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    Iran says diplomacy with US only possible if Israeli aggression stops

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    Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said that his country is ready for more diplomacy with the US only if Israel’s war on his country is brought to an end “and the aggressor is held accountable for the crimes he committed”.After several hours of talks with European foreign ministers in Geneva on Friday, there was no sign of a diplomatic breakthrough – or a resumption of negotiations with the US.Araghchi said: “Iran is ready to consider diplomacy once again and once the aggression is stopped and the aggressor is held accountable for the crimes committed. We support the continuation of discussion with [Britain, France, Germany and the EU] and express our readiness to meet again in the near future.”Late on Friday, Donald Trump said he was unlikely to press Israel to scale back its campaign to allow negotiations to continue.“I think it’s very hard to make that request right now. If somebody is winning, it’s a little bit harder to do than if somebody is losing, but we’re ready, willing and able, and we’ve been speaking to Iran, and we’ll see what happens,” he said.Araghchi said he was willing to continue talks with his European counterparts since they have not supported Israel’s attacks directly. But he said Iran was “seriously concerned over the failure of the three countries to condemn Israel’s act of aggression” and would continue to exercise its right to “legitimate defence”.He also said Iran’s capabilities, including its missile capabilities, are non-negotiable, and could not form part of the talks, a rebuff to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who in an earlier statement said they should be included in the talks.With Israeli diplomats and military commanders warning of a “prolonged war”, the route to direct talks between the US and Iran remains blocked, leaving the European countries as intermediaries.After Friday’s talks between Araghchi and his British, French and German counterparts, the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, said: “This is a perilous moment, and it is hugely important that we don’t see regional escalation of this conflict.”The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said there “can be no definitive solution through military means to the Iran nuclear problem. Military operations can delay it but they cannot eliminate it.”The talks are being held against the backdrop of Trump’s threat that the US could launch its own military assault on Iran within a fortnight – a step that would probably turn the already bloody war into a full-scale regional conflagration.European diplomats said they came to talks to deliver a tough message from the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and special envoy, Steve Witkoff: that the threat of US military action is real but that a “diplomatic pathway remains open”.But without direct talks between the US and Iran it is hard to see how an agreement can be reached to curtail Iran’s nuclear programme in a way that satisfies the US headline demand that Iran must never have a nuclear bomb.Trump suggested that European efforts would not be enough to bring any resolution. He said: “Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this.”The European ministers said they had expressed their longstanding concerns about Iran’s expansion of its nuclear programme, “which has no credible civilian purpose and is in violation of almost all provisions in the nuclear deal agreed in 2015”.The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said: “Today the regional escalation benefits no one. We must keep the discussions open.”Earlier on Friday, Macron said the European offer to end Israel’s war would include an Iranian move to zero uranium enrichment, restrictions on its ballistic missile programme and an end to Tehran’s funding of terrorist groups.The proposals were surprisingly broad, spanning a range of complex issues beyond Iran’s disputed nuclear programme, and appeared likely to complicate any solution unless an interim agreement can be agreed.One proposal recently aired is for Iran to suspend uranium enrichment for the duration of Donald Trump’s presidency. The concept of uranium enrichment being overseen by a consortium of Middle East countries – including Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – remains on the table.Macron, already accused by Trump of publicity seeking this week, set out a daunting agenda. “It’s absolutely essential to prioritise a return to substantial negotiations, including nuclear negotiations to move towards zero [uranium] enrichment, ballistic negotiations to limit Iran’s activities and capabilities, and the financing of all terrorist groups and destabilisation of the region that Iran has been carrying out for several years,” he said.In the previous five rounds of talks, the US insisted that Iran end its entire domestic uranium enrichment programme, but said it would allow Iran to retain a civil nuclear programme, including by importing enriched uranium from a multinational consortium.Iran claims that as a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, it has an absolute legal right to enrich uranium, a position neither the European nor American powers have endorsed. In the past, European negotiators have proved more adept than their US partners in finding compromises, including the temporary suspension of domestic enrichment, a principle Tehran reluctantly endorsed between 2003 and 2004. More

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      America is sleepwalking into another unnecessary war | Eli Clifton and Eldar Mamedov

