Biden’s Ready-Made Excuse for a New Iran Deal

H ow could the Biden administration defend a terrible nuclear deal with Iran? Simple: blame Trump.

An awful agreement was never inevitable, mostly thanks to the ayatollahs: Their demands may be so excessive that not even the EU3 and the Biden negotiators can accept them. But it seems increasingly likely that the United States will soon acquiesce to a deal in which Iran does one thing — such as agreeing to stop enriching uranium to 60 percent — in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief. A recent visit to Vienna by South Korean officials suggests that unfreezing the $7 billion Iran has on the books there will be step one. Step two will likely be lifting all sanctions on Iranian oil exports, allowing the regime to increase sales to China and others in Asia immediately. My own guess: In exchange for Iran’s ceasing to enrich uranium to 60 percent, virtually all U.S. sanctions will be lifted.

This “less for less” deal would be a terrible agreement. It could really be termed “less for more” — Iran does less and gets more. It would ignore Iran’s subversion of the IAEA and its refusal to allow serious inspections. It would ignore Iran’s refusal to deal with the “previous military dimensions” of its nuclear program, which are quite obviously real (the nuclear archive purloined by Israel proved that) and still exist today. It would ignore Iran’s use of advanced generations of centrifuges and would certainly permit enrichment above the 3.67 percent limit agreed in Obama’s 2015 deal. And it would supply the regime with billions — likely tens of billions — of dollars to use, for instance, subverting Iraq, fighting in Yemen, and supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.

So how would the Biden administration possibly defend such a deal? Trump! Here is how a Politico story began this week:

The White House sought Wednesday to reframe the Washington debate about the Iran nuclear deal, asserting that former President Donald Trump’s decision to quit the agreement is what has led to an Iran on the verge of an atom bomb.

In other words, “We had no choice.” You may not like this agreement, they will argue, but the United States was left with no alternative.

We should expect to see this line come from the White House, the State Department, CNN, the New York Times, and the rest of the echo chamber. But it is false. The “maximum pressure campaign” of sanctions that began in 2018 had, by the end of the Trump administration, had a devastating impact on the Iranian economy. According to the U.S. Institute of Peace:

Iran earned $41 billion in oil exports in 2016 and $53 billion in 2017. But Iran earned only $8 billion to $9 billion in oil revenues from March 2019 to March 2020. And over the next six months, from March to September 2020, parliament claimed that Iran earned only $2.5 billion from oil exports.

The Iranian rial also depreciated 49 percent against the dollar in 2020, and inflation was 30 percent in 2018 and 40 percent in 2019. Moreover, as the BBC put it, “The reinstatement of US sanctions in 2018 – particularly those imposed on the energy, shipping and financial sectors that November – caused foreign investment to dry up . . .” And most stunningly of all, between 2018 and 2020, Iran’s accessible foreign-currency reserves fell from $122.5 billion to $4 billion, according to the IMF.

The Biden administration could have kept the pressure on until the Iranian regime — aware far more than the White House is of the hatred ordinary Iranians feel for their leaders — faced economic crisis and agreed to a better deal. Instead, Team Biden decided on the Obama administration approach, and is on a path toward an agreement that rewards Iran’s malfeasance and gets it closer and closer to a nuclear weapon.

An agreement with Iran, following on the chaotic retreat from Afghanistan, would further rattle America’s allies. It would mean that Joe Biden looked at the worst case — no deal, Iran proceeding toward a nuclear weapon, and the United States forced to act militarily — and blinked.

Congress should demand to review any agreement the administration reaches under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA). Passed by bipartisan congressional majorities in 2015, that law requires congressional review of any new agreement with Iran, and any deal reached in Vienna would certainly qualify. But would the Biden administration even submit the new agreement to Congress, as the law requires? If it refused, would Congress demand that it do so? Would the mainstream media, so concerned in other contexts with ensuring that presidents follow the law, demand that it do so?

I hope that the answer to all three questions is, “Yes.” But I won’t be holding my breath.