In a sharply critical article in the Spectator, Jake Wallis Simons has called the Iran nuclear talks one of “the West’s great foreign policy failures of 2021”.

Simons, who is the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, has based some of his criticism on information from unnamed diplomatic sources, but also on arguments such as candidate Joe Biden’s move in September 2020 to telegraph his eagerness to rejoin the Obama-era 2015 nuclear agreement known as the JCPOA.

Simons said in the Staurday op-ed that “there has been a dramatic failure to extract any concessions from Tehran,” not even a freeze on Iran’s uranium enrichment that is bringing the country close to the threshold of stockpiling enough fissile material for a bomb.

He quoted diplomatic sourcesas having described the chief American negotiator Robert Malley as “the most dovish official we’ve ever seen.”

Simons wrote that Malley “has bent over backwards so far that, as one official put it, he now speaks to Tehran from between his legs.”

The Op-ed also described tensions among Western countries involved in the talks and the European often trying to hold back the Biden Administration from making unnecessary concession to Iran.

Simmons concludes. “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that 2022 will be Iran’s year.”