The Biden administration’s appeasement of Iran is already bearing bitter fruit. The Iranians now feel strong enough, as they did not during the Trump administration, to tell Biden and the Europeans to go take a hike over talks on the nuclear deal. Apparently the recent pinprick bombing of Iranian forces in Syria didn’t have the desired effect.

Now Biden, in a likely coordinated move with the Euros, gets a door slammed in his face. How long will this happen until he wises up? Into perpetuity.

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FNC: “Iran rejected a European Union offer to arrange direct nuclear talks with the U.S., senior diplomats say, risking fresh tension between Tehran and Western capitals. Two senior Western diplomats said Iran has ruled out attending a meeting in Europe for now, saying it wanted a guarantee first that the U.S. would lift some sanctions after the meeting. The U.S. had said it would attend the talks, which the EU had hoped to host in the coming days. However, Washington had refused to provide sanctions relief before face-to-face negotiations with Iran had taken place.”

The only person still in the process not taken in by the Iranians is Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. “It is most important that Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, with or without an agreement, this I also told to my friend Biden,” Netanyahu said Monday. After the Iranians hit a ship in the Persian Gulf recently, Netanyahu told an Israeli public broadcaster  that “it was indeed an act by Iran, that’s clear…Iran is the greatest enemy of Israel, I am determined to halt it. We are hitting it in the entire region.”

 

Iran “strongly rejected” Netanyahu’s claims. Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said Netanyahu was “suffering from an obsession with Iran” and described his charges as “fear-mongering.” Khatibzadeh also accused Israel of taking “suspicious actions in the region” to kill the nuclear deal and promised Iran would respond.

“Israel knows very well that our response in the field of national security has always been fierce and accurate,” he said. It is a seriocomic part of Iranian diplomatic messaging to engage in the kind of hyperbole that would make Donald Trump blush. Since the late 1940s Israel’s enemies have been boasting of their military prowess against the sole democratic outpost in the Middle East. This usually happens right before the Israelis clean their entire clock in a battle or two. Thus “fierce and accurate” can be better translated into “clumsy and ineffective.”

What the Iranians have done is motivate moderate Arab states in the region to form a not so secret military alliance with Israel. Thus, if the Iranians get cute it won’t be the Israelis alone they take on. But probably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Bahrain as well. You’d think the Biden administration would get this and act accordingly. But, nah.