US Deputy Special Envoy for Iran Richard Nephew and two other diplomats have quit the team negotiating the revival of the nuclear deal with Tehran after their pleas for Team Biden to take a harder line fell on deaf ears. It’s a terrible sign — not just on the Iran front, but for all American diplomacy.
Career diplomat Nephew was a top member of the team that negotiated the original 2015 deal, after playing a key role in designing sanctions imposed on Iran from 2006-13, which are what brought it to the negotiating table in the first place.
Now he and his colleagues are out, having pushed for stronger US responses after Tehran last month pulled back nearly all the concessions it had made in prior months. (The Iranians won’t even sit in the same room as the US team: Europeans have to carry messages back and forth.)
Nephew & Co. wanted existing sanctions enforced seriously, and for Washington to push the International Atomic Energy Agency to call out Tehran’s countless violations of its promises.
The point being: Make Iran pay a price for its bad faith, or it will drag out the talks forever, even as its nuclear-weapons program rushes forward.
Nephew, a strong backer of the 2015 deal, has said that tough sanctions were vital in getting the Iranians to negotiate seriously then, and clearly thought the same was still true.
No doubt, the Biden State Department is set to keep on talking until Tehran announces it’s gone nuclear — rather than risk annoying Iran’s leaders by actually playing tough. Biden is so unwilling to consider alternatives to the (ruinous) deal that he’s willing to ignore the fact that the Iranians are only playing for time.
In short: You cannot only expect this evil regime to go nuclear on Joe Biden’s watch, you can bet all America’s other enemies recognize that US diplomacy is toothless.
Instead of “peace through strength,” this administration has embraced weakness that’s all too likely to encourage war.