Who Lost Iran?
President Biden entered office vowing to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action - JCPOA - better known as the Iran Deal. What in 2O15 was hailed as a stunning win for diplomacy by most of the world was summarily executed in infancy by the Trump Administration. The JCPOA foreclosed all pathways towards a nuclear bomb to Iran. For a year after Trump aborted the Agreement, Iran continued to comply with its requirements. But faced with the U.S. refusing to lift sanctions as called for by the Agreement, Iran restarted its uranium enrichment program.
Biden was expected to move quickly to rejoin the JCPOA once in office. The moderate Rouhani Administration, which negotiated for Iran, had only a few months left in its second term. Inexplicably, Biden hesitated and instead made an attempt to soften Israeli and Saudi Arabian opposition to any agreement between the U.S. and Iran, a pointless endeavor. Talks to rejoin stalled. A new conservative government came to power in Iran and the two sides again circled their wagons. The current round of talks is on life support.
However, the fallout from Trump reneging on the initial Agreement cost America credibility and signaled to the international community that America’s signature on official documents may turn out to mean nothing. Biden refuses to guarantee that a future Republican president won’t pull the plug on any agreement he signs now. How could he? The international business community assesses that, even if the Administration did lift sanctions against Iran, no sane players would invest in the country given the uncertainty of the American commitment.
The new round of negotiations last week began on a negative note, as experts expected. Israel and Saudi Arabia’s opposition to American diplomacy is like granite and once again opposes American interests. Iran is staking out a hard line under the new conservative government. That has led Trita Parsi, VP of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and staunch defender of the JCPOA, to conclude:
“While escalation toward conflict remains the most likely outcome if diplomacy is abandoned, changing circumstances have also allowed another potential outcome to emerge: The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the Iran deal is known, would all but die, but the parties would pretend that it is still alive to avoid the crisis that its official death would spur. Let’s call it the coma option. Think of how Western powers have pretended that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been alive for the last decades.”
Horrible Dictu!