Has Naftali Bennett figured out a way to stop the Iran nuclear arms agreement?
For almost a decade, the U.S. and other world powers have engaged in a protracted set of negotiations with Iran over that country’s ability to build weapons of mass destruction. Over most of those years, Israel has waged a lonely and mostly unsuccessful battle against the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Benjamin Netanyahu was able to convince Donald Trump to withdraw from the accord midway through Trump’s term in office, but Joe Biden’s election two years later appeared to ensure that some version of the treaty would be reinstated. (Although the Biden Administration had indicated a commitment to a “longer and stronger” agreement when the negotiations began again, that goal has since appeared to become a casualty of Iranian intractability.)
Recently, the latest round of deal-making has seemed to be nearing conclusion with a new version of the JCPOA that is unacceptable to Israel. While Bennett has pressed his objections to Biden and the leaders of most of the other countries involved in the talks, he has been making little progress and has appeared to alter his goals from derailing the agreement altogether to convincing the negotiators to remove the provisions that put Israel’s security most greatly at risk.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine and turned the international landscape upside down. Bennett has received global attention for the way he has managed to avoid taking sides in the dispute by inserting himself as a mediator between the two countries. What has received much less notice is that at precisely the same time that Bennett has been talking to Vladimir Putin, the Russian representatives to the Iranian nuclear meetings have added significant new demands to the potential agreement which now threaten to undermine the entire deal.
Let’s assume that Bennett and Putin spend most of their time discussing the war in Ukraine, since that is obviously Russia’s primary concern at the moment. It’s not hard to imagine that at some point in those hours of conversation, the two leaders might have spent at least a small amount of time talking about their mutual and now potentially overlapping interests in Iran.
From the beginning of the negotiations, Russia has advocated for Iran’s interests and has pushed strongly for the agreement. But now that the U.S. and many of its allies are imposing sanctions on Russia’s oil and gas industry, and gasoline prices are skyrocketing throughout the West, millions of barrels of Iranian oil which would become available under a new deal are looking much more alluring to Biden and his allies.
But at the same time that the West’s appetite for Iranian oil has dramatically increased, Putin obviously has a strong vested interest in keeping global energy supplies limited. The Russian leader knows that the best way to weaken the resolve of the NATO countries and their allies is to keep gasoline prices as high as possible for as long as possible. A renewed agreement with Iran that lifts sanctions on that country’s oil supply makes Russia’s fuel reserves much less necessary for the rest of the world.
It’s easy to see how Bennett might offer some encouraging words to Putin about how both countries’ interests can be served by a derailment of the nuclear talks.
Bennett knows all of this, of course, and understands how much the prospects of a new nuclear accord will diminish without Russia’s active encouragement and support. He also certainly recognizes that Putin can draw these conclusions without any help from him. But given that they are talking so regularly, it’s easy to see how the Israeli Prime Minister might offer some encouraging words to Putin about how both countries’ interests can be served by a derailment of the nuclear talks.
Last Friday, the prospect of a new JCPOA agreement was so close that the participants had actually set up a podium for a formal announcement. But Russia’s new demands derailed that plan and the negotiations are now on ice. Putin wants to see global oil prices continue to rise. Bennett does not want to see Iran develop nuclear weapons. So the two men can both enjoy the breakdown in negotiations, even if their happiness is for entirely different reasons.
Dan Schnur is a Professor at the University of California – Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine. Join Dan for his weekly webinar “Politics in the Time of Coronavirus” (www/lawac.org) on Tuesdays at 5 PM.
