BIDEN'S SHOCKING EMPOWERMENT OF RUSSIA AND IRAN

Its’s hard to believe, but through its double-dealing with both Russia and Iran, America is now working with a lethal enemy of the west — to empower a lethal enemy of civilisation.

March 18, 2022

STOPIRANNOW.ORG

By Melanie Phillips - JNS

In his address to the US Congress this week, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky told US President Joe Biden, in a plea for American air defences against Russian bombardment from the sky: “You are the leader of your great nation. I wish you to be the leader of the world”.

Congress members gave him a standing ovation. Yet reports suggest that, in its imminent deal with Iran, America is about to massively empower a state that is a lethal threat to the west and already has far more American blood on its hands than has Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While the Biden administration postures as standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine in its desperate defence against murderous aggression, it is itself reportedly about to capitulate entirely to Iran.

This, astoundingly, is America’s actual answer to Zelensky.

Given that the Iranian regime has been at war with the west since it came to power in 1979, that its fingerprints are on almost every major terrorist atrocity against western interests and that it unceasingly declares its genocidal aim to exterminate Israel, the administration’s determination to empower it is incomprehensible.

The reported terms of the deal being negotiated in Vienna will allow Iran legitimately to equip itself with a nuclear arsenal after a mere delay — according to Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — of two-and-a-half years.

Meanwhile, through the associated sanctions relief America will enable the regime to receive an estimated $100 billion to ramp up its regional power grab, redouble its terrorist activities and perpetrate attacks on Israel from its proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq and Yemen.

The United States is even said to be considering lifting the designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation in return for some vague commitment by Tehran to rein it in. Given the IRGC’s key role as Iran’s elite global terrorism enforcer, any such commitment would be risible.

Yet since the Biden administration has so far crumpled in the face of every Iranian demand, can anyone believe it will allow this unconscionable condition to scupper the deal?

Over the past few months, Iranian attacks on US interests have become increasingly brazen while America’s response has been no more than a feeble slap on the wrist. In response to American weakness, Iran contemptuously upped the ante in the Vienna talks, to which the Biden administration cravenly offered it more and more concessions.

Unable to tolerate this surrender to terrorist blackmail, three of Biden’s negotiators in Vienna resigned earlier this year.

For America to bring Iran into the community of nations is obscene. To do so while purportedly exiling Russia from that community of nations is astonishing hypocrisy.

Even worse is that, while Biden is instructing the world to impose sanctions against Russia, his administration is actually working closely with Russia to lift sanctions against Iran.

Since Iran has refused to deal directly with the United States in Vienna, the Biden administration last year asked Russia to take over leadership of those negotiations. That was bad enough; but yet worse again was to come.

The announcement of the Iran deal, which was expected more than a week ago, was reportedly delayed by Putin’s demand that the United States lift its Russian sanctions over Ukraine to allow Moscow to begin trading with Tehran. Since the Iran deal was being brokered by Russia, this threw a spanner into the works and shone a harsh light on the Biden administration’s strategic and moral incoherence.

Now, however, senior western diplomats say Russia has walked back this demand. It reportedly would accept narrower guarantees ensuring that it could carry out the nuclear work it was (no less astonishingly) mandated to do under the 2015 nuclear deal.

That includes a uranium swap with Iran, the redesign of the Fordow nuclear facility and the provision of nuclear fuel to Iranian reactors.

And according to Adam Kredo in The Washington Free Beacon, Russia’s top state-controlled energy company Rosatom is set to cash in on its $10 billion contract to expand Tehran’s Bushehr nuclear plant.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price said this week that America “would not sanction Russian participation in nuclear projects” that were part of the deal.

So the Biden administration is now accepting Putin — the man who Biden himself calls a “war criminal” and who has threatened nuclear war against the west — as the controller of Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme.

This also enables Russia to set up a sanctions evasion