By Bonnie Kristian
Rob Malley, the US special envoy for nuclear talks with Iran, went to Qatar in the last week of June to resume European Union-facilitated negotiations with representatives of Tehran. Speaking with NPR recently, Malley expressed dismay about how they went. “It was a little bit of a — well, more than a bit of a wasted occasion,” he said, laying blame for diplomatic stagnation squarely on Iran. It’s still possible, he continued, that the United States will rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and Iran will return to compliance with its constraints, but that opportunity is fading. Eventually “the deal will be a thing of the past,” Malley said, and in the meantime, Iran’s uranium enrichment means the United States is in “a very dangerous situation.”
Four years after the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), this is a familiar story: US–Iran talks, typically with a European mediator, have been floundering since 2018. President Joe Biden’s 2020 promise to return to the nuclear deal has so far gone unfulfilled, and it may never happen. That would be unfortunate, insofar as the nuclear deal could be a foundation for normalizing US-Iran relations and could even help prompt some liberalization of the regime in Tehran.
Biden is currently on his first official tour of the Middle East, where he has met with Israeli officials and plans to go to Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Speaking in Jerusalem on Thursday, he said his administration won’t “wait forever” for Iran to comply with US demands and that “we will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” even if, as a “last resort,” that requires military intervention.
But if the deal does become a thing of the past, Malley’s characterization of the danger to US security is greatly overstated, and military intervention isn’t inevitable. With or without the nuclear deal, we can still avoid war with Iran. US deterrence can continue to achieve that end even if diplomacy does not, though ongoing US military intervention in the greater Middle East — especially in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — raises the risk of open conflict.
This piece was originally published in Inkstick on July 14, 2022. Read more HERE.