With Iran a central bad actor in fomenting terrorism through proxies in the Mideast and providing weapons to Russia in Ukraine, it is unfathomable to witness European allies and the Biden administration allowing sanctions on their sale of drone and missile armaments to expire.
All of this terminated a 2007 permanent embargo unanimously imposed on Iran sales of ballistic missiles by the UN Security Council which was subsequently downgraded in 2015 by the Obama administration to sunset unless reestablished by the Oct. 18 "Transition Day" which the Biden administration quietly allowed to lapse.
Be reminded that Iran is the main instigator and sponsor of Mideast mayhem including the most recent and devastating Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli communities from Gaza on the south supported by Hezbollah Lebanese factions on the north.
Iran also supplies weaponized drones employed in Russian assaults on Ukrainian communities and defense forces.
The whole idea behind the original arms sanctions was that making nice with Tehran mullahs would induce them to reciprocate in honoring terms of a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA: July 14, 2015) more infamously known as an "Iran Nuclear Deal" so fervently pursued by both Obama and Biden along with European allies.
The JCPOA permitted the lifting of the UN ban on Iran’s ballistic missile activities, whereby: "Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology."
We have recently learned that top Obama JCPOA negotiator and Biden Iran envoy pick Robert Malley has had his security clearance rescinded for allegedly mishandling classified information in connection with suspected connections to an "Iranian spy ring."
Those years of failed JCPOA attempts have allowed Tehran to achieve near atomic weapons grade capabilities that are reportedly only days or weeks away under continued Biden negotiations brokered on America’s behalf by Russia.
President Obama had assured America and the international community that Tehran noncompliance would trigger so-called "snapback" sanctions to discourage malign behavior after the original arms embargo was allowed to expire in October 2020, with missile and drone limits expiring this month.
Instead, the U.S. lamely imposed its own missile sanctions which aren’t either internationally binding or credible given Biden abandonment of former President Trump’s oil export sanctions and other pathetically subservient appeasement policy positions towards Iran.
Recall that the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel that claimed more than 1,400 lives occurred just weeks after the Biden administration agreed to release $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets to secure five U.S. prisoners in exchange for several of theirs.
Also recall that the Trump administration had frozen that Iranian money along with even much larger estimated $80-$90 billion in revenues from their oil exports — mostly to China — precisely to defund their promulgation of proxy terrorism.
Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 because it was clear that the deal offered no real hope to stop Iran’s drive to weaponize a nuclear device, degrade its ballistic missile program and end its sponsorship of terrorism.
As a State Department spokesperson explained, since the U.S. is no longer a party to JCPOA, the snapback mechanism that the overwhelming majority of U.N Security Council members agreed to in 2020 "had not snapped back into place."
Nevertheless, as Richard Goldberg, who served on the National Security Council during the Trump administration as the director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction, told Fox News Digital, the Biden administration would have multiple pathways to try stopping the sanctions from expiring.
Goldberg, also a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), notes that U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 states unequivocally that the U.S. is a partner to the resolution that endorsed the JCPOA, and therefore a formal request to the Security Council president from key NATO EU3 allies — the U.K., France and Germany — could likely have reinstituted an international sanctions snapback agreement.
Perhaps Richard Goldberg is giving the U.N. leadership far too much credit regarding a peace guardianship role.
Seemingly blaming Israel for the brutal Hamas attacks on its citizens, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres observed, "The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.
"They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced, and their homes demolished."
Meanwhile, as Tehran continues to fund acts terrorism with relief of oil exports to China and U.S. hostage ransom that supply weapons used against allied U.S. and European Ukraine defense forces, they can now legally expand that lucrative arms market to other adversaries.
Israeli intelligence reportedly believes that roughly 50 nations have an appetite for Iranian drones.
Included is Bolivia’s socialist government, which according to the Iranian regime-controlled Islamic News Agency, recently signed a defense and security MOU to obtain Iranian drone technology.
As Richard Goldberg observes, President Biden "gives a speech saying he is heartbroken about the images of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and opposes Hamas, and a week later, he hands a gift to Hamas’ sponsor, Iran."
This, removal of UN sanctions on Iran’s missile program, he adds, "will be a huge victory for Tehran that is simply serving as a reward for terrorism and proliferation around the world."
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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