I have on a few occasions in this series assessed with moderate confidence that the Russian wrinkle in the conclusion of our imminent nuclear deal with Iran will be ironed out. The Biden administration has of course relied on its friends in the Putin regime to work out the deal with Iran on our behalf and then, at the last minute, insisted that it needed an accommodation regarding sanctions. As Reuters puts it in the story linked below, they “unexpectedly demanded sweeping guarantees that Russian trade with Iran would not be affected by the Ukraine-related sanctions – a demand Western powers have said was unacceptable and Washington has insisted it will not accept.”
Reuters has been tracking the ins and outs of the deal most closely. Its team now reports “Russia says it has written guarantees on Iran nuclear deal.” Reuters quotes Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov: “We have received written guarantees – they are included in the very text of the agreement on reviving the JCPOA, and in these texts there is a reliable defense of all the projects provided for by the JCPOA and those activities – including the linking up of our companies and specialists.”
In his March 15 Wall Street Journal column — “Crisis for Biden’s Chaotic Foreign Policy” — Walter Russell Mead takes the Biden administration’s hysterical climate theology seriously and observes that “Mr. Biden’s climate agenda has collapsed into utter incoherence.” I find it disappointing that Mead seems to take the climate theology at face value.
On the point of this installment of my series on the imminent deal, Mead notes: “Russia’s demands that the proposed agreement on Iran’s nuclear program be revised to protect Moscow’s participation in the accord from Ukraine-related sanctions underline the difficulty of simultaneously confronting and engaging revisionist anti-American powers.” All such circles can be squared in the administration’s quest to give Iran what it wants with the assistance of the friends of Vladimir Putin. Speaking of incoherence…
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