Biden throws Putin a nuclear lifeline
By Mark Dubowitz & Jonathan Schanzer
The Russian war of aggression in Ukraine has significantly encumbered the Biden administration’s drive to reach a renewed Iran nuclear deal. Seeing an opportunity to build leverage against the United States and Europe as they impose sanctions on Russia, Vladimir Putin threw a grenade into the Iran talks taking place in Vienna. The Russian strongman demanded a “white channel” with Tehran to circumvent international sanctions. This was apparently a bridge too far for U.S. diplomats, who had until that point seemed willing to cave on any and every Iranian demand to seal a deal.
The negotiators left Vienna to reassess their options, but that didn’t stop Russia and Iran from sending their counterparts clear messages. Since then, Russia has unleashed unspeakable violence on Ukraine, while the Iranian regime fired missiles near the American Consulate in northern Iraq. If the latest reports are true, the U.S. has just agreed to allow Russia to carry out nuclear work mandated under the 2015 nuclear deal: uranium swaps with Iran, work on the Fordow nuclear facility, and the provision of nuclear fuel to Iranian reactors.
The Biden White House is apparently indifferent to the terrible optics. While war rages on the edge of Europe and the U.S.-led world order hangs in the balance, a deal is now in the works that is set to empower Putin’s Russia and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s Islamic Republic.
If it wasn’t clear before, it should be now: This is no time for a deal with either of those authoritarian regimes.
Already under fire at home for its disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, the Biden administration is undeniably struggling to find its equilibrium after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is uncertain about imposing the most effective sanctions, such as cutting off all Russian banks from global commerce and tying up Russian energy revenues. And it is unwilling to deploy force. The White House thus appears content to rally the international community to express its collective outrage. But that will do little to stop Putin’s destruction of Ukraine, let alone mitigate Americans’ sticker shock at gas stations and supermarkets as oil and food prices soar. It also will not help preserve the American-led world order, which is increasingly under assault by Russia, Iran, and China.
There may have been a moment when the Biden White House believed a deal with Tehran might demonstrate American leadership amid the crisis in Ukraine. But that moment has passed, as Putin seems to have settled into the driver’s seat there as well. The Russian negotiator in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, has emerged as the dominant advocate for Iran’s case. Ulyanov recently boasted, “Iran got much more than it could expect in [the] Vienna talks.” This is now undeniably the truth. But Russia’s perks are not inconsiderable, either.
The American concession that enables Russia to conduct nuclear work with the Islamic Republic, even as Putin threatens to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, is foreign policy malpractice. It’s hard to argue otherwise. Still, some might say that at least the White House held firm and denied the Russian request for a sanctions “white channel” to trade with Iran. Yes, that was technically taken off the table. However, Russia will effectively get a white channel anyway because the Biden administration would never sanction Iranian entities transacting with Russian businesses once a deal is signed. Indeed, the administration has already surrendered to Iranian nuclear blackmail. Besides, it’s also possible that the U.S. will provide secret guarantees to Iran or even Russia in side letters. Washington struck secret side deals in the last agreement that were never made public. Nothing prevents the White House from doing so again.
Not to be left out, China reportedly is also asking for a special carve-out for Chinese entities previously sanctioned. Russia recently approached Beijing to help finance the war effort in Ukraine. Should Joe Biden agree to any of this, it would be a political collapse of epic proportions.
What makes this all so baffling is the fact that the Iran deal of 2015 was no great achievement in the first place. Tehran did not need to cheat to reach threshold nuclear-weapons capabilities. With key constraints set to sunset, the regime was prepared to wait for a decade while the terms of the deal yielded the regime an industrial-size enrichment program, a near-zero breakout time, an advanced centrifuge-powered clandestine path to a nuclear warhead, long-range ballistic missiles that could threaten America, and access to advanced conventional weaponry to target America’s allies across the Middle East. The estimated $150 billion in sanctions relief granted to Iran enabled it to fund its terrorist proxies to expand the regime’s regional dominance. Worse, those funds increasingly immunized the regime against future Western sanctions.
Former President Donald Trump exited the original deal in 2018. Biden’s team has vowed to restore it. But the “new” deal promises to be far worse than the original. Biden’s chief negotiator in Vienna, Rob Malley, reportedly aims to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the State Department’s list of terror groups; the Guard has been responsible for terrorist attacks worldwide. He was reportedly ready to cave on U.S. sanctions against the regime’s top human rights abusers, including the current president, Ebrahim Raisi, who is responsible for murdering thousands of Iranian dissidents in the 1980s. Biden was also prepared to lift sanctions on the office of Khamenei, a human rights abuser himself, along with his multibillion-dollar slush fund.
As our colleague Saeed Ghasseminejad calculated, under the new deal, the Islamic Republic could immediately gain access to a total sanctions relief package of up to $130 billion. And that doesn’t include tens of billions in additional perks as the regime plugs back into international banks and businesses. This is not only an outrage to our regional allies, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Israel, which are under constant threat of Iranian missiles and terrorism. It’s also an outrage to American gold star families of soldiers killed by Iran-backed terrorists. More than 1,000 of them have signed a letter urging Biden not to give the clerical regime this money, particularly when they are owed billions in damages for Iranian terrorist attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Biden has not answered their letter.
