Michael Totten: ‘The Iranian Nuclear Deal Keeps Getting Worse:’
‘Deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes acknowledges that Iran’s ballistic missile tests violate Security Council Resolution 2231, but not the JCPOA struck between the United States and Iran. “Iran has complied with the JCPOA,” he said at the Nuclear Security Summit when a reporter asked him if the ballistic missile tests violate the agreement.
So the United Nations now takes a harder line on Iran than the United States does.’
Comments are a little personal, but worth a read.
‘While the administration says it remains vehemently opposed to Iran’s missile tests and destabilizing activities throughout the Middle East, it insists the nuclear deal has made Iran less of a threat. The cost of walking away from the deal, U.S. officials maintain, will be even more destabilization and a graver threat.’
Well, administration officials would say that. Full text of the negotiations here.
Dan Drezner back on January 5th:
It is still likely that the Iran deal will continue to be implemented. But it also seems increasingly likely that the negative externalities of negotiating the deal are rendering it far less significant in advancing the oxymoron that is “Middle East stability.”
Walter Russell Mead here:
‘…It was a mistake to separate the nuclear negotiations from Iran’s regional policy. In some ways the chief destabilizing element in the Middle East is the rise of Iran and the fear this is causing among the Sunni Arab powers…especially now in alliance with Russia…’
…there needs to be a clear barrier to Russian and Iranian expansion in the Middle-East.’
As previously posted:
‘Aquarius Theory‘
The stakes are high, and the video below low, but I’ve been constantly criticized for suspecting there’s a lot less strategic realism and a lot more Western peace-idealism going on here than acknowledged.
The moon is in the 7th house…:
Previously on this site:
Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft here, long before any dealing:
A good background and synopsis of American/Iranian diplomacy, and of the Iranian regime’s likely aims to become a Shia-led, anti-American/Western Islamist Republic dominating the Middle-East with deliverable nukes:
‘Some adjustments are inherent in the inevitable process of historic evolution. But we must avoid an outcome in which Iran, freed from an onerous sanctions regime, emerges as a de facto nuclear power leading an Islamist camp, while traditional allies lose confidence in the credibility of American commitments and follow the Iranian model toward a nuclear-weapons capability, if only to balance it.
Future generations’ prospects and American blood is still on the line.