Ron Dermer, former Israeli ambassador to the US and designated foreign minister for the 25th Knesset, last August delivered a harsh and decisive criticism of the American administration on the Iranian nuclear issue, as reported this evening (Thursday) on News 12.
As part of his joint podcast with Michael Makowski, called “Undemocratic”, Dermer said: “A drop of self-respect. You (the US) are the greatest power in the world, and an ancient power is trying to kill people on your soil, and you sit and bear and give with them? Do you know what their (the Biden administration’s) explanation will be? “Iran is a terrible actor, but it will be a lot worse if it has nuclear weapons. That’s their answer all the time, but they didn’t really stop them from getting nuclear weapons, they just gave them a comfortable position to break into the nuclear weapons. When you do nothing and nothing.”
He referred to Iran’s acts of aggression and said: “In response to these provocations, I think it conveys a terrible weakness. Mr. President, what are you going to do when the pizza time (for the bomb) approaches 0? People are not looking seriously at what this deal does. Is America Projecting such weakness when Iran does such actions and the US sits with them and almost begs for a deal, what message does this send to the entire region?”
In critical and sarcastic language, Dermer leaves no room for doubt and explains what he thinks about the way the Biden administration is handling the issue. “The whole idea of returning to the agreement, meaning that the US gives up all its levers due to the lifting of sanctions on Iran, and then miraculously, as if by the magic of fairies, they will convince Iran to agree to a longer and more repeated deal?”
Iranian President Raisi on the future of the nuclear agreement in his speech at the United Nations
He continued: “The maximum this deal lasts is seven or eight years, after that they can enrich as much uranium as they want, not for one bomb, not for 5 warheads, but for 100 nuclear bombs.”
To the question “What does the United States want”, Dermer has an unequivocal answer: “The policy of the Biden administration, which is similar to the policy of the Obama administration, is to contain a nuclear Iran and not to prevent a nuclear Iran. Once you understand this, their refusal to leave the negotiating table makes sense. If you ask senior officials in the Biden administration which of the two options is the worst – military cooperation with Iran or a nuclear Iran, they will say that a military confrontation is the worst option.”
Regarding the Israeli members of the Knesset, Dermer said that “it seems that the Israeli policymakers do not understand that there is no backup plan, because they (the Biden administration) oppose any kind of confrontation, so they will not work with Israel. This is what I believe, I would love to be deceived, and to be proven wrong They will not seriously work with Israel on a contingency plan, except to put handcuffs on Israel in order to prevent it from carrying out military action.”
“They are not only tactically wrong, but they are fundamentally and strategically wrong as well,” Dermer said of the US administration. “The agreement they are trying to achieve paves the way for a nuclear Iran, (the agreement) puts the entire region on a path to war. It may not seem so at first, because the agreement can make people suddenly seemingly breathe a sigh of relief, and say that we have stepped off the cliff, but all the agreement does is To put us on autopilot towards another cliff.”
He continued: “We all know it: the Saudis know it, Israel knows it, the Turks, the Egyptians. Everyone in the region knows that a nuclear agreement will make Iran a nuclear power by a certain date, no later than 2030-2031. They will make their own decisions Accordingly, and this means that (those countries) may try to obtain their own nuclear weapons, you will see the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, and because Israel is in a situation where we cannot allow a regime that publicly calls for its destruction through nuclear weapons, you are putting Israel in a position where it will have no choice but to prevent it.”