By Joel C. Rosenberg, All Israel News—
Why is Tehran seemingly not willing to take up Washington on its generous offer and simply reenter the nuclear deal? Are the Iranians learning to live with sanctions instead?
These are some of the questions perplexing the Washington establishment. I spoke with Robert Satloff, executive director of The Washington Institute, who tackled these questions and more in a two-part interview on the convergence of the 9/11 anniversary, the one-year anniversary of the Abraham Accords and the ever-present Iranian threat.
In fact, Satloff warned that the Biden administration should now be making a Plan B regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions as the regime defies expectations that it would readily jump back into the deal from which former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018.
Satloff, an expert on Arab and Islamic politics as well as U.S. Middle East policy, shared his insights on what he sees as the message emanating from Iran in the past few months. Iran is not just guilty of terrorism, he said, but of creating instability in the region which, in many ways, is just as menacing.
“The Iranians are today the greatest exporter, state sponsor, of insecurity in the Middle East – I don’t just say ‘terrorism,’ I say ‘insecurity’ through their proxies, through their support for various terrorist groups and, of course, through their own activity in the Gulf,” Satloff said.
And this empowered Iran does not seem to be interested in America’s overtures to renew a nuclear deal.
“Washington is beginning to come around to the sense that it needs a Plan B, namely, how does one deal with the array of Iranian threats in the absence of a return to the nuclear deal?” Continue Reading….
