There was little reason to celebrate the new understanding. The Iranians followed this latest deal with new statements about their program which were clearly disturbing. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that Iran’s enrichment levels of its uranium would no longer be limited to 20%. “We may even increase enrichment to 60%.” The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) , also known as the “Iran deal” from 2015 limited enrichment to just 3.67%. It should be recalled that enrichment to the level of 90% was what the Iranians needed to manufacture a nuclear explosive device.
Verification of these understandings was extremely flawed. Last November Iran’s enrichment levels reached 12 times the amount that had been permitted in the JCPOA, according to the IAEA. Tehran was now on a path to get closer to an atomic bomb than ever before.
The old Iran nuclear deal had other serious defects that needed to be fixed, but it did not appear that these changes were going to happen. Take ballistic missiles. When the West created an arrangement with Saddam Hussein at the end of the First Gulf War that sought to address his weapons of mass destruction, they did not limit themselves to dismantling biological, chemical and nuclear components that the Iraqis possessed. They included all ballistic missiles above a range of 150 km. But the JCPOA did not touch Iran’s missile capabilities. It was a huge hole in the agreement. There was no indication that it was now going to be remedied.
Another defect in the JCPOA was that it was built around the assumption that if Iran adhered to its terms, Iranian behavior would become more moderate. This was projected in the West to be a possible consequence of the easing of sanctions on the Iranian economy. But now looking back to 2015, the relaxing of sanctions on Iran did not moderate its regional behavior.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) continued to employ Shi’ite militias sometimes with even greater force. A February 2021 report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change did not mince any words on this point: “The number of militias created by the IRGC surged.”
Iranian expansionism was spreading in this period to areas which are not thought to be within its sphere of influence. Its support for the Houthi guerrillas in Yemen gave it a strategic presence along the Bab al-Mandeb that connected the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Iran began working with the Polisario in the Western Sahara, basing themselves in Algeria. Iran was operating far away from the Persian Gulf.
What was needed was a robust response by the West to these Iranian actions. Without a strong reaction, the Iranians were likely to escalated their actions across the Middle East. But there was no indication that the US and Europe understood what they were facing.
The writer is the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the former Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He served as ambassador to the UN during 1997-99.