Team Biden has similarly shrugged off the controversy surrounding reports that the negotiators agreed to close one file currently open with the International Atomic Energy Agency involving the regime’s production of enriched uranium metal that is key to building the core of a nuclear bomb. On three other files related to undeclared nuclear materials and activities, Biden’s team agreed to let the IAEA keep trying to get answers until June. After that, based on past patterns, the Biden team will likely ignore Iran’s nuclear intransigence and block punitive action by the IAEA Board of Governors.
But perhaps the worst collapse by the Biden team in Vienna was the inclusion of an “inherent guarantee” to the regime. Reports out of Tehran and other Middle Eastern capitals suggest that the Biden team offered a written guarantee stipulating that if the Iranians say there is a breach of the agreement, including if a future administration exits the deal (as Trump did in 2018), the regime in Iran will have the right to enrich uranium at 60% and to install thousands of advanced centrifuges. In other words, the Biden administration has reportedly decided to legitimize Iranian nuclear blackmail. This guarantee will, in all likelihood, be part of a series of side letters. Just as it happened in 2015, the world will never see the text of these promises. Indeed, the American public may never know the extent of Biden’s concessions.
For the Biden White House, the point of these extreme concessions has always been to put the Iranian nuclear problem “in a box” so that Washington could pivot to contain the rise of the revisionist powers: Russia and China. But the agreement will feed the Iranian war machine in the Middle East. It’s also a jack-in-the-box; the Iranian nuclear program springs out once restrictions sunset. As Putin has just made crystal clear: An unhinged regional aggressor backed with nuclear weapons is a nightmare to contain. The clerical regime in Iran almost certainly seeks to follow his lead.
This may, in fact, be the plan. The terms of the new Iran agreement were brokered by Russia. Putin only agreed to it because it would help to undermine the U.S.-led world order. Tehran would never assent to a deal without Putin’s consent because the regime knows it will need Russia in the future.
The world has changed since Feb. 24, when Vladimir Putin ordered his army to invade Ukraine. Whatever the Biden White House thought it would achieve in Vienna, it must think again. This is the time for deterring, not empowering, rogue regimes.
Mark Dubowitz is CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president.
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U.S Intelligence warns Iran targeting Americans as Biden nears nuclear deal that would end sanctions
(PresidentialHill.com)- Even as President Joe Biden is approaching a new nuclear deal with Iran, the U.S. intelligence community is saying that Iran will continue to send threats to Americans, both in a direct way and through various proxies.
At the same time, the intelligence community made an assessment last week that said Iran is continuing to try to develop networks located within America.
Then, on Sunday, the fears were proven true when Iran ultimately claimed responsibility for a barrage of missiles that hit close to a U.S. consulate located in northern Iraq that was under construction. Luckily, there were no casualties reported in the attack.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that it was trying to attack Israeli targets. The IRGC, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist group, might have been trying to exact revenue for an airstrike initiated by Israel in Syria that killed two of the group’s commanders.
Media outlets that have been linked to IRGC, though, also said the attack was motivated in part by the killing of General Qassem Soleimani by U.S. forces in 2020. Soleimani was the head of the Quds force with the IRGC.
At the same time all of this is happening, Biden is pushing forward to try to revive talks on a nuclear deal with the terrorist country. If a potential deal is indeed struck, it would give the Iranian government plenty of cash since it would receive relief from sanctions.
The intelligence community believes that if that were to happen, Iran would take that money and spend it on terrorist groups it supports as well as on its own military.
According to the 2022 Annual Threat Assessment released by the intelligence community:
“We assess that Iran will threaten U.S. persons directly and via proxy attacks, particularly in the Middle East. Iran also remains committed to developing networks inside the United States — an objective it has pursued for more than a decade.”
That report was published recently by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It added that the country “has previously attempted to conduct lethal operations in the United States,” and will likely launch various attacks that target American forces and other Americans who are located not only in the Middle East, but in other parts of the world, too.
It’s not necessarily new information that Iran may be trying to use Hezbollah to launch an attack on the American homeland from within. The terrorist group that is based in Lebanon has sleeper agents and sleeper cells within the U.S., and they’ve had that for years, the intelligence community states.
In fact, it’s possible they are just hanging around, waiting for the call from Iran to attack.
The former director of intelligence analysis at the New York City Police Department, Mitchell Silber, recently told Just the News:
“Based on my experience and recent investigations, it is highly likely that both Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah have ‘sleeper networks and operatives’ in the U.S. that could be activated in the event of the outbreak of hostilities between the U.S. and Iran.
“During my time at the NYPD, we had robust investigations related to both Lebanese Hezbollah and separately Iran. The Iran/Lebanese Hezbollah threat was one that was always at the top of our threat matrix.”
