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In Israel and the Gulf, Reaction to U.S. Push for Iran Talks Is Muted but Wary

Nations that opposed the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran responded cautiously to the Biden administration’s decision to re-engage, while those that supported the deal cheered the move.

The administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has announced its intent to restart nuclear talks with Iran.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

JERUSALEM — When the United States last tried to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, the reaction from the Israeli government was blunt and fierce. In the years preceding Iran’s 2015 agreement with Washington and several other leading powers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel repeatedly called the negotiations a “historic mistake.”

But on Friday, the formal announcement that the Biden administration was seeking a return to nuclear negotiations with Iran, after the collapse of the 2015 agreement under President Trump, did not provoke a sharp backlash — not just in Jerusalem, but also in the Gulf nations of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which also oppose too generous a rapprochement with Iran.

The muted response from Iran’s regional antagonists may mask a strong undercurrent of pessimism and behind-the-scenes pushback against the Americans’ decision. Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates remain wary of Iran’s intentions, and have signaled that they would be open to a deal only if it went well beyond the previous one — reining in Iran’s ballistic missile program, its meddling in other countries and the militias it supports in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere, in addition to its nuclear program.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office issued a brief statement, avoiding direct comment on the American intention to negotiate, but noting that Israel was in contact with the United States.

“Israel remains committed to preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, and its position on the nuclear agreement has not changed,” the statement said. “Israel believes that going back to the old agreement will pave Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal.”

Western diplomats and former Israeli officials said that the Israelis had accepted the need to engage constructively with Washington instead of dismissing the negotiations out of hand.

Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s minister for community affairs, said the Israeli government was not intrinsically opposed to negotiations. But the talks had to yield a better deal than the one in 2015, which Israel and the Gulf countries condemned because its restrictions on Iranian nuclear activities would expire in a decade and a half and because it did nothing to restrict Iranian military activity across the Middle East.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel did not comment directly on the negotiations, but his government is lobbying the United States for an agreement that is much tougher on Iran. Credit...Pool photo by Marc Israel Sellem

“We would like the negotiations to emphasize what the world would like to see: an agreement for a longer time — for at least 50 years, if not more,” Mr. Hanegbi said in an interview. “It has to be an agreement that will be valid for generations. Anything else will not achieve the goal of preventing a nuclear Iran.”

Saudi and Emirati officials, for their part, were silent on Friday. Watching the Biden administration’s outreach to Tehran with resignation, the two Gulf States — which were outraged at being excluded from the last negotiations — can only hope that the United States will keep its promises to consider Gulf interests in the talks, analysts said.

“We just have to trust the new administration,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist. “We don’t have any option. They really are determined to reach out to Iran, so there’s no way that anybody could stop them.”

But he acknowledged there could be something to gain, saying, “If the end result is less confrontation with Iran, a less aggressive Iran, a less expansionist Iran, it’s a dream of a sort.”

The Israeli government’s reticence reflects a less combative approach to the Biden administration’s policymaking than with President Barack Obama’s, at least initially, said Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence.

“Practically, they will not confront the Biden administration directly,” he said. “They will wait a little bit to see whether the Iranians are reacting and how the negotiations develop.”

But behind the scenes, Israel is already lobbying the United States for an agreement that is much tougher on Iran. The Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, and a team of experts will soon travel to Washington to brief senior American officials about what they see as the threats still posed by Iran, hoping to persuade the United States to hold out for harsher restrictions on Iran in any deal, two senior Israeli officials said.

Israeli intelligence suggests that Iran has blatantly violated the terms of the original nuclear deal and is still taking steps to develop a nuclear warhead, the officials said, claims that Iran denies.

In Europe, Russia and China, which supported the original deal and opposed President Trump’s withdrawal from it, the reaction was positive.

“The U.S.A. is giving diplomacy a chance,” Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, wrote on Twitter. “We expressly welcome and support this!”

Mr. Maas also warned Iran against taking aggressive measures at a time when diplomatic breakthroughs seemed possible. “Now the Iranian leaders must also show that they are serious,” he said.

