Rewarding an Inimical Iran

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 20, 2023

 

“It is dead, but we are not gonna announce it,” Joe Biden said of the Iran nuclear deal in a surreptitiously recorded video last year. “Long story,” he added. The story isn’t really that long. Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran was never ratified as a treaty by the GOP-led U.S. Senate, which warned that a future Republican administration would void the agreement. That’s exactly what happened. The end.

 

But while the Biden administration may privately accept this reality, it seems to believe that it is obliged to behave as though the JCPOA can be resurrected. Since he took office, the president has made a variety of fruitless overtures to the Iranian regime, the most recent of which occurred this week.

 

According to Reuters, a U.S. official confirmed that Washington had provided the government in Baghdad with a waiver allowing it to purchase Iranian electricity via non-Iraqi banks. The State Department has retailed the move as a humanitarian initiative — “a step Washington hopes may keep Tehran from forcing unpopular power cuts during the sweltering Iraqi summer,” the Reuters report read. But the currency waiver is a concession to Tehran.

 

The latest waiver was expanded to permit payments to banks outside Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government, apparently in the hopes that this might transfer some of the pressure that Iran has exerted on Baghdad to other countries.

 

“We have to help the Iraqis with this perennial pressure from the Iranians to access the money,” said the U.S. official.

 

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that “these funds will remain in accounts where they can only be used for non-sanctionable activity, and with every transaction approved in advance by the Department of Treasury.” But coming on the heels of the Treasury Department’s decision to sanction 14 Iraqi banks over allegations that they were siphoning money for Iran, the waiver provides Tehran with new access to hard currency that the Islamic Republic desperately needs.

 

This latest concession follows the recent discovery that Iran continues to smuggle weapons and narcotics into Yemen, despite a March agreement with the Saudi government to taper off its support for the Houthi rebel group. It comes amid growing tensions between Israel and Iran-sponsored terrorist organizations Hezbollah and Hamas. And it comes as the Pentagon dispatches U.S. warships and fighter jets to the region amid Iran’s audacious efforts to hijack commercial shipping vessels in the Persian Gulf.

 

Nevertheless, the Biden administration remains committed to the diminishing returns it receives from its efforts to engage with the theocratic regime in Tehran. It’s unclear what, if anything, could convince this White House of its folly.