US ENTERS NEW HIGH-STAKES CONFLICT WITH IRAN
Tehran faces new sanctions as it covertly aids Russia in the Ukraine war.
Over the past few days, Iran has told international inspectors that it plans to begin making near bomb-grade nuclear fuel deep inside a mountain that is hard to bomb, and dramatically expand its nuclear fuel production at a plant that Israel and the United States have repeatedly sabotaged.
Iranian forces have shot or locked up anti-government protesters, provided Russia with drones for its war in Ukraine and, some Western intelligence agencies suspect, may be negotiating to produce missiles as well for Russia’s depleted arsenal. The United States accused Iran on Tuesday of once again violating Iraqi territory to conduct attacks in the Kurdistan region.
A new era of direct confrontation with Iran has burst into the open. Its emergence was hidden for a while by more dramatic events — including the Ukraine invasion and rising US competition with China — and negotiations with Iran dragged on, inconclusively, for 18 months.
Now President Joe Biden’s hope of re-entering the United States into the deal with Iran that was struck in 2015 and that former president Donald Trump abandoned has all but died. Negotiations halted in September, and in recent weeks, Mr Biden has imposed new sanctions on Iran and expressed support for protests that Iran’s hard-liners have portrayed as a mortal threat.
At the White House, national security meetings on Iran are devoted less to negotiation strategy and more to how to undermine Iran’s nuclear plans, provide communications gear to protesters and interrupt the country’s supply chain of weapons to Russia, according to several administration officials.
“There is no diplomacy right now underway with respect to the Iran deal,” John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council at the White House, bluntly told the Voice of America last month. “We are at an impasse right now, and we’re not focused on that.”
As recently as the summer, American officials still had hopes of reviving the nuclear deal. An agreement negotiated by European and Iranian teams was nearly complete. Representatives of the Biden administration — whom the Iranians refused to talk to directly — had approved the outlines and were awaiting a final signoff from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It never came.
US intelligence officials assessed that reviving the deal was as unpopular among Iranian conservatives and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which runs the military side of the nuclear programme, as it was among many American critics of the arrangement. Then came the street protests and an agreement with Russia that essentially put Iran, along with Belarus, in the position of aiding the Russian invasion.
“The regime has made a series of choices that is increasingly cutting them off both from their people and from much of the international community — including European countries that had devoted the bulk of the Trump years seeking to salvage the nuclear deal,” Robert Malley, the State Department’s special envoy for the Iran negotiations, said on Tuesday.
Mr Malley said Iran’s government “failed to engage” with the International Atomic Energy Agency when it demanded more visits and data to sites where nuclear material had been detected. Iran then announced plans for new nuclear production after the agency issued a resolution condemning the lack of cooperation.
The result has been “a series of vicious cycles”, Mr Malley said. “The repression fuels more protests. The protests trigger more repression. The alliance with Russia only further isolates Iran, which prompts it to double down on this alliance for lack of any other partner.”
Of greatest concern to Israel and many in the United States was Iran’s announcement that it would begin enriching nuclear fuel to 60% inside Fordow, the nuclear facility it built inside a mountain, on a military base, after the repeated cyberattacks and physical assaults on the Natanz nuclear enrichment site.
Now the question is whether the more hawkish new government that Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to form in Israel will press for an attack on the facility, which would be hard to destroy except with the largest bunker-busting bombs. Both the United States and Israel have trained to conduct a strike, and Mr Netanyahu came close to ordering one when he last served as prime minister.
By the public assessments offered by the administration, Iran has now made so much progress that it could amass fuel suitable for a bomb in a matter of weeks — down from a warning time of more than a year under the 2015 agreement. But the West would still have time: CIA and Israeli intelligence officials say that fashioning the fuel into a working weapon that could fit atop a missile would take two years, and the United States recently issued an assessment that it had no evidence of a bomb-making project underway.