Close to 50 retired military officers wrote that the new nuclear agreement the Biden administration is negotiating with Iran is likely to “instantly fuel explosive Iranian aggression,” in an open letter last week.
In the letter, coordinated with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, the group of generals and admirals said that the deal would help Iran’s nuclear program and support of terrorism, and linked the nuclear talks in Vienna to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
U.S. negotiators have worked through intermediary countries in the Austrian capital to hammer out an agreement to reverse President Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord.
Although the two sides have repeatedly said that they are close to inking a final agreement, the U.S. seems to have balked at Iranian demands that the White House remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization sanctions list. The talks have remained stalled for weeks, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that he’s “not overly optimistic” that the U.S. and Iran can reach a final agreement.
Meanwhile, around 20 Democratic lawmakers have criticized the negotiations and the concessions which the administration is reportedly mulling, while Republicans have prepared a range of legislative options with which to torpedo the potential agreement.
While the administration has not ruled out the IRGC delisting, which would be an extraordinary capitulation to Tehran’s demands, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that a senior administration official told him that “President Biden doesn’t intend to concede on the terrorist designation.”
It’s also possible that the administration would find a workaround, by delisting the IRGC but maintaining another category of terrorist sanctions or keeping the FTO designation on specific IRGC units, to blunt potential criticism.
The officers noted in the JINSA letter that “Iran’s main terrorist wing responsible for the deaths of at least 600 American troops” could be one of the expected nuclear deal’s risks.
They also wrote that they oppose the deal on the grounds that it “could leave Iran twice as close to a nuclear weapon as the 2015 agreement,” weaken restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, and grant the country the ability to enrich uranium and to build a bomb.
Other problems with the deal, the officers added, include its expected omission of Iran’s ballistic-missile program and terrorist activities across the world, which Biden administration officials have said they want to address in a follow-on accord.
The JINSA letter’s signatories include General Chuck Wald, a former deputy commander of U.S. European Command, and Vice Admiral John Bird, former deputy commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, among dozens of other senior officers.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should serve as a cautionary tale, they warned.
“In Ukraine, we are bearing witness to the horrors of a country ruthlessly attacking its neighbor and, by brandishing its nuclear weapons, forcing the rest of the world largely to stand on the sidelines,” they wrote.
The retired officers added that Russia “has played a central role in crafting” the expected deal, which they said “will enable the world’ leading state sponsor of terrorism to cast its own nuclear shadow over the Middle East.”