Reports have come out this week, that world powers and the Iranians may be inching closer to a renewed Iran nuclear accord. Troublingly, a senior Iranian official said in a recent interview, “The achievements of the Islamic Republic in the nuclear talks in the past one month were exceptional.” This comes on the heels of Iran’s top nuclear negotiator providing local reporters with a list of “concessions,” Tehran has extracted from Washington.

Diplomacy involves compromise, but if these reports are to be believed – and we’ve seen no evidence since President Biden took office that they should be discounted – it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Biden administration’s Iran negotiators are simply bad at their jobs. The American people were promised a longer and stronger agreement, yet today, Iran is boasting about the “concessions” to which Team Biden has acquiesced.

On Tuesday morning, as Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid was departing for France to discuss Iran and Hezbollah with French President Emmanuel Macron, Lapid sent a clear and unambiguous message to Israel’s neighbors to the north: if Lebanon doesn’t “rein in” Hezbollah, Israel will. In this week’s Action Update, we delve into what prompted the Prime Minister’s comments, and a number of issues directly related to the malign activities of Hezbollah and its backers in Tehran.

The Middle East is rapidly changing, and in some cases, for the better. One of the themes prevalent around the time of the Abraham Accords was that such was unthinkable just a few years prior. In this week’s Action Update, we start with an even more “once unthinkable” reality in which we presently find ourselves.