Biden declares Iran will never get a nuclear weapon ‘on my watch’

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Biden’s airstrikes send a clear message amid Iran deal talks — but are unlikely to derail them, analysts say

PUBLISHED MON, JUN 28 202112:16 PM EDTUPDATED MON, JUN 28 20211:42 PM EDT

Natasha Turak

@NATASHATURAK

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KEY POINTS

The airstrikes are the second round ordered by President Joe Biden against Iranian-backed militias since he began his term in office.

They took place against the backdrop of ongoing negotiations in Vienna between Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., to revive the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal.

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks after a roundtable discussion with advisors on steps to curtail U.S. gun violence, at the White House in Washington, June 23, 2021.

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks after a roundtable discussion with advisors on steps to curtail U.S. gun violence, at the White House in Washington, June 23, 2021.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

The U.S. launched airstrikes into parts of Iraq and Syria overnight, targeting Iranian-backed militias there in response to what the Biden administration says were drone attacks against American personnel in Iraq.  

The strikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities in two locations in Syria and one in Iraq, though it is not immediately clear if anyone was killed or injured. The strikes are the second round ordered by President Joe Biden against Iranian-backed militias since he began his term in office.

The strikes took place against the backdrop of ongoing negotiations in Vienna between Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., to revive the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal. Also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Obama administration-era deal lifted economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits to its nuclear program. 

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Returning to the JCPOA — which the Trump administration abandoned in 2018 — is a major foreign policy priority for the Biden White House. Could the new strikes derail the talks, or rather send a message that good faith attempts at diplomacy won’t preclude military action where the administration deems it necessary? 

No ‘carte blanche’ for Iran

For Sanam Vakil, an Iran expert and deputy head of the Middle East North Africa program at Chatham House, it’s the latter.

“The strikes send a clear message that regional issues with Iran will not be ignored at the expense of the Vienna JCPOA negotiations,” Vakil told CNBC on Monday. “This is also intended to reassure the U.S.’s regional partners that a U.S. reentry into the deal won’t result in a carte blanche to Iran.”

Presidential candidate Ebrahim Raisi gestures after casting his vote during presidential elections at a polling station in Tehran, Iran June 18, 2021.

Presidential candidate Ebrahim Raisi gestures after casting his vote during presidential elections at a polling station in Tehran, Iran June 18, 2021.

Majid Asgaripour | WANA News Agency | Reuters

Still, the current negotiations — where the U.S. and Iran are not talking directly, but rather via intermediaries — are expected to survive the recent military strikes. Aniseh Tabrizi, senior research fellow at London’s Royal United Services Institute, noted that Biden ordered airstrikes against Iranian-backed militia targets in Syria in February and talks still took place.

But Iran earlier this month elected a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-liner with a vocally anti-Western stance. While outgoing President Hassan Rouhani supported outreach to Western counterparts and even spoke on the phone with former President Barack Obama — the first such contact between leaders of the two countries in more than three decades — Raisi has flatly rejected any prospect of meeting with Biden.

With this in mind, Tabrizi doesn’t see the attacks from Iranian-backed militia in the region cooling down. 

“In fact, there is a chance they could even intensify,” she said.

‘Only countries making bombs’

Despite Raisi’s track record as a hard-liner, he has expressed support for rejoining the 2015 nuclear deal. Reentering the deal and having the crippling Trump-era sanctions lifted is essential to preventing Iran’s devastated economy from spiraling further, analysts say. 

“I doubt that the strikes would have any impact on the JCPOA talks,” Ali Vaez, Iran project director at Crisis Group, told CNBC on Monday. “The two sides seem to have managed to segregate their differences between those that could be settled diplomatically and those for which they seek a military solution.” 

“Both Iran and the U.S. have demonstrated that they’re capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time.”

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Still, with so many variables at play, there remains the very real risk that the talks could fail. Iran and the U.S. are at loggerheads over the issue of sanctions; Tehran has dramatically ramped up its uranium enrichment and stockpiling in violation of the deal since the U.S. began loading sanctions on the country, and says it will only reverse course once the sanctions are lifted. 

The Biden administration, meanwhile, is refusing to budge on sanctions until Iran walks back its nuclear deal breaches. Earlier in June, the chief of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency said that “only countries making bombs” are enriching uranium at Iran’s level. And on Sunday the speaker of Iran’s Parliament said that the country would “never” hand over images of the insides of its nuclear facilities to the U.N. nuclear watchdog, which was part of an agreement with the monitoring group, since that agreement had expired.

The latest missile volley from the U.S. then, Vaez warned, “suggests that if the diplomatic track in Vienna collapses, the tensions in the region are bound to go from bad to worse.”

Biden declares Iran will never get a nuclear weapon ‘on my watch’

The comments came in an Oval Office meeting with Israel’s outgoing president and after the U.S. launched airstrikes on Iranian-linked facilities.

President Joe Biden in the Oval Office. 

President Joe Biden meets with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin in the Oval Office June 28, 2021 in Washington, D.C. | Doug Mills/New York Times/Pool/Getty Images

By MARISSA MARTINEZ

06/28/2021 05:28 PM EDT

Updated: 06/28/2021 06:32 PM EDT

President Joe Biden on Monday declared that Iran would “never get a nuclear weapon on my watch,” after affirming an “iron-clad” relationship between the U.S. and Israel.

Biden’s comments, in an Oval Office meeting with Israel’s outgoing president, Reuven Rivlin, came after the U.S. launched airstrikes against Iranian-linked facilities on the Iraq-Syria border on Sunday evening. Biden said he launched the strikes under the authority of Article II of the Constitution. He also said the U.S. backed recent normalization deals between Israel and countries in the Middle East and Africa.

