He has leverage. He should use it

For the past four years Iran’s enemies in the Middle East have had a friend in the White House. President Donald Trump blamed Iran for the region’s problems, sold arms to Israel and Arab states, and pulled America out of the deal that saw Iran limit its nuclear programme and agree to inspections in return for the lifting of international sanctions. In November Mr Trump retweeted news of the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the architect of Iran’s past nuclear-weapons programme.

The killing appears to have been the work of Israel, which has a history of bumping off Iranian nuclear scientists. With the clock ticking on the Trump administration, it may have been an attempt to scorch the earth before Joe Biden takes over. When it comes to Iran, Mr Biden prefers statecraft to sanctions and talks to targeted killings. He promises to return to the nuclear deal if Iran, which began breaching parts of it last year, moves back into compliance.

The assassin was not a human. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, erstwhile maestro of Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme, was gunned down on November 27th by a remote-controlled machinegun mounted on an exploding pickup truck—if Fars, an Iranian news agency, is to be believed. “No one was present at the scene,” said Ali Shamkhani, the head of Iran’s national security council. Other accounts suggest that gummen—human ones—were on the ground, and escaped. The bullets were certainly real.

Mr Fakhrizadeh, notionally a physics professor, was the brains behind Project Amad, Iran’s clandestine pursuit of nuclear weapons from the 1980s to 2003. After Iran’s leaders halted the formal programme, Mr Fakhrizadeh continued to dabble in dual-use research, presumably to keep alive the possibility of a bomb. Documents stolen by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, suggest that 70% of Mr Fakhrizadeh’s staff under Project Amad stayed with him in a new organisation.

 

Source - economist.com

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22.01.2021 11:05