Biden must be firm with Iran

US President Joe Biden’s firing of the starter’s gun for resumed talks with Iran about resurrecting Barack Obama’s deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal was badly timed. It followed last week’s stepped-up rocket attacks by powerful Iranian-linked militia groups on residual US forces in neighbouring Iraq. The attacks are part of Tehran’s relentless drive to achieve Shia regional domination and force a total US retreat from Iraq.

Mr Biden’s announcement also coincided with the sentencing by a court in Belgium of a senior Iranian diplomat to 20 years’ imprisonment for a 2018 terrorist plot intended to blow up a rally of thousands of exiled Iranians outside Paris. They were rallying in opposition to the ayatollahs’ regime and in favour of democracy. Claims by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif that the bomb plot had been a “false flag” conceived to embarrass the ayatollahs were dismissed with contempt when evidence by Belgium’s VSSE security service showed the potentially devastating attack was “conceived in the name of Iran and under its leadership” as part of the rogue regime’s ongoing, global state-terrorism activities. The Biden administration’s announcement that it is keen to resume talks with Iran also coincided with confirmation by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has again threatened to drastically limit the work of international inspectors monitoring its nuclear activities. That follows new evidence that it has further breached the enrichment limits of the 2015 deal and is moving to make uranium metal, which has no civilian use but could be part of a nuclear weapon.

In his rush to repudiate Donald Trump’s 2018 withdrawal of the US from the 2015 nuclear deal, Mr Biden must not ignore the incontrovertible evidence of unrelenting bad behaviour by the Tehran regime. Rewarding the ayatollahs for their continuing villainy would be absurd.

Mr Biden’s election win gave him a mandate to seek the US’s return to the deal. But giving in to Iran’s demands for the lifting of “maximum pressure” Trump-era sanctions as a precondition for resuming talks, reported in our World pages on Monday, would be a serious mistake. In rescinding Mr Trump’s tough line, the Biden administration, unfortunately, has already acknowledged that Tehran has the right to purchase advanced weapons. That is a potentially far-reaching concession and a strange way to deal with a rogue nation that persists in behaving so egregiously in support of terrorism. So is Mr Biden’s lifting of Mr Trump’s targeted domestic travel restrictions on Iranian diplomats accredited to the UN in New York.

With its many flaws and sunset provisions that effectively kept the door open wide to Iran’s dangerous nuclear ambitions, the 2015 deal is testimony to the way Tehran ran circles around Mr Obama’s negotiators. Some, including Mr Biden’s new Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, were among them. Iran’s hegemonic regional ambitions and brazen, ongoing involvement in state-sponsored terrorism in the Middle East and beyond show why Washington must remain implacable in ensuring that the extremist Islamic theocracy never acquires nuclear weapons and is never in a position to threaten Western allies, especially Israel.

Mr Biden has said Washington will return to the Obama deal and lift sanctions if Tehran returns to full compliance with the 2015 accord. The US then wants to negotiate a follow-on agreement that would rewrite the Obama deal in a way that outlaws Tehran’s terrorist activities, its regional bullying and its ballistic missile-building program, which poses a threat to the entire region. Mr Biden is right to want to make up for the many shortcomings of the original Obama deal. But he will only succeed and ensure the security of key Western allies if he recognises the odious regime in Tehran is a serious danger to peace and security. Its extortionist demands for easing sanctions in return for talking must be rejected.