There are growing indications that the Biden administration is slowly recognizing its Iran policy has failed. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden and his team have no idea what to do now. This is the message of a recent article by Robin Wright in The New Yorker. Titled “The Looming Threat of a Nuclear Crisis with Iran,” Wright’s 5,000-word treatise includes interviews with Iran negotiations envoy Robert Malley, CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, nuclear proliferation experts, Iranian officials and others. And what they all said, effectively, is that they don’t know what to do.
As Wright’s reporting showed, the nuclear negotiations in Vienna are going nowhere, as Iran marches across the nuclear threshold. And on the off chance Iran agrees to make some sort of deal with the administration, the deal will give Iran a lot of money, but it won’t significantly stop its path to a nuclear arsenal. So the entire exercise is futile.
Moreover, according to McKenzie, Iran’s nuclear weapons program is not even the most acute threat Iran poses to the U.S. and its allies.
Iran’s missile arsenal, which is the largest and the most diverse in the region, can overwhelm most missile defense systems. Its ballistic missiles are precise, powerful and capable of reaching targets as far away as India and southern Europe, not to mention all countries in the Middle East. Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Yemen are fully integrated into Iran’s war machine. They are well-armed and they operate at Iran’s command.
McKenzie told Wright that Iran’s nuclear sites are so well fortified, and its missile arsenal and proxy forces are so formidable, that were the U.S. to find itself in a war with Iran, it would take at least a year and massive losses—”We would be hurt badly”—before the U.S. would prevail.
So a nuclear deal is out, at least as a non-proliferation tool. War is a terrible option. And, according to a senior State Department official, the option of sanctions has “exhausted” itself.
The stakes for the U.S. are exceedingly high. While a hegemonic, nuclear-armed Iran is an existential danger to Israel, it also poses a massive threat to the U.S. The Iranian regime makes no effort to hide the fact that it hates and wishes to destroy the U.S., which it refers to as the “Great Satan” (Israel is the regime’s “Little Satan”). A nuclear-armed Iran would pose a mortal threat to all U.S. military forces in the Middle East and Africa. And Iranian terror forces in Latin America pose threats to the U.S. mainland.
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