In Russia — an ally of Iran and a signatory to the nuclear deal — the Kremlin praised how the White House had also backed away from the Trump administration effort to restore United Nations sanctions on Iran.

“Halting the call for sanctions is a good thing, on its own,” said Dmitri S. Peskov, President Vladimir V. Putin’s spokesman. “This is an event that one can probably mark with a plus sign.”

China, which signed a trade and military pact with Iran last year and is another signatory, reiterated Friday that the United States should “unconditionally” rejoin the nuclear deal. It has opposed renegotiating a new agreement in the past.

An unconditional return “is the key to breaking the deadlock,” Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, said at a news conference.

Biden administration officials said Friday that the next move was Iran’s, and that they did not intend to offer concessions or incentives for Tehran to join negotiations.

“We don’t anticipate taking additional steps,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters traveling with President Biden on Air Force One. A senior administration official said that any U.S. actions, such as the removal of sanctions on Iran, would have to be discussed at the negotiating table.

Iranian officials did not formally respond to Mr. Biden’s proposal on Friday, although several officials said Thursday that Iran would likely join the talks. But they did reiterate their position that the United States must lift sanctions first before Iran would return to its commitments under the nuclear agreement.

“Gestures are fine,” Saeed Khatibzadeh, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said on Twitter. But to revive the nuclear talks, he said, the “U.S. must Act: LIFT sanctions. We WILL respond.”

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A shopping arcade in Tehran last month. Iran’s economy has been damaged by Trump-era sanctions, and Tehran is insisting on their removal before negotiations can begin.Credit...Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA, via Shutterstock

In the Persian Gulf, American allies who view Iran as a major threat were gritting their teeth over the possible talks.

Ali Shihabi, a Saudi political commentator who is viewed as being close to the government, said Saudi Arabia had been signaling to the Biden administration for months that it supported re-engaging with Iran, but only if the goal was a deal with additional constraints on Iran’s regional behavior.

“The Biden people are making all the right noises,” he said, “but the proof is in the pudding.”

Calling renewed negotiations with Iran “a totally mind-boggling thing to do,” Mohammed Alyahya, the editor in chief of the English website of the Saudi-owned news channel Al Arabiya, warned that lifting sanctions against Iran would mean relinquishing all the leverage the Trump administration accrued through its maximum-pressure campaign of economic punishment, leaving Tehran to do as it pleased.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” Mr. Alyahya said. “Going back to the same deal is going to yield the same exact results that the first deal did: an empowered Iran, an Iran that is going to quickly try to reclaim its regional leverage that it has lost as a result of the maximum pressure campaign. This is not a regime that will act in good faith.”

Yet amid a cooling in U.S.-Saudi relations — Biden officials have said they will recalibrate the relationship after four years of coziness between the Trump administration and the Saudis — Saudi Arabia’s official communications have emphasized the positive in dealings with the Biden administration so far, said Eman Alhussein, a Saudi analyst at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“They want to be seen as being part of the solution to these problems,” Ms. Alhussein said, partly because of the “atmosphere of apprehension” about the kingdom’s uncertain relationship with United States.

Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem, and Vivian Yee from Cairo. Reporting was contributed by Irit Pazner Garshowitz from Jerusalem, Steven Erlanger from Brussels, Roger Cohen from Paris, Melissa Eddy from Berlin, Anton Troianovski from Moscow, Raymond Zhong from Taipei, Taiwan, Farnaz Fassihi from New York, Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv and Michael Crowley from Washington.

A correction was made on 
Feb. 19, 2021

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry. She is Hua Chunying, not Hua Chuying.

How we handle corrections

Patrick Kingsley is the Jerusalem bureau chief, covering Israel and the occupied territories. He has reported from more than 40 countries, written two books and previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian. More about Patrick Kingsley

Vivian Yee is the Cairo bureau chief, covering politics, society and culture in the Middle East and North Africa. She was previously based in Beirut, Lebanon, and in New York, where she wrote about New York City, New York politics and immigration. More about Vivian Yee

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Israel Reacts to U.S. Strategy on Iran Quietly, but Warily. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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