The Iran nuclear deal - looking more and more like a lost opportunity

Fred Kaplan reports (Israel and Iran Are Tanking Their Own Security Slate 08/02/2021):

Iran’s drone strike on an Israeli-owned oil tanker last week was but the latest in a series of skirmishes between the two states in the past two years—though it also marked a dangerous escalation, in which both sides are taking higher risks but achieving no apparent gains in their security.

The attack may have been retaliation for an Israeli attack on an Iranian military vessel in April, which may have been a response to an Iranian attack on an Israeli-owned container ship in March…and on and on the trail of tit-for-tat attacks goes, at least back to the summer of 2019, when Israel attacked a ship carrying Iranian oil and arms through the eastern Mediterranean and Red Seas—in violation of sanctions that were re-imposed when then-President Donald Trump after he withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

The Biden-Harris Administration could have announced in January that the US was officially re-entering the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ), the landmark Iran nuclear nonproliferation agreement that the Obama-Biden Administration negotiated with iran, from Trump had withdrawn the US.

They didn't. In any international negotiation, there is always the chance to blame someobday else other than one's own side. Kaplan's article discusses the Iranian and Israeli aspects in this article.

I hope the JCPOA can be saved. But the clock is ticking.

And the US really needs to demand more of its own ally Israel:

On April 6 [2021], hours before U.S., Iranian, and European diplomats assembled in Vienna to reopen talks on the nuclear deal, an elite commando unit of the Israeli Navy attacked an Iranian military vessel. The next day, to drive the point home, Netanyahu said, “The deal with Iran that…threatens our destruction will not obligate us.”

It's also by no means clear that the Iranian government is completely serious about getting the US back into the agreement. It could well be that they are also now looking for a way to get out of it without taking the full blame: "Given the many Iranians (especially the IRGC) oppose reviving the nuclear deal or any friendly ties to the West, it may well be that some of their moves have been provocations for their own sake."

But the window of opportunity on keeping the JCPOA alive seems to be closing rapidly.

Kaplan also has some interesting news about Iranian-Saudi diplomacy that could undermine one of Netanyahu's and Trump's favorite achievements, the Abraham Accords. He argues that the Israeli-Saudi rapprochement is "based entirely on their shared hostility to Iran."