Benny Avni

Benny Avni

Opinion

Saved by the French

Back when John Kerry was running for president in 2004, critics said he was “too French” to lead the free world. Now it turns out the French are tougher.

Over the weekend, France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, killed an agreement that would’ve risked letting Iran pass nuclear-weapons “go” and also began to junk vital international sanctions on the Islamic Republic. (In response, Iranian state-run TV endlessly accused the fabulous Fabius of being “a Zionist agent.”)

What a difference a decade makes. Now Kerry & Co. are cheeseburger-eating surrender monkeys, while the French stand up to the Axis of Weasel.

On Friday, Secretary of State Kerry cut short his Mideast trip, jetting to Switzerland to join talks among the world’s six leading powers and Tehran. Next to show were foreign ministers of the other nations involved, raising hopes that a “historic” accord on Iran’s nukes was all but ready to be inked.

Never mind that Kerry’s goal in his travels had been to repair relations with allies angry that US policies have grown so soft. And never mind that as Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of our strongest Mideast ally, accompanied Kerry to Ben Gurion airport for the flight to Geneva, he warned against signing “a very, very bad deal.”

Yet Kerry was plainly still salivating over his chance to make history by “ending” the decades-old standoff over Tehran’s nuclear drive. No less than Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the Senate Foreign Relation Committee chairman, told ABC-TV Sunday, “We seem to want a deal more than the Iranians.”

In Geneva, in fact, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was grinning like a wolf at the sight of Little Red Riding Hood.

Until France’s Fabius pulled out his axe, calling the proposal “a con game.”

He alone saw the fallacy of the proposed deal: Iran was to halt a very small part of its nuclear program for six months, while the West would start dismantling the sanctions regime that forced Tehran to talk.

Kerry et al claimed our concessions would be “reversible.” Reportedly, they included unfreezing $3 billion Iranian assets held in US banks, plus (according to Israeli reports) easing restrictions on trading gold, cars and aviation parts.

Yet they also would’ve defied six UN Security Council resolutions that insist Tehran completely scrap its uranium-enrichment program.

As Iran’s “moderate” president, Hassan Rouhani, stressed over the weekend, enrichment is the regime’s “red line.” This, the deal-hungry in the West tell us, means we must set aside those UN-based demands to have “realistic” negotiations with the Iranians.

But Security Council resolutions carry the weight of international law. Once we start ignoring them, countries that have only agreed to join us in sanctioning Iran because “it’s the law” will surely drop out. Once the sanctions dam is cracked, a flood of business deals with Iran will follow, whether or not they technically violate still-existing bans.

(In fact, as the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake and Josh Rogin reported Friday, President Obama already started an “Iranian détente,” by putting a freeze on Treasury Department blacklisting of Iranian persons and firms linked to the nuclear program since this summer’s Rouhani election.)

Meanwhile, the real “reversible” parts of the deal are Iran’s miniscule concessions.

According to reports from Geneva, Fabius stopped the rush to sign an accord by demanding that Iran stop all activity at its Arak heavy water plant. He also wanted more restrictions on uranium enrichment, plus assurances of better access for international inspectors — all of which were missing from the proposed deal.

Iran is already nearing the stage where it need only “push a button” to become a nuclear power. Its biggest challenge is how to turn the raw material that it amassed into a deliverable nuclear weapon. Nothing in the proposed deal stopped its advance on that front.

(The International Atomic Energy Agency’s chairman, Yukiya Amano, lands in Tehran today. He’s expected to push for access to Iran’s Parchin military complex, where Iran does its secret weaponization work.)

“We are not blind and I don’t think we are stupid,” Kerry told NBC on Sunday. But our Mideast allies fear that America is about to give away the store.

International talks resume Nov. 20. Let’s hope Congress tightens sanctions by then, rather than easing them. After all, we can’t rely forever on the French and the United Nations to stop Obama from making his promises to stop Iran from going nuclear into as much of a dead letter as the ones about keeping the insurance that we like.