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      As the United States inches closer to direct military confrontation with Iran, it is critical to recognize how avoidable this escalation has been. “We knew everything [about Israel’s plans to strike Iran], and I tried to save Iran humiliation and death,” said Donald Trump on Friday. “I tried to save them very hard because I would have loved to have seen a deal worked out.”As two of the last analysts from an American thinktank to visit Iran, just three weeks ago, we can report that Iran’s own foreign ministry and members of the nuclear negotiating team were eager to work out a deal with Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, and showed no indication they were interested in slow-walking talks.Over the course of conversations held on the sidelines of the Tehran Dialogue Forum, high-level foreign ministry officials expressed concern about the potential for a spoiling effort by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and various staff and officials showed themselves open to considering a variety of scenarios including a regional nuclear consortium for uranium enrichment under international oversight and bilateral areas of diplomatic and economic engagement with the United States.What we heard should have been cause for cautious optimism – yet instead, Washington squandered a rare diplomatic opening, seemingly allowing Israel to start a disastrous war of choice that may soon drag in the US. Contrary to the narrative that Iran was dragging its feet in negotiations, we saw no evidence of deliberate stalling. In fact, Iran’s worsening economic crisis had created a strong incentive for Tehran to strike a deal – one that would provide sanctions relief in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, with even the possibility of broader normalization with the US on the horizon. Middle-class Iranians we spoke with elsewhere in Tehran were frustrated with the economic situation and, despite a highly developed sanctions-resistant economy, eager for sanctions relief allowing them greater access to international travel and trade.Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, emphasized flexibility on nearly every issue outside Iran’s red line on low-level uranium enrichment. That was echoed in private conversations we held with foreign ministry staff and members of the nuclear negotiating team. Domestic enrichment is non-negotiable for Iran but they believed they had front-loaded their concessions to Witkoff, offering up a 3.67% limit on their enrichment with whatever monitoring and surveillance mechanisms were necessary for the US to feel confident the deal was being honored.Enrichment, even at a low level, is a matter of national pride, a symbol of scientific achievement and a defiant response to decades of sanctions, the red line consistently stated in our conversations and one which they thought was agreeable to Witkoff. Iran claimed to be completely blindsided by Witkoff’s 18 May statement that zero enrichment was the only acceptable terms for a nuclear deal but was open to returning to talks to discuss ways forward. After weathering immense economic pain to develop this capability, no Iranian government – reformist or hardline – could feasibly surrender to the zero enrichment demand. The idea that Tehran would dismantle its enrichment program in 60 days, as the Trump administration demanded, was never realistic.This was not mere stubbornness – it was rooted in deep mistrust sown by Trump. The US had already violated the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) by unilaterally withdrawing during Trump’s first term, despite Iran’s verified compliance. Why would Tehran now accept another agreement requiring total denuclearization, with no guarantee Washington wouldn’t renege again?Iranian officials signaled openness to creative solutions, including shipping excess low-enriched uranium to Russia; forming a regional consortium for enrichment; allowing US inspectors to join International Atomic Energy Agency teams – a major shift from previous positions. Other ideas were also floated at the Tehran forum, albeit not from official sources – temporary suspension of enrichment and a pause on advanced IR-6 centrifuges as confidence-building measures. Araghchi’s expressed willingness to return to JCPOA-permitted enrichment levels (below 4%) – was a concession so significant that it drew criticism from Iranian hardliners for giving too much, too soon. This was not the behavior of a regime trying to stall; it was the posture of a government eager for a deal, engaged in an effort to avoid spoilers in Jerusalem, Washington and at home in Tehran, and knowing full well that long, drawn-out negotiations would offer more, not fewer, opportunities for enemies of diplomacy to strike.The US team, led by Witkoff and mediated by Oman, seemed to share this urgency. The Iranian government seemed empowered enough to make a deal – if the US had been willing to take yes for an answer. Yet here we are, on the brink of another Middle East conflict – one that was entirely preventable. Instead of seizing this rare moment of Iranian flexibility, the US chose escalation. The consequences may be catastrophic: a wider regional war, soaring oil prices and the total collapse of diplomacy with Iran for years to come.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt is still possible to step back from the brink. Tehran has signaled willingness to re-engage in talks if Israeli ceases attack. Omani channels remain open. Yet, after the start of the Israeli bombing campaign, the political space for negotiations has shrunk.The US is sleepwalking into another Middle East quagmire, an open-ended war with unclear goals, loose talk of regime change and the potential for a regional conflagration if Iran attacks US military installations in the Persian Gulf. And this war comes after Iran extended a real offer for compromise. If Washington chooses bombs over diplomacy, history will record this as a war not of necessity, but of tragic, reckless choice.

