Stubborn Facts Facing Biden on Iran

R ejoining the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA) has long been high on the to-do list for the Left, were they to win the 2020 presidential election. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden and his advisers consistently mentioned that it would be a priority if he won office, but added that a Biden administration would reenter the agreement once Iran came into full compliance— at which point they would then move to renegotiate the deal to fix its flaws and extend its expiration date.

But as president, Joe Biden will face enormous pressure from the American Left and European leaders to quickly rejoin the nuclear deal even if Iran remains in noncompliance. I hope he resists this pressure and faces the reality that the situation in Iran has changed considerably since he was vice president.

For Democrats, President Trump’s May 2018 decision to withdraw from the JCPOA has been one of his most egregious and hated acts as president. It’s difficult to exaggerate the reverence Democrats have for the nuclear deal as one of President Obama’s most important legacies. Although significant flaws in the agreement and evidence of Iranian cheating more than justified Trump’s decision to withdraw, he took great relish in rubbing this decision in the faces of Democrats by constantly claiming that the JCPOA was one of the worst deals ever negotiated and a sign of the incompetence of the Obama administration.

So make no mistake: For many Democrats, quickly rejoining the JCPOA will be payback.

The problem is, over the past two years, the nuclear deal’s enormous flaws have become indisputable. There also are new concerns about how the United States’ rejoining the JCPOA would destabilize the Middle East.

The Obama administration acknowledged when the JCPOA was announced in 2015 that it was imperfect and excluded safeguards against many threats posed by Iran, such as its missile program and sponsorship of terrorism. Obama officials claimed the deal had a narrow purpose: to keep Iran one year away from a nuclear bomb for ten to 15 years. They said this was the best agreement that could be reached with Iran, touted broad international support for it, and claimed the deal prevented a war with Iran.

For years, JCPOA defenders successfully refuted or discredited evidence of Iranian cheating on the nuclear deal. This became impossible, however, in 2018 after Israeli intelligence stole a huge cache of documents on Iran’s secret nuclear-weapons program. Indeed, the newly discovered Iran Nuclear Archive provided clarity on Iran’s nuclear program and its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The archive documents indicated that Iran’s nuclear-weapons program was far more advanced than it had admitted to the IAEA, that Iran had misled and lied to the IAEA and the international community about its nuclear program in disclosures required by the JCPOA, and that the Iranian government had taken steps to deceive IAEA inspectors after the JCPOA was implemented. The documents also suggested that some covert Iranian nuclear-weapons activities were still underway and revealed covert nuclear sites that Iran quickly moved to destroy before they could be inspected by the IAEA.

The archive documents transformed the debate on Iran’s nuclear program and led the IAEA and European states to demand explanations from Iran, in addition to IAEA access to nuclear sites mentioned in the archive. Iran refused to provide explanations and resisted permitting inspections of these sites.

Iran refused for a year to allow an inspection of a nuclear warehouse in Tehran. When it was finally inspected in April 2019, the warehouse had been emptied and “sanitized,” but IAEA inspectors still detected enriched uranium particles indicating undeclared nuclear work. Last August, Iran finally agreed to allow the IAEA to visit two other nuclear sites revealed in the archive, but by this time, Iranian officials almost certainly removed all evidence of nuclear activity there.

Pressured by the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA, new sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, and growing criticism of Iran’s JCPOA compliance by European states and the IAEA, Iranian officials ended their compliance with the JCPOA in early 2020. As a result, Iran is now openly violating the nuclear deal by exceeding limits on uranium enrichment, reactivating work at nuclear sites that had been closed by the JCPOA, and accelerating work on advanced uranium centrifuge designs.

Iran has violated the JCPOA’s 300-kg cap on its stockpile of low-enriched uranium and now has over 2,400 kg — enough to make two nuclear bombs if further enriched to weapons-grade.

In addition, Iran nearly sparked a war with a series of dangerous provocations over the last two years, including a September 2019 missile attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq and Khurais oil-processing facilities and missile attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq last January.

While these dangerous and provocative acts should alone be enough to convince Joe Biden not to rejoin the JCPOA, there’s another important reason to stay out of the nuclear deal: peace in the Middle East.

The Trump administration has made remarkable progress toward peace in the Middle East by convincing Bahrain, the U.A.E., and Sudan to normalize relations with Israel. More of these agreements between Israel and Arab states reportedly are on the way. This effort has been so successful that Ambassador James Jeffrey — the former U.S. special enjoy for Syria who signed a Never Trump letter in 2016 — recently recommended that a Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

But a crucial element of this policy was uniting Arab states and Israel against a common threat: Iran. If a Biden administration rejoined the JCPOA and dropped Trump’s sanctions on Iran, it would be seen by regional states as rewarding Iran for its bad behavior and probably would embolden Iran to resume its aggression and meddling in regional disputes. There’s no question such a reversal of U.S. policy would seriously undermine American credibility with Israel and our Arab allies.

Bahrain’s foreign minister recently said that he would expect a Biden administration to consult Bahrain and other Gulf countries before moving toward a new nuclear deal with Iran.

In addition, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said last week that it will not reopen the nuclear deal for renegotiation with a Biden administration and considers the agreement “signed, sealed and understood.”

Given how much the Iran situation has changed since the end of the Obama administration, I sincerely hope a President Biden will name top national-security officials who will resist pressure from the Left to quickly rejoin the JCPOA and carefully consider the compelling reasons that the United States should stay out of the agreement. While it may feel good for Biden officials to infuriate Donald Trump by reversing his withdrawal from the nuclear deal, such action would not be in the best interest of American or global security.