The new US administration should not return to the spirit of the Iran deal, which could spark an arms race in the Middle East, former secretary of state and national security advisor Henry Kissinger warned at an online conference of the Jewish People Policy Institute on Monday.
Kissinger criticized the 2015 Iran deal, which President Donald Trump left in 2018, and President-elect Joe Biden seeks to return to if Iran agrees to comply again with the agreement’s limitations on its nuclear program.
"We should not fool ourselves,” the 97-year-old diplomat, consultant and author said. “I don’t believe that the spirit [of the Iran deal], with a time limit and so many escape clauses, will do anything other than bring nuclear weapons all over the Middle East and therefore create a situation of latent tension that sooner or later will break out.”
The current regime in Iran “don’t seem to find it possible to give up this combination of Islamist imperialism and threat,” he said. “The test case is the evolution of nuclear capacities in Iran, if these can be avoided.”
At the same time, Kissinger clarified: “I do not say we shouldn’t talk to them.”
Dennis Ross, former advisor to presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, interviewed Kissinger at the JPPI farewell event for its founding director Avinoam Bar-Yosef.
Ross asked Kissinger what he would advise Biden and his administration to do to take advantage of the Abraham Accords, in which four Arab states normalized ties with Israel. READ MORE
