President Joe Biden called Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” Wednesday. With good reason: The autocrat’s forces have bombed hospitals, schools and other civilian structures, wantonly slaughtered children and are leveling Ukrainian cities to try to make them submit.
But Biden, as usual, didn’t mean it.
Turns out the revived Iran deal now under discussion includes a massive sanctions waiver for Russia’s nuclear projects in Iran, such as state energy giant Rosatom’s plan to build out the Bushehr reactor — a project valued at $10 billion.
So the sanctions Biden holds up as a terrible punishment for a war criminal turn out to be totally conditional on a clearly lesser (and majorly bad) goal: reviving the Iran deal.
Aside from the ugly moral implications, this is policy malpractice. It endangers US interests abroad and also Ukraine, by telling Putin we’re not that serious; if he waits, he can expect to see other sanctions dropped.
This, to revive a terrible deal. The 2015 accord was a disaster: It emboldened Iran and helped solidify its position as an aspirant regional hegemon. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal was one of his wisest foreign-policy maneuvers.
Has Iran moderated its behavior since in an attempt to show good faith? No. Just last week, the Revolutionary Guard claimed credit for the missile strikes in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. To say nothing of Iran’s threats to harm or actual plots to kill American officials like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton whom Tehran perceives as hostile. (Yes, it’s released a few hostages held on fake criminal charges: It knows it can take more later.)
The Biden administration has refused to indict conspirators in the Bolton plot, per a DOJ source, over worries that it might upend the effort to revive the nuke deal.
Team Biden talking points echo those for the 2015 deal, saying it’s the only way to keep the Islamic Republic from getting a nuke. Yet the first deal actually put Iran on a glidepath to “legally” becoming a nuclear power, and the new version is likely to do the same. Israeli experts estimate that a return to the deal would put Iran’s breakout time to nuclear-weapons capability at four to six months.
Sacrificing deterrence of Putin for such idiocy — while the White House brags how tough it’s getting — only compounds the crime.