A US source told Reuters this week that Iran has dropped some of its demands that had prevented the closing of a new nuclear deal, including that IAEA probes into suspicious activity be closed.
Former US Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams told the Jerusalem Post that "if we sign an agreement without insisting on answers, Iran will have won this negotiation and we will have abandoned the IAEA."
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On the other hand, it seems unlikely that after all the haggling, Iran has dropped its demand that it be allowed to keep the highly enriched uranium that it has accumulated since breaching the original deal. The current amounts most likely make it a de-fact threshold state. They insist that allowing them to keep it would serve as a guarantee against the US pulling out of the deal.
Israeli experts believe that Iran has reached the point in which a deal would no longer be effective because it will continue with its secret nuclear program. Just several months ago, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Iran was several weeks from having enough material if it decided to break to a bomb. But now the conventional wisdom is that it already has enough material, so that means that a deal would just be a present in the form of sanction relief. According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, by the first year after sanctions are lifted, Iran will have raked in $274 billion and by 2030 this figure will stand at $1 trillion. That year Iran will also have the necessary nuclear industrial apparatus to produce a large number of bombs with the full authority of the deal, whose main provisions will have expired by then.
This means that a state that has regional and global imperialistic ambitions and has publicly stated that it wants to destroy Israel would have a nuclear weapon to achieve this. Iran's nuclear program picked up pace after President Joe Bide took office and a near government was installed in Israel. The Iranians assess that Biden will not dare attack it, particularly in light of the Afghanistan fiasco. This is their strategy, and they believe that Israel will not act unilaterally without getting the US' approval (which will not be granted). Prime Minister Yair Lapid announced just after the government was sworn in in June (as foreign minister), that he would subscribe to a policy of "no surprises" with the Americans.
Former Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer has recently said that the US has apparently shifted to a policy of containment. This means that Washington has abandoned its goal of preventing Iran's nuclearization. Israel must not agree to this lack of US resolve and must win over the American public, and over the heads of the US policymakers. The solution goes beyond military or technical aspects; Israel must have the right leaders who know how to deal with Iran in the new chapter that is about to begin.
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