Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 9 July 2023. © Richard Kemp
Iran is pretty much a nuclear threshold state, having enriched enough uranium to build multiple nuclear bombs within a few weeks while hard at work weaponising them in a timeframe that is so far unknown but probably under a year.
Much of this came to pass during Joe Biden’s presidency. When President Donald Trump pulled out of President Barack Obama’s flawed JCPOA nuclear deal, Iran’s uranium enrichment was under 5% and Trump kept it there with his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign of sanctions. The ayatollahs were also running scared of Trump and didn’t want to tempt him to kinetic action, a fear reinforced by his targeted killing of the international terrorist and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
When Biden entered the White House a year later, he wanted nothing more than to resurrect the JCPOA, as part of his obsessive undoing of everything Trump had done — except leaving Afghanistan — along with a determination by him and his Obama-inherited staff to restore their former boss’s legacy. Added to which, Biden decided to slavishly return to Obama’s wrongheaded strategy of rebalancing power in the Middle East by giving Iran the upper hand. So he eased off on sanctions and made it blatantly obvious he would do almost anything for a deal.
The consequence has been uranium enrichment from 5% to 60%, and with some material up to 84%, according to IAEA suspicions — verging on the levels needed for a bomb.
Biden was so fixated on gaining a deal that he allowed Moscow to take the lead on international negotiations, and his plans even envisaged Russia getting control of Iran’s highly enriched uranium. All of this as Putin has been threatening the West with his own nuclear weapons and savaging Ukraine while US taxpayers spend billions of dollars to counter him. Continue reading