      Eli Clifton is senior adviser at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

      Eldar Mamedov is non-resident fellow at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and member of the Pugwash Council on Science and World Affairs More

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      ‘Will Trump give up the store?’ Edward Fishman on how US economic warfare works – and doesn’t

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      Edward Fishman’s first book, Chokepoints, is a study of American economic warfare. Densely reported but fast-moving, the book examines recent US sanctions policy regarding Iran, Russia and China, and how the dollar’s dominance of international financial systems has allowed administrations to pursue political aims.Fishman’s own service under Barack Obama, at Treasury, Pentagon and State, stands him in good stead. So does teaching at Columbia and being a Washington thinktank fellow.As Chokepoints comes out, Donald Trump is beginning talks with Russia aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. Russia is seeking relief from US sanctions, which Trump seems inclined to give, and Ukraine and Europe are increasingly isolated from the US.“The record of the first Trump administration on Russia is not particularly strong,” Fishman said, diplomatically, when asked what the US might expect from a president widely held to be in thrall to Vladimir Putin – and speaking before Trump’s spectacular Oval Office argument with Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and subsequent suspension of US military aid.Fittingly, as the author of a history of modern sanctions, Fishman looked back to look forward – and did not find encouraging signs.View image in fullscreenIn 2018, “under pressure from Congress, Trump imposed sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate in Russia … Deripaska owned Rusal, which is the largest aluminum company in Russia, and produced almost 10% of the world’s aluminum. And overnight, basically, aluminum prices skyrocket, Rusal stock collapses, and there’s significant chaos in metal markets.“And Trump gets all these calls from the Russians, from CEOs, saying, ‘What are you doing? Stop.’ And he just pulls back the sanctions.”Years later, that episode is “concerning” to Fishman, “for a few reasons. One is, I think it signals to Russia that as soon as [Trump’s US faces] even the slightest amount of blowback, he will cave, even absent any concessions. It wasn’t like Putin gave any political concessions [in 2018]. It wasn’t like, ‘OK, we’re gonna free these prisoners overnight, we’re gonna stop this bombardment in Ukraine,’ because there was a low, simmering conflict being fought at the time. Trump just pulled back the sanctions.“And after that is when Russia shifts basically all of its foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar and into the euro and the yuan, the Chinese currency, and gold. So that was the key moment. Putin realizes [about Trump], ‘This guy, he doesn’t have the stomach to do anything, but also he’s so erratic.’ I think that was when the US lost leverage it needs with Russia, though I think it contributed to Putin underestimating the sanctions he would face in 2022”, from Biden, when he ordered a full invasion.US sanctions have hurt Russia deeply – and therefore should be among Trump’s strongest cards to play. Typically, he has been inconsistent. Usually friendly to Moscow, on Friday, Trump used his social media platform to say that because Russia was “absolutely ‘pounding’ Ukraine on the battlefield” he was “strongly considering large scale” sanctions and tariffs on Russia until a ceasefire could be reached.Fishman pondered the issue: “Do I think that Trump will give up the store? I don’t know … I would say I’m not confident that he’s going to get a just peace in Ukraine. But I’m not yet saying, ‘This guy is failing, we’re about to give up everything to Russia in exchange for nothing,’ though I think it’s possible and it’s certainly what the Russians want. It’s very clear they want to cut a deal with Trump that basically couches sanctions relief as a favor to the US, to say, ‘We should have open trade and investment with you. It’s good for America. It was Biden who put on all these restraints. He was just restraining US-Russia relations for no good reason.’“They want to basically get the US to give up their biggest bargaining chip before full negotiations over Ukraine even start.”Fishman studied at Yale, Cambridge and Stanford after 9/11. He noticed that “Iran’s nuclear program shot to the top of the foreign policy agenda”, even though “it was very obvious that the US was not willing to fight another war in the Middle East. And as a result, a number of people were thinking, ‘OK, what do we do about it?’”Joining the US government, Fishman found himself looking for a good book on sanctions.