Israel welcomes a German push to expand the Iran nuclear deal into a broader security agreement, Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff said in Berlin yesterday.
Issacharoff, the nation’s envoy in Germany since 2017, said that a recent call by German Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas to reassess the 2015 nuclear accord with a new US administration was a “step in the right direction.”
The 2015 nuclear deal — known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — gave Iran relief from sanctions in return for curbs on its nuclear program.
Photo: AFP
Maas told Der Spiegel magazine this month that the existing agreement, under massive pressure after repeated Iranian breaches and US President Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018, needed an overhaul.
The “nuclear agreement plus” envisaged by Maas would bar the development of nuclear weapons, as well as place restrictions on Tehran’s ballistic rocket program and interference in countries across the region.
US president-elect Joe Biden has signaled that Washington could rejoin the deal as a starting point for follow-on negotiations if Iran returned to compliance.
However, Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif has rejected talk of reopening the accord struck five years ago after marathon talks involving the US, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
Issacharoff said that the so-called 5+1 partners needed to take Iran’s “destabilizing involvement” in countries including Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq into account in any further negotiations with Tehran.
“I think people need to realize that you can’t just turn the clock back to 2015,” he said. “There’s been a production of missiles and testing of missiles, and these issues need to be addressed, as well as the wholesale violations that Iran has carried out against the whole JCPOA agreement.”
Issacharoff said he welcomed more active involvement of Germany in Middle East diplomacy and the now robust “strategic partnership” that had developed in the 70 years since the Holocaust.
Anticipating a vast improvement in “tone” between Germany and the US with Biden at the helm, he said that Israel would like to see more of “a triangular type of strategic partnership” with the two countries on Middle East security issues.
It was Germany’s firm commitment to atone for Nazi atrocities that had allowed relations with Israel to flourish since the countries officially established diplomatic relations in 1965, he said.
Issacharoff highlighted “moving” visits by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and Auschwitz this year, and joint military exercises in August between Israeli and German fighter pilots.
“From defense issues to culture, people-to-people engagements, economy, cyber, intelligence — I can only see this as a partnership which is evolving and becoming one of, I’d say probably the most important partnership for Israel clearly in Europe, but even in global terms,” he said.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and