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Judicial Watch pursues/seeks Durham Investigation information/e mails etc.:
Judicial Watch Sues DOJ for Emails Between John Durham and AG Garland  The senators said, in December 2021, that Hennessey “expressed a clear partisan bias against the Special Counsel’s investigation,” referring to one of her tweets: “Durham has made abundantly clear that in a year and a half, he hasn't come up with anything. I guess this kind of partisan silliness has become characteristic of Barr's legacy, but unclear to me why Durham would want to go along with it.” To explore this, we filed a FOIA suit against the Department of Justice for records of communication between Special Counsel John Durham and Attorney General Merrick Garland (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:22-cv-00734)). We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the DOJ failed to respond to our August 23, 2021, FOIA request for: 1. All records of communication, including emails and text messages, between Special Counsel John Durham and Attorney General Merrick Garland. 2. All budget records related to the operations of the office of Special Counsel John Durham. It shouldn’t take a federal lawsuit to get answers to simple requests for information about Garland’s communications with Durham and basic budget documents about the Durham Special Counsel operation. And: Years Late and Millions Short on Hunter Biden By Tim Graham +++ Finally:https://youtu.be/iiloKxcqp6M ++++++++++++ From generally reliable source:Subject: late night musing, perhaps ... things just don't add up ... not sure what it all means, but tread lightly The Bank of Japan wrapped up a status quo policy meeting this morning, keeping benchmark interest rates at minus 10 basis points and targeting a 0% 10-year government bond yield, while maintaining the pace of its comprehensive asset purchase program. That stand-pat decision comes as headline CPI rose 0.9% from a year ago in February, matching the highest reading since fall 2018 but far from the skyscraping figures seen in the West. “Inflation is around 8% in the U.S. and 6% in Europe, but in Japan it’s still below 1%,” BoJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda told the press. “For them it’s natural that they would raise rates, weaken the amount of easing, and move towards normalization. There’s absolutely no need for Japan to raise rates just because others are doing it.” After predicting that measured inflation could reach a 2% annual pace by April, Kuroda added that such a hypothetical print would “in no way signif[y] . . . a revision of our current monetary policy.” Any such course correction would reverberate, considering Kuroda and Co.’s strenuous exertions in recent years. Assets on the Bank of Japan’s balance sheet stand at 134% of last year’s nominal GDP, towering over the 37% for the Federal Reserve’s holdings and 61% for the ECB. More broadly, Japanese gross government debt stood at 257% of domestic output as of year-end per the IMF, compared to 120% for the U.S. and 98% for the euro area. Accordingly, Totan Research chief economist Izuru Kato told Bloomberg, “the meaning of a rate hike in Japan is very different from in the U.S. and Europe because the government has a mountain of public debt. Raising rates here would be tantamount to opening Pandora’s Box.” Inconveniently, various anecdotes suggest that global price pressures may manifest in Japan soon enough. Thus, McDonald’s announced price hikes across key menu items earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reports, including a bump to ¥160 ($1.35) per cheeseburger from ¥140. At the same time, long-dormant wages have shown signs of life, as the Financial Times relays that major employers such as Toyota, Hitachi and Toshiba have all recently announced compensation increases. That would be no small development, as wages are little changed from their 2000 levels in real terms, data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development show. Energy and electricity bills both jumped by some 20% last month from February 2021, the fastest pace in four decades. Meanwhile, the impact of substantial cell phone fee cuts enacted last year will begin to dissipate in coming months, adding more upside pressure to consumer price data. Other factors could serve to wake the inflation beast in the world’s third-largest economy. As the BoJ diverges from the Fed’s gradual tightening and the European Central Bank’s pivot (governing council member Klaas Knot suggested yesterday that two rate hikes could be in store for 2022, a change from previous rhetoric), currency markets have taken notice: the yen sits at eight-year lows against the greenback and near a four-year nadir against the euro, underpinning Japan’s exporters but rendering imports more expensive. Fiscal policies could serve to fan the flames. Earlier this week, leaders of Japan’s ruling coalition floated the idea of new spending to cushion the blow of rising energy prices, including direct payouts to retirees. Such an initiative would come on the heels of a record $490 billion stimulus package enacted last fall, a sum equivalent to nearly 10% of total output. While the BoJ doubles down on easy money in contrast to Western central banks, Japan takes center stage in terms of global financial repression: Yen-denominated borrowings now account for 49% of the $3.46 trillion worldwide negative nominal-yielding debt, topping the 44% share for the European Union. For context, euro-denominated paper accounted for 38.3% of those upside-down liabilities as the negative-yielding debt stack sat near its high-water mark of $17.4 trillion in early 2021, with only 25% coming from yen-denominated issuers. +++++++++++++++++++++++++ Why are so many Americans homeless and what can we do to help them?
America has a homelessness crisis—and it’s getting worse by the day. Politicians promise to stop it. Big cities like San Francisco spend millions trying to end it. Nothing seems to help.
PragerU’s new short documentary exposes the root causes of homelessness and offers compassionate, effective solutions that we can all get behind.
Policy experts, elected officials, community leaders, and people who experienced homelessness firsthand reveal the truth and offer practical solutions to this humanitarian crisis. This short documentary was made in partnership with the Cicero Institute. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ GOP Leadership Previews How Different Committee Membership Will Look in Future Congress+++ Democratic Congresswoman Says Party Leadership Attempted to 'Beat Moderates into Submission' By Landon Mion +++++++ |
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