Unexpected Turn in Iran Talks: A UN Inspector Takes Hard Line, Biden Sees Eye-to-Eye With Russia

President Biden’s negotiations with Iran over a deal on the A-bomb are taking an unexpected turn. It’s emerging that, despite a raft of sanctions, Russia stands to make a mint off of a renewed Iran deal. The one voice of skepticism turns out to be the international body whose job is to verify Tehran’s nuclear compliance. Following a classified hearing in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Republicans opposing renewal of President Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action from 2015 are warning that Russia is set to make billions of dollars from a carve out in sanctions, which would allow it to do business with Iran.The renewed deal, according to the Washington Free Beacon, would include a sanctions waiver to a Russian energy firm, Rosatom. The state-controlled company’s $10 billion contract to construct a new wing of Iran’s nuclear plant at Bushehr was stopped after America weighed imposing sanctions on Rosatom, along with Russian companies, in the aftermath of its Ukraine invasion.The new deal, once completed, would allow Rosatom to complete the Bushehr 2 project, and reap the profits. Russia “has launched an aggressive war and will steal Ukraine’s electricity,” says the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, David Albright.Rosatom, he tells The New York Sun, is the same company that will assume ownership of Ukraine’s energy-producing nuclear plants that the Russian military seized early in the war. “Biden is managing to pull off an incredible feat: Help Iran go nuclear and help Russia get rich helping them do it,” Rep. Darrel Issa is quoted by the Free Beacon as saying. Meanwhile, as America bends over backward to accommodate Tehran, a coalition of Iranian neighbors is frantically making its disapproval known. Meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh, President al-Sisi of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates’ crown prince, Mohamed bin Zayed, and Prime Minister Bennett of Israel discussed strategies to deal with an Iran agreement.All, as well as Saudi Arabia, have made their opposition known to the public. Perhaps more substantially, another party increasingly questions the fundamentals of the Iran deal. Notably, that group, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, will be charged with verifying compliance with the deal once it’s completed. “It is hard to imagine that anyone can reach a comprehensive agreement like the current JCPOA when talks with the IAEA … are deadlocked,” the agency’s director, Rafael Grossi, told the Tel Aviv-based Israel Hayom newspaper this week. This “is a new standard” for the IAEA, says Mr. Albright. In reports and public appearances Mr. Grossi is challenging the agency’s board members: “How can you have a nuclear deal in which Iran is non-transparent?” asks Mr. Albright. Citing Iranian interference with IAEA inspections last fall, Mr. Grossi publicly called on the agency’s board of directors to censure Iran. Yet America, France, Britain, and other board members blocked the censure drive.The agency’s board is in effect Mr. Grossi’s boss, but he bypasses them in public appearances where he raises access denial of inspection on Iran’s undeclared nuclear facilities. Many of the undeclared aspects of the nuclear program were exposed by Israel, whose spies secreted a trove of documents from a hidden nuclear archive at Tehran.Mr. Grossi now demands transparency on all parts of Iran’s undeclared sites, making his stance far tougher than President Biden’s or those of America’s allies, who are eager to renew the nuclear deal. Yet, it wasn’t always so. When Mr. Grossi, an Argentine, took the helm at the agency in December 2019, the IAEA’s approach to inspection was highly politicized. His predecessor, Yukiya Amano of Japan, edited inspection reports to accommodate diplomacy and appease Iran, and often took at face value Tehran’s assertion that it doesn’t possess a military nuclear program. Can such denials be trusted? Can America hope for Iran compliance with any deal? This week Tehran reneged on a deal to free a British-American dual citizen, Morad Tahbaz. His release from jail was included in last week’s deal that sent two other British-Iranian hostages back to Britain in return for a $550 million ransom payment. As soon as the two hostages landed safely in London, Mr. Tahbaz, who remained in Iran, was rearrested. When the original JCPOA was enacted, the Obama administration promised history’s “most robust inspection program.” When President Trump walked out of the deal in 2018, the IAEA’s Mr. Amano said, “We have the strongest verification regime in Iran.”Mr. Grossi currently is much less willing to buy Iran’s arguments than Mr. Amano was. He’s also more skeptical of Iran than the six powers that are eager to renew the deal. Within the IAEA in the past, Russia was the most vocal Iran advocate but now, says Mr. Albright, “I’m hoping the Russians’ screaming will be less effective” than it was before the Ukraine war. Yet, America’s reported cave — allowing a company active in stealing Ukrainian assets to profit from an Iranian deal — puts the Biden administration in a tight spot, for in its eagerness to renew the JCPOA, Washington finds itself seeing eye to eye with Moscow.

Unexpected Turn in Iran Talks: A UN Inspector Takes Hard Line, Biden Sees Eye-to-Eye With Russia

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