Israel, Ukraine, and the Malley-Biden Appeasement of Iran

Yedidiya Julian Sinclair asks if, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden may have second thoughts about the appeasement of Iran by his chief negotiator in Vienna, Robert Malley. His article is here: “Is Joe Biden really going to do this?,” Times of Israel, March 4, 2022:

Russia is intensifying its deliberate massacre of innocent Ukrainians. Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of State accused Russia on Thursday of killing “hundreds if not thousands of civilians,” and targeting buildings of no conceivable military value.

The Russians have shelled without mercy civilians In the cities they now hold –Mariupol, Kherson, Kharkiv; they are now laying siege to Odessa, Ukraine’s third largest city, and to the capital, Kyiv. The Russians are battering, or rather sledge=hammring, these cities into surrender.

The West has mobilized economic sanctions, arms transfers, and humanitarian aid beyond all expectations. Yet despite Ukraine’s urgent pleas, they have recoiled from direct military involvement that could slow the slaughter, for one good reason: Western armed intervention against Russia could spark a nuclear conflagration.

All that aid – especially the weaponry – has suddenly been arriving only after the Russians crossed into Ukraine on February 24, instead of when it might have been most useful, at the beginning of December. Biden dithered for so long, instead of delivering the kind of weapons that might have led Putin to reconsider his invasion or, if he had gone ahead, the already well-armed Ukrainians, with Javelin anti-tank missiles, mines, drones, and Stinger surface-to-air missiles, could have stopped his troops in their tracks.

Now is the time for a full recounting of the two decades of appeasement, supine inaction against Russian aggression in Georgia, Syria, and the Crimea, and Western economic coddling of Putin and the Russian elites, that brought the world to this awful point. Yet the outlines of the sorry story are well known.

There has been a long history of Western appeasement of Putin. Nothing was done when he engineered the breakaways of Abkhazia and North Ossetia from Georgia, setting up two “republics” subservient to Moscow. Nor did the West do anything when Putin seized the Crimea. Instead of economic sanctions, the West eagerly bought oil and gas and wheat from Russia; the Nordstream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany continued to be built. And the West allowed Putin’s oligarchs to buy properties in London, Paris, New York, to park their private planes In Western airports, and to keep their immense yachts In Western marinas.

You would hope then, that Mr. Blinken and the president he serves would think hard before empowering another rogue regime devoid of any moral restraints with international legitimacy, lots of money, and nuclear weapons.

That other “rogue regime” is that which rules Iran, with whom we are negotiating the terms of a revived 2015 nuclear deal. All reports suggest that the chief American negotiator, Robert Malley, is prepared to capitulate to Iranian demands; three of the most experienced State Department negotiators In Vienna have resigned In protest at Malley’s concessions. 

“A disturbing Twitter thread published last night by former State Department official Gabriel Noronha, suggests otherwise (h/t Melanie Phillips). Mr. Noronha,  begins as follows (he numbered his tweets in the long thread):

1. My former career @StateDept, NSC, and EU colleagues are so concerned with the concessions being made by @RobMalley in Vienna that they’ve allowed me to publish some details of the coming deal in the hopes that Congress will act to stop the capitulation.

2. “What’s happening in Vienna is a total disaster” one warned. The entire negotiations have been filtered and “essentially run” by Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov. The concessions and other misguided policies have led three members of the U.S. negotiating team to leave.

“The rest of the thread details some of the astounding concessions in the agreement, which, Noronha’s sources say, may be finalized as soon as Monday. [March 7] These include the lifting of sanctions against virtually all Iranian bodies, including the Revolutionary Guards, who foment murder and mayhem across the Middle East, the immediate unfreezing of $7 billion of Iranian assets in South Korea, to be rapidly followed by $90 billion in foreign exchange reserves. For all these concessions, Noronha continues in his Twitter thread, with enumerated paragraphs,and writes:’

32. …we haven’t gotten anything at all from the Iranians. The JCPOA’s sunsets have not been extended at all. Some restrictions, like the UN arms embargo, have already expired. All the meaningful restrictions will expire in the next 9 years.

The “sunset clauses” automatically lift more restrictions on Iran from 2022 to 2025; In 2031 all remaining restrictions end, and Iran will then be completely free to build nuclear weapons.

33. Iran won’t make any concessions on its ballistic missile activity, its terrorist activity and support for proxy groups, or taking further hostages from the United States and other countries. But it will get money anyways – lots and lots of money.”

Biden and Blinken kept promising for many months that they would “lengthen” and “strength” the original Iran nuclear deal. But they haven’t done either. There iis nothing that has been “strengthened” in the new agreement, clauses that would limit Iran’s work on ballistic missiles; there is nothing, either, about curbing Iran’s regional aggressions, through its network of proxies and allies, including the Houthis In Yemen, the Kata’ib Hezbollah In Iraq, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And the agreement will not be “lengthened” either; the sunset clauses will ensure the removal of more limits on Iran’s nuclear program; in 2031, Iran will be completely free to pursue its nuclear program

More tweets in the thread have Norona warning:

39. The Biden administration is claiming that they are going back to the JCPOA [the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran] and therefore do not need to submit the deal to Congress under the 2015 INARA law. That’s not true — this deal is not the JCPOA. It is much, much worse.

