James Phillips and Peter Brookes
Heritage Foundation, Dec. 8, 2022
“… the Biden Administration chooses to believe that the regime will adhere to promises on nuclear proliferation issues that it repeatedly has broken in the past.”
The Biden Administration’s risky efforts to revive the deeply flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), have been derailed by unacceptable Iranian demands for guarantees and sanctions relief that were not part of the original deal.
But the Administration has signalled that it still wants an agreement and is willing to return to negotiations to seal a deal. Another flawed nuclear deal would bolster Iran’s Islamic dictatorship by lifting sanctions and unfreezing billions of dollars of Iran’s frozen assets, at a time that the regime is crushing a popular revolt at home,
launching proxy attacks abroad, supporting Russia’s war on Ukraine, and moving ahead with a worrisome nuclear program with suspected military dimensions.
Reviving the JCPOA would undermine the security of the United States and its allies by enriching, empowering, and emboldening a fiercely hostile regime and its terrorist proxies, while legitimizing Iran’s nuclear program and giving it a patient, but assured, a path to nuclear weapons. By discarding the Trump Administration’s “maximum pressure” policy, the Biden Administration has reduced the costs to Iran of continuing its nuclear advances and flouting its obligations under its International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear safeguards agreement.
