If President Obama seems less worried than Israel that Iran will obtain nuclear weapons as a result of his administration’s negotiations with the regime, maybe that’s because he’s less worried than Israel about Iran having nuclear weapons.
“I think Iran is like North Korea,” Obama told David Brooks when he was running for president in 2007. “They see nuclear arms in defensive terms, as a way to prevent regime change.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disagrees. “The ideology of Iran’s revolutionary regime is deeply rooted in militant Islam, and that’s why this regime will always be an enemy of America,” he said in his speech to Congress denouncing the deal being negotiated. “The foremost sponsor of global terrorism could be weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons and this with full international legitimacy.”
The negotiations are currently stuck, as Iran refuses to ship its stockpile of enriched uranium to Russia.
“The export of stocks of enriched uranium is not in our program, and we do not intend sending them abroad,” an Iranian negotiator told state-run media, according to the Washington Free Beacon. “There is no question of sending the stocks abroad.”