On Tuesday, the Biden administration gave senators their first classified private briefing on Iran. This administration has been in office for more than two years. It has a lot to explain. But it doesn’t want to talk about it.

Reviving the Iran Deal was a central goal of Joe Biden’s foreign policy. The failure of the negotiations in Vienna was a public humiliation for the United States, just as the Iranian regime intended.

The recent reconciliation of Saudi Arabia and Iran, stage-managed by China, was even worse, just as all three parties intended. Last November, Biden was asked at a rally about the status of the Iran negotiations.

joe biden

Joe Biden (Photo: Getty Images)

“It’s dead, but we’re not gonna announce it,” the president ad-libbed with characteristic discretion.

Nevertheless, some nameless Democratic staffer was insisting before Tuesday’s briefing that Wendy Sherman, the Deputy Secretary of State, would “update” senators on the state of negotiations.

The real update is that Sherman, the US’s second most senior diplomat, suddenly announced her retirement last week. Sherman’s boss, the hapless Antony Blinken, did not attend the briefing.

US Special Envoy for Iran Robert MalleyGettyImages-1240895059

US Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley (Photo: Getty Images)

Robert Malley, the State Department’s special envoy for Iran, wasn’t there either. He, according to anonymous sources, is “on leave”.

And Malley’s negotiating team has disbanded. Malley’s deputy, Richard Nephew, the Wall Street Journal reported in January 2022, was one of three members of Malley’s team to leave because they disagreed with his tactics and wanted a “harder negotiating stance”.

A career Iran specialist, Nephew was one of the architects of the US’s sanctions on Iran. He has now been sidelined as the administration’s Global Anticorruption Coordinator.

Malley was the lead negotiator on Barack Obama’s JCPOA deal in 2015, and the lead negotiator on Biden’s attempt to resuscitate it.

The entire world manages to drop in via Zoom when it matters, but Malley now prefers to dodge difficult questions. So does Blinken, who blithely declared in January that reviving the Iran deal had “not been on the agenda as a practical matter for many months now”.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, has been asking for an Iran briefing ever since.

Wendy Sherman former deputy US Secretary of State ( who quite GettyImages-1234749642

Wendy Sherman (Photo: Getty Images)

Last month, another Republican, Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, led a dozen senators in a bipartisan appeal for the administration to enforce oil sanctions on Iran.

It is, she said on Monday, “incredibly disappointing” that the letter “has yet to receive an answer from the administration, despite a requested deadline of today”.

The Democrats’ line is that the Vienna talks failed because Iran has sided with Russia in Ukraine. The facts do not support this exercise in covering the bureaucratic posterior.

The talks never went anywhere, and Malley’s team fell apart three months before Russia invaded Ukraine.

On Monday, John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said that since August, Iran has supplied more than 400 drones to Russia, most of them Shahed “suicide drones”, while Russia is selling fighter jets to Tehran and assisting Iran’s missile and air-defence programmes. Kirby described the Russian-Iran alignment as “a full-scale defence partnership”.

It is the Biden administration’s stated policy to resist Russian expansion and strike a deal with Iran.

But Iran has long been an instrument of Russian expansion in the Middle East, and Russia has long supported Iran’s nuclear programme while exploiting Iran’s push for regional dominance. You could drive a Fajr-3 240mm mobile rocket launcher through the gaps in the Biden team’s logic.

As usual, the big American Jewish organisations have nothing to say. The Anti-Defamation League is more concerned with policing pronouns and parsing the monologues of Tucker Carlson than with the dangerous incoherence of Biden’s foreign policy.

As for the terrifying prospect of a nuclear Iran committed to undoing American influence and destroying Israel, best not to talk about it.

Dominic Green is a contributor to the ‘Wall Street Journal’ and a columnist for the ‘Washington Examiner’.