President Biden is looking forward to engaging again with Iran and returning to the nuclear deal. However, the murderous regime has no interest in changing its ways. He is driving the development of his nuclear weapons and his network of deadly militias across the Middle East in his continued quest for hegemony.
Biden said during the campaign that he would re-join the nuclear deal “as a starting point for subsequent negotiations” if “Iran returns to strict compliance”, working “to strengthen and extend the provisions of the nuclear deal, while addressing other issues of concern, ”such as Iran’s ballistic missile program, human rights abuses and“ destabilizing activity ”.
This has always been naive, and Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, confirmed on Friday: “There can be no renegotiations,” he wrote in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Iran’s regional and defense policies have not been discussed,” as the West will not withdraw from the region and stop selling weapons to its allies.
Zarif proudly stated, “Iran has significantly increased its nuclear capabilities” and, in fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed this month in a confidential report that Iran took a crucial step in December, starting an assembly line to make metallic uranium , an important nuclear element – a weapon component prohibited by the nuclear agreement. France, Germany and Britain jointly warned of “serious military implications”, noting that the metal “has no reliable civilian use”.
Earlier this month, Tehran said it was producing 20 percent enriched uranium, well above the 3.67 percent agreed in the nuclear deal, crossing what even European appeasers see as a red line. The IAEA said in November that Iran had accumulated a stockpile of low enriched uranium 12 times that allowed by the agreement. Iran prevented the agency from visiting the agency for months in the past year and promises to permanently stop inspectors if American sanctions are not lifted until February 21.
The problem is not just nuclear. Tehran’s multi-day military exercises this month included tests of ballistic missiles and unmanned planes aimed at, said Iranian state TV, a “hypothetical enemy missile shield” and “hypothetical enemy bases”. Some missiles landed just 160 kilometers from the USS Nimitz, their debris flying after they exploded. A missile touched the water 20 miles from a commercial ship.
Newsweek recently reported that Iran is delivering “suicide drones” (advanced unmanned aerial vehicles) to its Houthi representatives in Yemen. With a range of 2,000 kilometers, they can reach Israel, Saudi Arabia and even American targets in the region.
All of this should be a wake-up call for the new president, but Biden appears to be looking for appeasement. His choice for CIA director William Burns played a key role in the Obama administration’s secret talks with Tehran in 2013, which led to the 2015 nuclear deal. And Biden is reportedly looking to make Robert Malley his special envoy to Iran.
Malley was expelled from the Obama campaign in 2008 after news that he met with members of the terrorist group Hamas, but he became the director for the Middle East of President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. Last year, he actually condemned the death of top Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
A dozen former Iranian hostages and human rights activists sent a letter to Biden’s secretary of state urging him not to put Malley in government, as it “would send a scary signal to the Iranian dictatorship that the United States is exclusively focused to re-enter the nuclear deal with Iran and ignore regional terrorism and domestic crimes against humanity ”.
This was exactly the Obama era approach, and Biden seems determined to repeat that deadly mistake.