When President Joe Biden meets leaders in the Middle East this week, he will face demands from both Israel and Arab states to take a tougher stance against Iran amid impatience with stalled nuclear negotiations with Tehran, former U.S. officials and current foreign officials say.
The Biden administration has spent more than a year trying to revive a 2015 deal aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but the negotiations between Tehran and world powers hit an impasse in March and recent attempts have failed to break the logjam.
During the president’s visit to the Middle East, Israel and other Arab governments are expected to press Biden to explain Washington’s strategy if the diplomatic effort collapses altogether, former U.S. officials said.
“Israel will want assurances about a ‘Plan B,’” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a former senior diplomat who helped shape U.S. policy in the Middle East.
The United States needs to outline “a coherent strategy” on how to deter Iran, regardless of whether the nuclear deal is salvaged, a senior Israeli official told reporters ahead of the trip.
Israel and Gulf Arab countries, once bitter adversaries, now increasingly share a common interest in countering Iran, citing Tehran’s nuclear program, its missile and drone arsenal, and its support for a network of armed militias from Lebanon to Yemen.
“There’s a broad consensus in the region about the Iranian threat to regional stability,” said the Israeli official, who was not authorized to speak on the record and spoke on condition of anonymity. “We are all impacted by Iranian proxies. … It’s a big concern for everybody and we all think that we should push back against them.”
Biden, who departs Wednesday on a four-day trip to Israel, the West Bank and Saudi Arabia, vowed in an op-ed published in The Washington Post over the weekend that he would ratchet up pressure on Iran until it agrees to restore the 2015 nuclear deal.
“My administration will continue to increase diplomatic and economic pressure until Iran is ready to return to compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, as I remain prepared to do,” Biden wrote.
The Treasury Department announced a new set of economic sanctions against Iran last week, targeting a network of companies based in China and the United Arab Emirates that allegedly helped Iran sell oil and petrochemical products in East Asia.
“I think they’re going to point to those sanctions as evidence that the administration is not solely focused on diplomacy and negotiations as the sole path to solving the Iranian challenge, and that they’re willing to take actions to pressure Iran as well,” said Eric Brewer, a former senior U.S. official now with the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a think tank.
The 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, known as the JCPOA, imposed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in return for the easing of economic sanctions. But then-President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in 2018, reimposed sanctions and added hundreds of additional sanctions against Tehran. Since the U.S. pulled out, Iran has increasingly operated outside the parameters of the deal, dramatically expanding its uranium enrichment and restricting access to the U.N. atomic watchdog agency.
Iran has stockpiled a significant amount of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and could create an atomic bomb in a matter of days if it chose to enrich the material to 90 percent, arms control experts say.
The IAEA said on Saturday that Iran is now using advanced centrifuges at an underground facility that allow it to more easily shift to higher uranium enrichment levels.
Biden will try to make the case that reviving the 2015 nuclear accord is still the best bet for curtailing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, even though the talks have bogged down in recent…
Read More: In Mideast trip, Biden to face calls for tougher action against Iran