US President Joe Biden this week returned from an embarrassing, gaffe-filled trip to Europe to address the war in Ukraine. While there, he escalated tensions between Russia and the West by calling for the overthrow of President Vladimir Putin.
It might look like a serious crisis in relations, but Russia’s actions in Ukraine don’t seem to be derailing everything. Despite tough talk and unprecedented economic sanctions for the brutal war on Ukraine, Biden administration diplomats are showing themselves to be far more deferential in their negotiations with the Russians in Vienna.
It is impossible to overstate the incongruency in tone between Biden’s vocal belligerence on Russia and his administration’s quiet desperation to obtain a new Iran deal. Both Tehran and Moscow know that Biden will not take no for an answer and that he is determined to bring back anything he can call a “deal.”
Whatever happens in Vienna will greatly affect the US’ ability to maneuver diplomatically when it comes to Ukraine, as well as in Europe and Asia.
Rather than negotiate directly on a new (though admittedly dangerous) nuclear deal with the Iranians, Washington empowered the far more cagey and skilled Russian diplomats to handle the mullahs’ portfolio. If this sounds familiar, it should: Obama alums like National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman have, as they did in Syria in 2015, again empowered Russia as the decisive stakeholder in the Middle East.
Aside from a bad new Iran deal that would remove sanctions on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terrorists, flush the regime with cash and put Iran within months of obtaining nuclear capability, Biden’s insistence on both Russian and Iranian buy-in will hurt the US in two immediate ways. It will empower Russia at a time when it is both diplomatically isolated and economically frozen out of key markets, giving it more leverage; and it will further alienate America’s allies in the region, which have already begun to recalibrate what a more hostile (but declining) US would mean for the region and the world.
Because of the corrupt media in the West, observers in the Middle East might be the only ones with a vantage point to clearly see how these two issues are linked. While American and European news consumers have been focused on horrific images from Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, in Riyadh or Jerusalem one eye is always on the expansionist and threatening regime in Tehran.
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