When Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and U.A.E. Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan on Oct. 13, statements were made indicating that time is running out for Iran to return to the Vienna talks on restoring the JCPOA. “Israel reserves the right to act at any given moment, in any way,” Lapid said during a joint press conference among the three ministers. “That is not only our right; it is also our responsibility. Iran has publicly stated it wants to wipe us out. We have no intention of letting this happen.”
When asked how much time there is left to reach an agreement, Lapid reiterated that as Biden said when he met Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in Washington that other options are on the table if diplomacy fails. “And yes, we are discussing in length the option, and I discussed this with Mr. Sullivan, we’re going to discuss this in the bilateral meeting with Secretary Blinken, and we have mentioned this even in this session,” he said. “As I was saying in my opening remarks, sometimes the world has to show its hand in order to make sure Iran understands the consequences of running to become a threshold country. We’re not going to allow this to happen, and I think everybody in this room shares this sentiment, and we are discussing how to make sure this will never happen.”
“We’re united in the proposition that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon, and President Biden is committed to that proposition,” Blinken said in response to the same question. What the U.S. is not seeing, Blinken went on, is a willingness on the part of Tehran to return to compliance with the JCPOA. “And time is running short because, as we’ve also had an opportunity to discuss together, we are getting closer to a point at which returning to compliance with the JCPOA will not in and of itself recapture the benefits of the JCPOA, and that’s because Iran has been using this time to advance its nuclear program in a variety of ways, including enriching uranium to 20% and even 60%, using more advanced centrifuges, acquiring more knowledge,” Blinken said. “And so that runway is getting shorter.”
A senior Israeli diplomatic official briefed reporters on background after the Blinken-Lapid bilateral meeting, that they discussed courses of action regarding Iran’s nuclear program that had not been on the table before, without saying what those actions might be. “There were closed-door talks during the visit about what happens if there is no agreement [for Iran to return to the 2015 nuclear deal], and indeed, options that were not on the table until now were discussed,” the senior official said, reported the Times of Israel.
