Complete defeat

Congratulations to Ruthie Blum for her biting analysis of the US administration’s defeatist position on Iran (“Biden crawls back to the nuclear drawing board,” April 9).

Indeed a dark cloud hovers over the Vienna negotiations to bring Washington back into the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. All the original signatories are in the one room, except for the US representative, held off in another.

The imagery is ominous for a retired US Foreign Officer as myself, steeped in diplomacy. Memories flood my virtual memory of the 1938 Munich Conference that sold out Czechoslovakia: the Czech representative was held in a separate room to receive the quadripartite diktat. It indeed brought “peace in our time” to be followed by the inevitable war in less than a year on worst of terms.

One factor is even more ominous this time around as Europe again leads the negotiating team. This entire scenario was probably planned by the Biden White House so that it can claim to have received “the best offer possible” given the disaster, as it sees it, of the Trump abnegation of the original accord.

Any American thought of weening Tehran away from Moscow and Beijing is illusionary. With a restored pact in hand, Iran will expand its newly financed worldwide terror operations and double down on its advancing military links to these antagonistic superpowers. President Biden’s wanting to avoid war in his time, will bequeath us war in ours.

AARON BRAUNSTEIN Jerusalem