U.S. officials have been easing off on demands from President Donald Trump about the Iran nuclear deal while Iran ramps up its ballistic missile program, multiple sources with knowledge of the talks told The Washington Free Beacon.
Senior officials in the Trump administration recently said to the Free Beacon that the U.S. is prepared to abandon the deal if allies in Europe do not address flaws that the administration sees in the deal.
Insiders said that the U.S. appears to be moving closer to the European position, with cosmetic changes that would not focus on Iran's missile buildup, the Free Beacon reported.
"If Trump doesn't take control of these negotiations, he will be to Iranian missiles what (Barack) Obama was to Iranian enrichment," one veteran foreign policy analyst said in the Free Beacon.
"Combined, Obama and Trump's negotiators could end up giving us a bipartisan Iranian nuclear weapon capable of bringing a second Holocaust. What does it say that Donald Trump's negotiators have a weaker position on Iranian missiles than the United Nations?" the official said in the Free Beacon.
"We need to address the Iranian ballistic missile threat as it appears today, and ensure Iran does not have a free pass to potentially test and acquire ballistic missiles that can be used to rain nuclear bombs down on Riyadh and Jerusalem," one senior congressional official said to the Free Beacon.
"The only acceptable fix to the Iran deal is one that prohibits all nuclear capable ballistic missiles, which is what the relevant U.N. resolution says anyway, if the international community would ever bother to enforce it," Omri Ceren, a managing director at The Israel Project, told the Free Beacon.
Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., has proposed a "zero tolerance" clause on Iranian ballistic missiles, which would return all sanctions that were waived in the nuclear deal if Iran tests any ballistic missile, Axios reported in January.
The Roskam legislation is the the "gold standard for how to fix the Iran deal when it comes to ballistic missiles," Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in the Axios report.
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