overtime loses faith in the sanctions and overtime undoes the good things that it is doing now, which is keeping in most of the sanctions on the books, and saying that Iran has to take the first step.”
Taleblu then presented the administration’s position in a nuanced light that analyzed Iran’s geopolitical history and influence and how the U.S. has sought to counterbalance Iran in the region.
“Interestingly, they are saying some of the right things to the American audience, but there are real doubts over whether they will actually act on those real things,” he said. “More than the U.S., Israel, and the Sunnis, Iran’s ability to capitalize on the chaos left in the region after the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, and the rise of ISIS is unparalleled. Iran’s power to exploit these vacuums, again and again, and press its advantage to export the Islamic Revolution drove the Sunni Arabs and Israel to come together.
“It took the Trump Administration’s initiative to let them know where these forces are going and support outside-in normalization to Israel. It took that recognition to understand the reality of those facts. I don’t think that the Biden administration will be undoing that, but I would stress the need to support those new partnerships and recognize the convergent strains that brought these divergent actors together, and from a national security strategy, it’s Iran, Iran, Iran.”
Taleblu concluded by offering a few policy-prescriptions that the administration may use to rearticulate U.S. foreign policy objectives in the region regarding Iran.
The U.S., he told Newsmax, “will have to signal its intentions through its actions that there will be no divorce between regional and nuclear or, if mistakenly, the U.S. wants to pursue a solely nuclear agreement, there would not be a softening position in the region but a hardening in the region. This position would be accomplished by marrying the following strategies:
- Committing to not withdraw from Iraq.
- Supporting a multinational and multilateral approach to interject Iranian arm flows into Yemen.
- Working with the Israelis to better impede Iran’s landbridge into Lebanon.
- Doing more with economic sanctions for human rights abuses.
- Having a stronger cyber deterrent.
- Using the power of the bully pulpit.”
Only time will tell which of the aforementioned policy-prescriptions, if any, that the Biden administration will employ to counter Iran and maintain U.S. influence in the region. With less than 100 days into the Biden administration, that decision is at present difficult to decipher.
Michael Cozzi is a Ph.D Candidate at Catholic University in Washington D.C.
Source: Newmax
