WASHINGTON – Israel should push for serious American engagement against Iran in the region should the US return to the JCPOA, says Ambassador James Jeffrey, a former envoy to Iraq. “That’s not what Israel wants; it’s what its Abraham Accords partners want. You have a consensus [in the Middle East] that America needs to do more.”
Jeffrey is the Chair of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center. He previously served as the Special Representative for Syria Engagement and the Special Envoy to the Global Coalition To Defeat ISIS during the Trump administration. Before that, he was Deputy National Security Advisor under the Bush administration and Ambassador to Iraq and to Turkey during the Obama administration.
Ambassador Jeffrey told The Jerusalem Post that he believes there is a strong commitment from the Biden administration to rejoin the JCPOA. The first reason, he said, is the fact that the 2015 nuclear agreement was signed during the presidency of Barack Obama. “That was his primary accomplishment, and this administration is, of course, made up of very close associates with President Obama.” The second reason, he said, is the desire to reverse the Trump era policies.
“But the third reason is a very specific one that I can sympathize with, having been deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration in the late years when we had to deal with the Iran problem,” said Jeffrey. The US government is interested “not to have a looming crisis, or war with Iran, constantly dominating our entire foreign policy,” he said. “That was true back in 2007-2008, it’s even more true now when we have far bigger threats than we had in 2007: climate change Covid, China, Russia. The mechanisms that you do, the coordination, particularly with the Israeli government, which, of course, gets very, very nervous and is capable of taking its own action; military requirements you have to have in place as [Iran] get close to a nuclear capability; the back and forth, is extremely fatiguing. It draws attention away from everything else, and there is a case that can be made that if you can push this back for the next 5 to 10 years that you’ve accomplished something, so I think those are the thre
e reasons why this administration wants it.”
He went on to say that the Iranians “want the agreement desperately because sanctions are crippling their economy.”
AFTER leaving the White House last week, the outgoing Israeli president, Reuven Rivlin, told reporters that he was under the impression that the return to the JCPOA is not a done deal. According to Jeffrey, the administration is saying that “for public consumption.”
“In the last few weeks, the administration has been downplaying the JCPOA and talking about obstacles, ‘Maybe we won’t get it.’ That is, first of all, to put pressure on the Iranians who are demanding a great deal,” he said. “Secondly, it is also to justify far-reaching concessions that the administration has been considering. I think the administration is playing a double game a little bit here, because I do think that they are moving forward in the negotiations.”
“I think they expect that they will get a deal,” he continued. “But I think they realize they’ll have to make concessions and they’ll try to act as if the deal almost collapsed and it’s really important to get the deal. And these [concessions] aren’t all that big.
Here’s why they are big, and here’s what Israel should do: First of all, it would be good for the new prime minister to be invited to Washington. This is a very, very important relationship. Israel should push for serious American engagement against Iran in the region should the US return to the JCPOA. That’s not what Israel wants; it’s what its Abraham Accords partners want.”
“You have a consensus [in the Middle East] that America needs to do more. The record has been mixed,” he said. “The Yemen approach of this administration, which is one of the areas where you need to contest Iran, was very weak. We just gave away all of our pressure points and expected the Houthis and Iran to compromise. Instead, they’re continuing their attacks on this major base in Yemen.”
Do you see a scenario in which Biden walks away from the deal?
“If he does, then Iran will very quickly get to a point where they will be weeks or less from having enough fissile material to build a nuclear device. And that will create a constant running military and diplomatic crisis for the Biden administration on an issue that they think is of second order. It’s not that it isn’t important, it is. But compared to Russia, China, Covid and climate, it’s less important and they do not want to be diverted by that. So therefore, they have tremendous incentive to get a deal.”
What is your understanding about the administration’s promise to have a ‘longer and stronger’ agreement?
“The administration has never, ever given any explanation of why it thinks Iran, which has made clear it does not want to negotiate [a different deal] would agree to do so.”
“It’s a bit irritating because it’s immature and these guys are very experienced. They’re basically saying, ‘sure, there are flaws in the agreement, and we all know the flaws in the 2015 agreement. But it’s OK, we’ll just negotiate a new agreement that will fix all of those problems.’ And the difficulty with this is that the only way that even conceptually or theoretically that could be possible is to push the administration and the Europeans, who tend to think this way anyway, towards the fatal assumption that Iran is a normal state that really wants to be friends with the rest of the world. That is a fatal problem. That’s the worst thing about the JCPOA.”
“You can do a deal with them on a technical issue, in this case, the nuclear one. But you cannot forget that you’re dealing with, again, to quote Kissinger, ‘a cause and not a state,’ a cause whose goal is to establish hegemony over the Middle East.”
Speaking about the situation in Lebanon, Ambassador Jeffrey said that “it’s a tragedy, but it’s also a lesson. And the key address for that is Baghdad.”
“[The lesson is that] if you do not push back against the armed and political wings of essentially an Iranian state within your state now, you will soon wind up like Lebanon and Lebanon is a tragedy.”
“It could be fixed,” he said. “But the consensus is it will not be fixed unless you have a functioning government that will take hard decisions. And the main obstacle to that, not the only one, but the main one, is Hezbollah and its hold on the state of Lebanon. And that is basically Iran’s hold on the state of Lebanon. That’s the future for Iraq. That’s the future for the other countries that allow themselves to be infiltrated by Iran. So therefore, it’s a lesson as well as a problem.”