The Biden administration is trying to claim that the latest agreement is almost identical to the JCPOA of 2015, that Congress approved at the time, and therefore there is no need to seek Congressional approval for the 2022 agreement. But it is not “almost identical” to the 2015 agreement; this 2022 version is a very different agreement, one that is “much, much worse” than the earlier version, and so it requires congressional approval, The Bidenites fear that Malley’s handiwork won’t be approved by Congress. Let’s hope that those fears are justified.

40. The degree of capitulation happening here is staggering —especially for people like me who worked in the technical trenches of this stuff for years. That’s why these non-partisan career staffers are coming out of the woodwork and desperately asking for oversight from Congress.

The professional staffers, not being political appointees and therefore loyal to Biden, are appalled at what Robert Malley has agreed to In Vienna, They have “come out of the woodwork” by publicly resigning to express their horror, or have published articles deeply critical of Malley. Their intended audience is Congress, which they hope will refuse to approve the new deal with Iran.

If this is correct, (and I have not seen it disputed,) Iran, which has spread murder and mayhem across the Middle East for decades and mobilized its Revolutionary Guards to help Assad slaughter half a million Syrians, is about to be empowered with tens of billions of dollars, international legitimacy and the removal of obstacles to making nuclear weapons.

The Iran deal of 2022 includes the removal of all economic sanctions by America; Iranian assets worth tens of billions of dollars will be unfrozen, while Iran will also be able to sell hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil and gas each year. It will naturally use that money on its nuclear program, on the IRGC campaigns in Syria and Iraq, and on the terror groups Iran supports — the Houthis of Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza.

With the world transfixed by Ukraine, will Congress or anyone else raise an outcry? Yet precisely now, the Ukraine disaster should be a graphic, real-time warning to the world of what an Iran empowered with huge sums of money and a nuclear umbrella would do to its neighbors.

Iran’s leaders are allies of Putin and deeply solicitous of his desires. They have watched his invasion unfold, watched the Bidenites’ dithering for two months until the Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine, and have taken note of how unwilling Biden has bee to be directly involved in halting the invasion.

It is hard to look beyond the horror of Ukraine. But how can one not speak up when the next geopolitical catastrophe is, God forbid, emerging in plain sight?

Putin managed to break off Abkhazia and North Ossetia from Georgia without eliciting a response from a supine West. He then seized Crimea, again without any consequences. This failure to respond to his previous aggressions led Putin to believe he could do the same with part, or all, of Ukraine – conquer it within a few days, install a puppet government, and the world would accept this fait accompli. He was right that the Bidenites would dither before sending weapons; they dithered in fact for two months, when the weapons from the West, had they been delivered just as soon as the Russian tanks appeared on Ukraine’s western border, might have prevented the Russians from getting deep within Ukraine.

Now the weapons are flowing in; Ukraine has a charismatic leader, and its people have shown a ferocious determination to protect their country. The Ukrainians are two weeks into a war that Putin thought would be over in 2-3 days, they are still fighting everywhere with regular soldiers and an army of Ukrainian civilians; nearly two weeks into the war, they have still managed to keep the Russians from entering the capital city, Kyiv. But the Ukrainians , with Western weapons, will have to fight o their own. The West will not enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, despite the imploring of Volodymyr Zelensky. It has at last agreed, however, to have the Poles transfer their own Migs to Ukrainian pilots, who are familiar with those planes; those pilots will do their best to deny Russian planes control of the skies over Ukraine..

The lesson for Israel is this: whatever powerful allies may promise, in the end you cannot entrust your own security to anyone else. This was not something new, but the Ukraine example reinforced that experience. The peace-keeping troops in the Sinai were withdrawn by U Thant in May 1967, when Nasser demanded their removal. At the same time, the written guarantees by the U.S., the U.K., and France, l that they would keep the Straits of Tiran open to all, including Israeli, shipping, could not be found. Israel was left to fend for itself In the Six-Day War. It was virtually the same during the Yom Kippur War, when only after Israel had been bloodied and faced possible defeat did the Americans rush over weapons and ammunition that Israel desperately needed. That delay by the Americans resulted in high casualties for the Jewish state, and almost cost Israel its victory.

When Ukraine gave up all of its nuclear weapons, it was given promises in writing by the major powers that it would be protected by the signatories, among whom was the United States. It did not turn out that way. Recent deliveries of weapons have been a great help to Ukraine, but they started to arrive two months later than they should have. And these weapons are not a substitute for American planes enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, or for American boots on the ground to secure the western Ukraine as a protected space where Ukrainians could be free from Russian attack. Israel should assume that, like Ukraine with Russia, against its mortal enemy, Iran, it will have to fight alone.