Just when you think the Biden administration couldn’t possibly get worse, it finds a way. Gabriel Noronha, a former State Department official, tweeted Wednesday that State, NSC, and European Union officials are warning that “what’s happening in Vienna,” where Biden’s handlers are negotiating a new nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, “is a total disaster,” and that they’re hoping that “Congress will act to stop the capitulation.”
On Monday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) criticized the Biden administration for reportedly looking to boost energy production in Iran and Venezuela and stated that doing so would make the authoritarian Maduro regime and Iran’s dangerous regime partners “to save our economy” and argued that every day America waits to boost domestic energy production, “continues to put us in an awkward position.”
Last week, I posited that the Biden administration was soft-pedaling SWIFT sanctions because it does not want to discuss why the United States is not in a position to boot Russia from the telecommunication system that facilitates global commerce and finance: The United States government has willfully entangled itself in dependence on Putin’s regime. This is particularly so in the realms of energy and foreign relations.
It hasn’t taken long for a textbook example of this idiocy to leap to the fore.
The response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows what a unified West can do when it recognizes a threat to democracy and to the security of its allies. Bowing to the reality of risking a direct military confrontation that could lead to escalation to a nuclear war, President Joe Biden has led our allies in imposing what are purported to be crushing sanctions on Russia. Critics of sanctions as a tool against aggressors have suddenly become cheerleaders. The ineffectual is suddenly viewed as crippling.
Meanwhile, even as the onslaught continues in Ukraine, the U.S. is depending on Russia to help secure a new nuclear arrangement with Iran. While sanctions are supposed to influence the behavior of the third most powerful person in the world, representatives of the West are preparing to remove all sanctions to appease Iran. To say the approach is hypocritical is an understatement.
Just when you think the Biden administration couldn’t possibly get worse, it finds a way. Gabriel Noronha, a former State Department official, tweeted Wednesday that State, NSC, and European Union officials are warning that “what’s happening in Vienna,” where Biden’s handlers are negotiating a new nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, “is a total disaster,” and that they’re hoping that “Congress will act to stop the capitulation.”
As the world’s attention is focused on the Russia-Ukraine war, the Arabs are continuing to express fear about the possibility that the Biden administration and the world powers will revive the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
The Arabs are warning that the appeasement of the extremist and terrorist regime in Tehran would allow Iran’s proxy militias to continue their attacks on America’s Arab allies and massively destabilize the Middle East.
When Iran’s regime is ecstatic about a deal, it should send a warning signal to the US and its allies. That the ruling mullahs are asking the Biden administration for guarantees that the US will never be able to leave the new nuclear deal, even after President Joe Biden leaves office, should signal that the mullahs want this deal badly and set off all sorts of alarms.
A nuclear deal with the Iranian regime is a win for the Islamic Republic. A deal would have several advantages for Tehran’s regime. First, a nuclear deal would boost Iran’s ballistic missile program as it did right after the 2015 deal, when Tehran promptly accelerated its missile development and tests.
Darkness descends on a region’s stability.
While we try to figure out Russia’s intentions for Ukraine, Iran is getting closer to a deal that will leave it a nuclear power. Discussions in Vienna are back on, and hopeful dispatches are sent out by Western diplomats. But given Iran’s maximalist demands, and the Biden administration’s fetish of “diplomatic engagement,” things aren’t looking good for the region’s stability.
While turning a blind eye to the Iranian regime’s increasing persecution of religious minorities, the Biden administration and the European Union are focusing only on lifting the sanctions against the Islamic Republic. The move will help to revive the disastrous nuclear deal that will empower the ruling mullahs to race toward nuclear weapons breakout; strengthen Iran’s internal militia, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and expand the country’s proxy militias abroad: the Houthis in Yemen, and the designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. That does not even include any plans Iran might have to expand its operations, which threaten America, in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
In November 2020, a convoy carrying Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s most prominent nuclear scientist, came under fire. He was killed with an artificial intelligence-assisted remote control machine gun.
Carrying out an assassination in such a surgical fashion against a moving target without any civilian casualties requires real-time intelligence on the ground.
After the killing, Iran’s intelligence minister, Mahmoud Alavi, claimed that two months earlier, he had warned security forces that there was an assassination plot targeting Mr Fakhrizadeh at the exact location where he was shot.
A suspected Iranian disinformation unit ran an elaborate network on Facebook targeting nationalist and ultra-religious Jews in Israel in an attempt to stoke division and inflame tensions with Palestinians, according to research shared exclusively with the BBC.
The alleged foreign interference campaign ran across multiple social media platforms posing as an ultra-Orthodox Jewish news group supportive of extreme right-wing groups.
Its goal was to help fuel “religious war” by amplifying “fear, hatred and chaos”, according to the Israeli disinformation watchdog FakeReporter, which uncovered the group’s suspected Iranian origin.
For almost as long as it’s existed, heavy metal has been used as protest music. On Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, the first thing you’re barraged with is War Pigs: a seven-minute savaging of the politicians who instigated the Vietnam war. Iron Maiden once had their mascot, Eddie, murder Margaret Thatcher on a single’s artwork; Metallica and Megadeth spent the 1980s lambasting cold war superpowers that didn’t know whether to shake hands or nuke each other.
The Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the second largest and hugely influential group in the Gaza Strip after Hamas, does not believe that the conflict with Israel is over Jerusalem, settlements, borders, checkpoints or Palestinian prisoners.
Like Hamas, PIJ’s “logical intellectual vision considers all of Palestine still occupied from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.” For PIJ, the only way for solving the conflict is by eliminating Israel and killing as many Jews as possible. PIJ sees Israel as one big settlement and a foreign implant that needs to be dismantled as soon as possible.
The ruling mullahs of Iran are strengthening their ties with the Chinese Communist Party as well as conveniently violating US sanctions without facing any repercussions from the Biden administration.
The Biden administration is perpetuating the idea that the White House is relying on “diplomacy” in dealing with the Iranian regime. However, the Biden administration’s “diplomacy” with Iran seems nothing but capitulations to the ruling mullahs.
As part of its “diplomacy”, the White House first told the Iranian leaders not only that it is willing to lift nuclear-related sanctions, but also that it is considering lifting non-nuclear related sanctions. This was followed by the first concession toward Iran’s proxy militia group, the Houthis. Even as the evidence — including a report by the United Nations — showed that the Iranian regime was delivering sophisticated weapons to the Houthis in Yemen, the Biden administration suspended some of the anti-terrorism sanctions on the Houthis that the Trump administration had imposed. Soon after, the Biden administration revoked the designation of Yemen’s Houthis as a terrorist group.
