When Iran agreed to a deal in 2015 that would have required it to hand over 97 percent of the uranium it could use to make nuclear bombs, Russia and China worked with the United States and Europe to get the deal done .
The Russians even took Iran’s nuclear fuel, for a hefty fee, prompting celebrations that President Vladimir Putin could cooperate with the West on critical security issues and help contain a subversive regime in a volatile region.
A lot has changed in the next nine years. China and Russia are now more aligned with Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” in an order led by America, along with North Korea. When President Biden gathered the leaders of six nations for a video call from the White House on Sunday to outline a joint strategy for de-escalating the crisis between Israel and Iran, there was no way anyone from Beijing or Moscow would appear on the screen.
The disappearance of that united front is one of many factors that make this moment seem “particularly dangerous,” said Vali Nasr, an Iranian-born professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, “perhaps the most dangerous in decades.”
But it’s not the only thing.
The decision of President Donald J. Trump’s withdrawal from the Obama-era nuclear deal triggered a predictable backlash from Tehran, and after a long pause, Iran resumed enriching uranium — some to near-bomb grade. It is much closer to making a bomb today than it was when the deal was in place.
Tehran has moved forward with its ballistic missile program, and several months before some of those weapons were fired at Israel this weekend, all remaining United Nations bans expired. Not only has Iran emerged as Russia’s most reliable foreign supplier of military drones, it has also improved its own drone fleet by learning from their use in the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
President Barack Obama’s pursuit of the 2015 nuclear deal was characterized by many Republicans as dangerously irresponsible at the time. Even some Democrats, while supportive of the deal’s details, worried that Mr. Obama was naive to hope it would bring about fundamental changes in Tehran.
With the latest escalation in tensions between Iran and Israel, Mr. Biden’s political opponents are now accusing the administration of not taking a harder line in recent years against Iran. They say this has left Israel in particular danger at a time when it is embroiled in a war against an Iranian client group, Hamas, in Gaza.
“The White House signaled both oblivion and weakness by failing to recognize that today’s conflict in the Middle East is not Palestinians or Arabs against Israel, but an Iranian war against the ‘little Satan,'” John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser and was a staunch opponent of the Iran deal, he wrote on Sunday.
“The sad truth is that the Israeli and US deterrence against Iran has failed,” he said. He went on to urge — as he and a small group of Iran hawks have done in the past — that the Israelis seize the moment to “destroy Iran’s air defenses” and perhaps turn to the Quds Force, Iran’s most elite units. In other words, take an escalation path just the opposite of what Mr. Biden is urging.
Even among experts most supportive of Mr. Biden’s diplomacy in the region, many worry that there are now few levers to influence Iran, especially if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should Israel respond to the attack with a more measured retaliatory strike than it of Mr. Bolton urges.
“It looks like we’re heading for an eventual Israel-Iran confrontation,” Mr. Nasr said.
“Iran and Israel are now the main protagonists in the Middle East,” he added. “They see each other as the most serious threats to their national security. There are no red lines or rules to limit their competition. The shadow war is now open and without some rules, they are on an escalating course.”
This was not the world Mr. Biden had hoped for as he laid out a strategy for his administration focused on containing Russia’s unrest in Ukraine and beyond, and on fierce competition with China. And in the first three years of Mr. Biden’s presidency, the Middle East seemed relatively calm until the October 7 Hamas terror attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, overturned his priorities and plunged the White House back into a familiar cauldron.
While Mr. Biden used intermediaries to assure that Iran’s retaliation over the weekend did not get out of hand — and Iran appeared intent on keeping indirect lines open — there is no direct communication between Washington and Tehran, a major shift even a decade ago. During the Iran negotiations, Secretary of State John F. Kerry spoke regularly, and directly, with his Iranian rival, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who had attended college and graduate school in the United States before the Iranian revolution.
As they haggled over the number of centrifuges Iran could build, they also defused potential crises. When a small US Navy ship accidentally crossed into Iranian waters and its crew was seized, calls between the two men freed them within hours, averting another hostage crisis.
But that era is over. When the Biden administration came in and tried in the first 18 months to revive some part of the 2015 agreement, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said there would be no direct talks with the administration. Notes and offers were passed by European interlocutors. The two sides appeared to be on the verge of a deal in the summer of 2022. Iranian negotiators took it back to Tehran, where new demands were added and the whole process collapsed.
Now the fear of a general escalation has a new, lurking nuclear dimension.
The Iranians, from all available evidence, did not race for a bomb. Their progress in uranium enrichment has been steady and deliberate. But as part of the pressure campaign on the West, they have largely blindsided inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog.
Inspectors have been barred from certain premises. Some inspectors, from countries deemed hostile by the Iranians, were denied entry. Surveillance cameras at some critical points have been removed. Questions about past activity at specific military locations have gone unanswered.
“The result is that I cannot offer assurances” that nuclear material has not been diverted to other facilities or weapons programs, Rafael M. Grossi, the Argentine diplomat who serves as director general of the United Nations agency, said in an interview before since the outbreak. of the missile barrage over the weekend.
Nuclear experts say one of their biggest concerns today is that Iran has every incentive to push ahead with its nuclear program, both to taunt the West and to build what it has always called a “deterrent” against Israel. of the undeclared nuclear weapons state in the region.
“That’s my concern — they have every incentive to accelerate,” James R. Clapper Jr., director of national intelligence under Mr. Obama, said on Sunday.
Other experts note that Israel’s success — with U.S. help — in shooting down nearly all of the drones and ballistic missiles fired by Iran on Saturday night could well lead Iranian military officials to conclude that more powerful weapons are needed. , stationed closer to Israeli territory. And they may conclude that their next logical step is to move—overtly or covertly—toward a nuclear weapon.
For now, Mr. Biden is doing his best to persuade Mr. Netanyahu, with whom he has a fraught relationship, to “take the win,” as he told him on Saturday night, and not retaliate.
For their part, the Iranians have signaled that in their minds, the incident is over. They have avenged the deaths in an Israeli attack of seven commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But “the end” could simply refer to the end of the missile barrage, not other forms of escalation.
The best-case scenario would be for Iran to recognize the danger as well, as it did on Saturday when it carefully telegraphed its intentions, making it much easier for Israeli, American and nearby Arab forces to intercept incoming drones and missiles. This was a sign that Iran wanted to say something, but may not be ready to go to the brink of war.
