Cohen, who knows full well Biden is about to give Tel Aviv veto power over his Iran policy, will prevail. We are now in for a textbook case of the diplomacy of no diplomacy.
Tehran asks the Biden administration to lift the punishing sanctions Trump imposed after he pulled the U.S. out of the accord as its only condition prior to reopen talks. A goodwill gesture of this kind is hardly an extravagant request under the circumstances. But Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have made it abundantly clear that the U.S. will take this step only after Iran returns to full compliance with the agreement's limitations.
Translation: Act on our demands before we open negotiations on our demands. The U.S. position, in other words, is intended as an offer Iran cannot possibly accept.
Blinken, it is to be noted, has begun to change his story since his Senate confirmation hearings the day before Biden's inauguration. "The time it would take Iran to produce enough fissile material for one weapon," he advised the assembled senators, "has gone from beyond a year, as it was under the JCPOA, to about three or four months, based at least on public reporting." In an interview with NBC News on Jan. 31, he said this timeframe could shrink to "a matter of weeks" if Iran continues low-grade enrichment at its current pace.
In my surmise, Blinken is sharpening his rhetoric in anticipation of the Yossi Cohen talks, now a matter of a week or two away. The heightened sense of alarm will then justify accepting what are certain to be the very stringent demands Israel imposes on the Biden administration. Lost in all that Blinken now articulates, of course, is Iran's longstanding declaration, verified by a National Intelligence Estimate during the Bush II years, that it has no program or plans to develop nuclear weapons.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister and for my money one of the two ablest diplomats now active (the other is Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister), is nothing if not inventive. Let us act simultaneously, he proposed last week: Iran will return to compliance while the U.S. lifts sanctions.
The European Union, in the person of Josep Borrell, its de facto foreign minister, can "choreograph the actions," Al Jazeera quoted Zarif as saying. "There can be a mechanism to basically either synchronize it or coordinate what can be done."
What's not to like? You may wonder. You will have to ask Biden's foreign policy people, because they declined the offer.
"If Iran comes back into full compliance with its obligations under the JCPOA, the United States would do the same," the State Department's spokesman, Ned Price, responded the next day, "and then we would use that as a platform to build a longer and a stronger agreement that also addresses other areas of concern."
What a third-rate hack. This is nothing more than the arrogant, impudent boilerplate of dullards with too much power: Blinken has been using these same phrases verbatim for months. It is another way of saying the U.S. has no intention of altering its position even when presented with a mutually satisfactory way through a diplomatic impasse.
There is nothing new in this. It is North Korea redux, to take one of numerous cases: Washington has engaged in the diplomacy of no diplomacy with Pyongyang for much of the past seven decades, offering it one "deal" after another intended to precipitate the North's rejection.
Indeed, in his confirmation hearings before the Senate a few weeks ago, Blinken made it plain this is precisely how he proposes to address the North Korea question: Use sanctions and the threat of force to confront the North with offers they cannot accept, then cast them as intractable.
This nonsense will not endure indefinitely as our new century unfolds.
In the Iran case, the clock now ticks. In apparent response to Washington's rejection of Zarif's proposal, on Sunday Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei described Tehran's final position thus:
"If they want Iran to return to its commitments " America must completely lift sanctions, and not just in words or on paper. They must be lifted in action, and then we will verify and see if they have been properly lifted, and then return."
The Agence France-Presse report, quoting this televised speech, implied that Iran, in observance of a law passed in the majlis last December, will expel all IAEA nuclear inspectors on Feb. 21 if the U.S. does not meet its demands.
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