Daily Alert Archives

On Iran, the Americans Are Not Going to Work with Israel Seriously on a Plan B

(JINSA) Ambassador Ron Dermer interviewed by Dr. Michael Makovsky - The Biden administration from the beginning was committed to going back into the nuclear deal. They started by saying they were going to get a "long and stronger" deal - which was absurd. The core Biden administration policy is the same as the Obama administration policy, which is to contain a nuclear Iran. It is not to prevent a nuclear Iran. Once you understand that, their refusal to walk away from the table makes sense. They will never fully walk away from the table because from their point of view, the alternative to almost any nuclear deal is worse than the deal itself, because they see the alternative is military action. I don't think that's the only alternative to walking away from the deal, but the goal for them is to avoid a military confrontation at all costs. If you ask the senior people in the Biden administration which of these two scenarios is worse - a military confrontation with Iran or a nuclear-armed Iran - they will actually say a military confrontation is worse. Their logic is that a military confrontation will only set the nuclear program back two or three years and then Iran will reconstitute its nuclear program and get a nuclear weapon anyway. So the best we can do, according to their logic, is to delay it for a few years, but that's better than a military confrontation with Iran. That's how they've always seen this problem. You hear Israeli policymakers say, "We need to speak to the U.S. administration about different Plan B scenarios." The Israelis don't seem to understand that there is no Plan B - because they are opposed to any kind of military confrontation. So they're not going to work with Israel seriously on contingency planning, other than to put handcuffs on Israel doing military operations. If there would be a deal that would actually eliminate Iran's military nuclear capability and at the same time would remove all the sanctions against Iran, Israel would accept that deal because it would have solved the one problem that it was designed to solve - to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. This deal doesn't solve that problem. It at best delays it for a few years and in the meantime makes everything worse and gives them a kosher stamp for a nuclear arsenal.
2022-08-29 00:00:00
Full Article