Fearing President-elect Joe Biden may re-enter talks with Iran and agree to abide by the same nuclear deal from 2015, Israel and several Arab states have tried to have their input heard and perhaps be included in the negotiating team, Politico reported Tuesday.
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"Representatives of some Gulf Arab countries as well as Israel are raising the idea in private and public conversations in the run-up to the start of the Biden administration," the site reported. "After all, ambassadors of three of the countries argued in interviews with POLITICO, they have more at stake than the United States or the other countries who crafted the 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran. Bringing them on board, they add, would beef up the US leverage over Iran."
Israel has recently announced peace deals with the UAE and Bahrain, in part because of the growing threat of Iran, which has flouted the main provisions of the 2015 deal over the past several years. Iran has said that it would go back to the deal if the US would agree to do the same, and Biden has said that he was open to the idea, although Israel Hayom has been told that he might keep the harsh sanctions imposed by the Trump administration as a means of extracting more favorable terms from Iran for a new deal, whether now or down the road.
According to Politico, Israel and the two Arab states would "prefer that Biden forget the original deal and start afresh in hopes of inking a tougher agreement that could even cover Iran's non-nuclear programs, such as its ballistic missiles and use of proxy militias. And that's to say nothing of what Iran's Islamist leaders, who have defied and baffled US presidents going back four decades, will agree to do."
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