As world powers gather in Vienna to revive the old Iran deal, one party is pacing nervously in the room where it isn’t happening — America. And yes, we’re increasingly irrelevant in Iran diplomacy.

Iran refuses to negotiate directly with the Big Satan. So American diplomats are forced to rely on interlocutors from the other parties to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The envoys of France, Britain, and Germany relay messages back and forth between representatives of Supreme Leader Khamenei and diplomats representing President Biden.

Has a superpower ever sunk so low?

The fact that those intermediaries, and even more so the other two powers, Russia and China, are all too eager to ally with Tehran means America loses leverage. Then again, too, losing leverage has been the hallmark of Mr. Biden’s approach to Iran from the start.

Apologists blame Iran’s current nuclear breakthroughs on President Trump’s preference for “maximum pressure” over diplomacy. If America can walk out on the deal, they say, so can Iran. In reality, Iran’s most significant nuclear leap started after Mr. Biden’s 2020 election win.

As election results poured in on November 3, 2020, the Iranian Parliament approved a provisional bill to begin enriching up to 20% uranium-235, and on New Year’s Day 2021, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, announced the start of that level of enrichment. A few days later, Iran installed thousands of new IR-2m centrifuges to significantly boost enriched uranium output.

By April Iran notifies the International Atomic Energy Agency that it has begun to boost enrichment levels to 60% uranium-235 using IR-6 centrifuges, placing it closer than ever to bomb-level.

True, Tehran started violating its obligations under the JCPOA soon after the deal was approved by the UN Security Council. With a new administration in Washington, though, the mullahs felt the time was ripe for a leapfrog in its nuclear program.

“Iran understood early on that the Biden administration was not comfortable with pressure when it routinely, both during the campaign and when in office, called maximum pressure a failure,” says Behnam Ben Taleblu, Iran watcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

As Tehran kept upping the ante, American demands melted. Secretary of State Blinken vowed at his Senate confirmation hearing to negotiate a “longer and stronger” deal, adding items omitted from the original JCPOA. Those would include tougher nuclear inspections, a ban on ballistic missiles, curbing Iran’s regional aggression, and even addressing horrid human rights violations inside Iran.

By the time the new Tehran government finally agreed to renew today’s Vienna talks, such demands were long gone. Instead, America was quietly pitching a temporary, nuclear-only deal, which is shorter and weaker than the JCPOA.

By then Iran deepened its presence in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. Its proxies attacked American military camps in Iraq. The ballistic missile program advances unabated.

Over the weekend the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, returned from Tehran after failing to renew agreements over effective nuclear inspections.

Remember how Mr. Biden vowed to center his foreign policy on human rights? Today his envoys rushed to Vienna a few days after the bloody Isfahan clashes. There, regime enforcers shot live ammunition at demonstrators, killing at least 15 people and injuring many more.

The violence erupted due to an acute water shortage, but other anti-regime slogans were also prominent. Isfahan, notably, neighbors the nuclear facility at Natanz and houses many of the country’s military industries.

The fact that the latest anti-government protest erupted at this previously regime-supporting region demonstrates the depth of dissatisfaction with Tehran across the country.

None of that, however, figures in the Vienna talks. According to Iran’s hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, Tehran isn’t there to talk about the a-bomb either, only about removal of sanctions.

American officials mutter that “all options” are on the table, but no one believes Mr. Biden would act militarily. For now Washington maintains that Iran needs to give something in return to further removal of American sanctions.

Yet, the most significant American sanction, a ban on Iranian petroleum sales, is now openly violated by Communist China, which already buys all the oil Iran can pump.

Plus, too, remember, China is at the table in Vienna, while America sits in a separate room, waiting to hear what happened, and leads from behind the negotiating powers.

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Twitter @bennyavni