The Biden administration has recently struggled with negotiating the revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal following the election of that country’s new president, the ultraconservative Ebrahim Raisi. Then-President Donald Trump imposed sanctions on Raisi for his alleged role in human rights abuses, but Iranian officials have implied they need to be lifted if the nuclear deal is to be salvaged.

Should the deal be revived, the U.S. would lift a variety of sanctions and Iran would end many of its nuclear activities.

In 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal, one of the Obama administration’s significant foreign policy accomplishments. The deal took more than two years of negotiations to reach the version that seven countries signed on to in 2015.

Iran at first remained in the deal after the U.S. withdrawal, agreeing to maintain tightened nuclear powers for a decade in return for removing sanctions that wounded its economy. But after a Trump-ordered airstrike killed Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian military official, at Baghdad International Airport in January 2020, Iran essentially dropped its end altogether — though the country had begun distancing itself from the deal the summer before.

By November 2020, Iran had surpassed previous limits on low-enriched uranium, according to the United Nations nuclear watchdog.

Rivlin is the first high-ranking Israeli official to meet with Biden at the White House, and will meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders before he leaves office in early July. Biden said he planned to soon host the new Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who took office earlier this month.

The Israeli Parliament on June 13 narrowly approved a new coalition government in a 60-59 vote, ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after a historic 12 years of leadership. The vote marked the end of a two-year cycle in which the country held four elections, with votes focused on Netanyahu’s fitness to remain prime minister as he faced corruption charges. Netanyahu’s critics have cast him as a polarizing leader who deepened divides in Israeli society, including tensions between Jews and Arabs.

Bennett now oversees the new fragile coalition, a patchwork of eight parties — with deep-seated ideological divisions — that could crumble if any members decided to depart. Bennett's party holds just six seats out of 120 in Parliament.

Political centrist Yair Lapid, the main force behind the coalition, agreed with Bennett that he would rotate to take over as prime minister in two years — if the government still remains.

Biden was quick to congratulate the new government and said he looked forward to working with Bennett. He said the administration was committed to working with the new government to “advance security, stability, and peace for Israelis, Palestinians, and people throughout the broader region.”

Myah Ward contributed to this report.

US must guarantee it will not leave nuclear deal again, says Iran

Tehran’s insistence signals that issue is still a serious obstacle after three months of talks in Vienna

Iranian and EU officials attend the sixth round of talks in Vienna

Iranian and EU officials attend the sixth round of talks in Vienna. The date for a seventh round has not been set. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor

Wed 30 Jun 2021 20.09 BST

A US guarantee that it will never unilaterally leave the Iran nuclear deal again is vital to a successful conclusion of talks in Vienna on the terms of Washington’s return to the agreement, the Iranian ambassador to the UN, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, has said.

His comments are the clearest official signal yet that disagreements between the US and Iran on how such a guarantee might be constructed remain a serious obstacle. Donald Trump took the US out of the nuclear deal in 2018, only three years afterhis predecessor, Barack Obama, had signed it.

Takht-Ravanchi said that unless some US guarantee of stability was provided, European and other investors would not have the confidence to invest in the Iranian economy.

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US diplomats have said such a legally enforceable guarantee cannot be negotiated if only because one US administration cannot bind another or Congress to it. Nor could Washington be left reliant on UN approval to leave the deal if it believed Tehran was flouting its terms because that would in effect make US policy subject to a Russian veto at the UN security council, they said.

The Vienna talks have lasted three months and six rounds and three months so far. Most details have been agreed, but no date has been set for a seventh round as Iran prepares for its new hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, to take office and possibly appoint a new foreign minister more hostile to the US than the incumbent Mohammad Javad Zarif.

It is now likely the talks will not recommence until Iran is satisfied that it has the guarantees it requires or compromises on its demand. Ali Bagheri Kani, a hardliner, is tipped to be in charge of the transition in the foreign ministry.

Speaking at a UN security council meeting, the French envoy to the UN, Nicolas De Rivière, said Iran had come closer than ever to a nuclear threshold during the three months of talks, and that the negotiations could not be allowed to drag on indefinitely.

“The parameters and the benefits of a return to the agreement will not be the same after a certain period of time,” he said.

He pointed to Iranian “research and development on the production of uranium metal; the enrichment of uranium first at 20% since the beginning of the year and then at a rate of 60%, without there being any civilian need in Iran for such enrichment rates; accumulation of advanced centrifuges in enrichment facilities, etc. As a result, Iran today has never been so close to a threshold capacity”.

The EU is coordinating the Vienna talks, and its ambassador to the UN, Olof Skoog, told the security council the EU was encouraged that the US had “expressed readiness” to lift sanctions tied to the nuclear deal, something advocated by the UN secretary general, António Guterres.

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But Skoog said: “It is clear that time is not on our side and that what might be possible still today may prove impossible in the near future. We have a limited diplomatic window ahead of us that we should not miss.”

In a further complication, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Iran said he backed an investigation of Raisi’s involvement in the mass killing of Iranian prisoners in 1988.

Javaid Rehman told Reuters on Monday that his office was willing to share testimonies and evidence collected on the Iranian executions with the UN human rights council or any other investigative body.

“I think it is time and it’s very important now that Mr Raisi is the president that we start investigating what happened in 1988 and the role of individuals,” he said.

Writing in the Guardian, the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said: “The families of the victims, as well as the world, have a right to know exactly what Raisi did during this gruesome episode. Diplomatic immunity can be no excuse in redoubling efforts to bring those responsible to justice.”

Robertson was asked in 2010 to conduct an independent investigation into the killing of the prisoners, regarded as terrorists and traitors by Tehran.