Biden Administration’s Actions Undermine Its Tough Talk On Iran

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he promised to change America’s policy towards Iran by pushing to re-enter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreed under President Barack Obama. However, the JCPOA deal would have made the Iranian nuclear threat worse, and Biden’s efforts to lure Iran back into negotiations failed.

In October 2022, the Biden administration decided to castigate Iran for its recent actions, including its supply of entities for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine and brutal crackdown on anti-government protests, and declared that the Iran nuclear deal was “dead.”

But the administration’s tone quickly changed, and trial balloons were floated over renewing diplomacy with Iran, even though the JCPOA was dead in the water. This conciliatory approach has continued, despite Iran’s enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade status, which Europe is more aggressive than the US in censuring.

Additionally, the recent diplomatic agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia brokered by China dealt a huge blow to US interests in the region. It seems that the Biden administration has failed to understand the stakes and has fallen flat on Iran policy, which can be disastrous for national security and American interests in a time of increasing insecurity and instability across the world, with