In the Middle East, Israel has had a nuclear weapon since the late nineteen-sixties. The talks with Tehran are designed to prevent a tenth nation-the latest was North Korea, in 2006-from getting the bomb. The Pentagon estimates that China could have at least a thousand bombs by 2030. Nuclear pacts hammered out in the last century are dated or fraying, as the U.S., Russia, and China modernize their arsenals. The world’s nuclear order, already perilous, is now at risk of unravelling. “They are miscalculating and playing with fire.” “We’ve seen Iran’s nuclear program expand, and we’ve seen Tehran become more belligerent, more bellicose in its regional activities,” he said. The bizarre diplomacy, Malley told me, took on unprecedented urgency in November. Was there a similar exercise in the history of international relations? I can not recollect anything like that. “The goal is to restore a nearly ruined deal piece by piece. “The aim isn’t to update an agreement or elaborate a new one,” he tweeted. The Russian envoy, Mikhail Ulyanov, described the Vienna process as one of the strangest in modern diplomacy. Infuriated, they stop playing before the game is finished. Both players claim that they are winning. Malley compared proxy talks to a Woody Allen story, “The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers.” In it, two men play chess by mail. Delegations from the other five nations consulted at a third hotel. Enrique Mora, a Spanish diplomat for the European Union, carried proposals back and forth. The Iranians were eight blocks away, at the InterContinental. During talks in Vienna this past spring, the Americans stayed at the Hotel Imperial. But when he became Biden’s envoy the Iranian diplomats he’d known for decades refused to meet with him. He kept in touch with some of his Iranian contacts. had never taken against another nation’s military, even the Nazi Wehrmacht.ĭuring the Trump years, Malley was appointed president of the International Crisis Group. Trump also designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s most powerful military branch, as a terrorist group-an action that the U.S. They targeted the Supreme Leader, the Foreign Minister, judges, generals, scientists, banks, oil facilities, a shipping line, an airline, charities, and allies, such as the President of Venezuela, for doing business with Tehran. He also imposed more than a thousand sanctions on Iran. Influenced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and by Republican hawks, President Donald Trump abandoned the deal in 2018. The agreement survived for only two years. They exchanged family stories, cell-phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. Malley, who deliberates with the intensity of a lawyer but is soft-spoken in person, was on a first-name basis with his Iranian counterparts. During two years of tortuous talks, the Iranians often met the Americans in hotel hallways to thrash out issues. Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia were equal partners, but the United States had a virtual veto, and Iran knew it. The agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was the most significant nonproliferation pact in more than a quarter century. As part of his job, he met with Iranian officials and travelled to Tehran.ĭuring the Obama Administration, he was on the team that produced the Iran nuclear deal, in 2015. Former colleagues publicly called the attacks on Malley “unfair, inappropriate, and wrong.” After Clinton left office, Malley worked on Iran at the International Crisis Group, which tracks global conflicts. Critics declared Malley rabidly anti-Israel. Malley published detailed insider accounts about how the Israelis shared the blame, for making proposals difficult for Arafat to accept. After they collapsed, in 2000, he broke with the conventional analysis that the summit had failed because of Yasir Arafat’s intransigence. Working on the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration, Malley participated in the Camp David peace talks. His father was a French journalist known for his support of anti-colonialist movements. Malley has long experience with the Middle East. Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiated at his wedding. He graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White. Malley, who is fifty-eight, grew up in France and was in the same high-school class in Paris as Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Shortly after his Inauguration, Joe Biden appointed Rob Malley to be his special envoy for Iran.
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