Reviving Iran deal would be a major step backward
You can expect a Biden administration to try to undo many of President Donald Trump’s accomplishments on taxes and the regulatory state. And it didn’t take long for Mr. Biden to express his eagerness to jump right back into several of the flawed foreign policy arrangements that characterized the Obama presidency.
Last month, Mr. Biden announced that he plans to revive the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that the Middle Eastern regime flouted from the start. Mr. Biden insists that this time he’ll demand that Iran respect the terms of the agreement, which was intended to forestall the country’s development of nuclear weapons. But on Thursday, Iran’s foreign minister said his country would not agree to any new conditions imposed by Mr. Biden. Oops.
A Biden administration should rethink simply mimicking Obama foreign policy mistakes. The Iran deal did little but provide the country cash to fund terrorism in the region. Iranian officials offered nothing but empty promises. Mr. Trump’s about-face — in pulling out of the deal, he imposed harsh economic sanctions on the country, which have made it more difficult for the Islamic regime to engage in dangerous mischief — has proven a more effective means of containment.
“It is worth recalling that former Secretary of State John Kerry — the great architect of the Iran deal when he served in the Obama administration — got everything about the region wrong,” noted James Jay Carafano of The Heritage Foundation in a recent essay. “Kerry claimed the Iranian regime would act more responsibly after the nuclear deal. It didn’t. … Kerry claimed that the Iranians would stop pursuing nuclear weapons. They didn’t. … Kerry also famously predicted that, beyond Jordan and Egypt, no other Arab nation would normalize relations with Israel without a Palestinian-israeli deal. In the last year, with no such deal in sight, three Arab capitals have established relations with Jerusalem.”
Indeed, the Trump administration has made progress in the Middle East that was previously unthinkable. Some of that progress reflects the increasing isolation of Iran and the emerging willingness of some Arab nations to choose peace over alignment with a belligerent nation that has lost much of its leverage in the region. “Thanks to our determined stand against the nuclearization of Iran, and to our opposition to the nuclear agreement with Iran,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last month, “many Arab countries have fundamentally changed their approach to Israel.”
That should be something a Biden administration would seek to build upon, not disrupt. Reviving the flawed 2015 Obama Iran deal would be a major mistake.