“I had an interesting mix of roles. Some were in the action, doing sanctions, diplomacy, and in others I was more of an adviser to really senior people. I worked for Secretary of State John Kerry and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey … And what I noticed was in the Situation Room, when the top leaders were discussing US foreign policy, whenever it turned to economic warfare, sanctions, etc, the level of conversation was so low, and I think it was because most people in the room had no idea what sanctions were.“It felt arcane. It felt mysterious. And so a big goal [with Chokepoints] was to demystify this and to create a way for average people just to read a book and say, ‘OK, I get it enough that I can develop my own opinions.’”The book is written to keep the reader moving, short chapters introduced with journalistic flourishes. Character traits are sharply noted, short anecdotes from lives away from work help present diplomats and bureaucrats in sharp relief.The importance of the sanctions policy such characters have shaped over the last 20 years is hard to overstate. The first part of Fishman’s book concerns the Iran nuclear deal, reached under Obama through diplomacy and economic pressure, meant to stop the Islamic Republic getting the bomb, dumped by Trump in 2018. Fishman also considers Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the US-led response – one subject of angry debate in the Oval Office when Zelenskyy visited last week – then switches to how Obama and Trump approached China.Fishman is a proud Obama alum but he is not afraid to apportion criticism.“Trump was significantly less risk-averse than Obama was when it came to sanctions. And I think that hopefully the Obama-Russia section [of Chokepoints] shows that in some ways, that risk aversion did not serve American interests.“The Obama administration also toward the end started to become quite concerned about China building islands in the South China Sea, all kinds of other aggressive acts. I think some Obama people would say this was too late in the administration to do anything about it but I would have been surprised, honestly, if you had seen a kind of frontal assault on Chinese economic aggression, even if Obama had more time.“So I think the benefit of Trump, with respect to China, was that he showed us that we have more leverage than we think we do, that we have more flexibility to actually push back against things that China was doing to hurt American interests, because I think it was well documented that Chinese IP theft was one of the ways that they were damaging American business interests, damaging the US economy, and we really hadn’t done anything about it.“So I do think that what Trump got right on China was that you can punch back without necessarily destroying the relationship … the US-China relationship didn’t really collapse during the Trump administration until the very end, until Covid, because they had signed the phase one trade deal in January 2020.“The thing that strikes me about the first Trump administration, and I think is going to be true about this one, is that Trump … on most issues, he vacillates. And China’s one of them. He goes back and forth from being extremely tough to being like, ‘Xi Jinping is my best friend.’”Trump is inconsistent toward other countries too, particularly those he threatens with tariffs, adversaries and friends alike, as demonstrated this week by 25% tariffs slapped on Mexico and Canada, then partially delayed.“Tariffs are taxes on imports,” Fishman said. “Let’s say we were to impose a tariff on Russian oil of 20%. That would mean that US companies could buy Russian oil, but if they were to do so, they’d have to pay a 20% tax. So a US refinery, down the street from me in New Jersey, could pay a tax to the US government to buy that Russian oil.“A sanction would be basically saying you can’t buy any oil at all. So a tariff is a significantly weaker form of a sanction. Historically, as a result, tariffs have not been used for national security reasons. They’re an economic bargaining chip. Sometimes you use tariffs to protect important domestic industries.“What Trump has done is basically just made tariffs yet another weapon in the US economic arsenal, alongside sanctions and export controls. And I think that’s OK. But it’s important for people to realize that tariffs are a significantly weaker tool than sanctions or export controls, so the idea of using them to address key national security problems is somewhat ludicrous.“Trump recently threatened tariffs on Russia. We import $2bn or $3bn worth of goods from Russia. So what good is that going to do? The tariff threat against the Brics countries – a lot of these things don’t make a lot of sense. I think he has a fixation with tariffs. Let’s see if one of his red lines is crossed, if he actually just relies on tariffs, or if there’s sanctions too.”A “chokepoint” is a point at which trade can be squeezed: physically, in corridors such as the Bosphorus or the Panama canal, electronically, through financial networks from which the US can freeze enemies out.“Geographic chokepoints have never fully lost their relevance,” Fishman said. “With the invention of the airplane, there are ways to ship commodities without access to chokepoints. But a lot of things, like oil, still travel by sea or by pipeline. And so that’s why the Bosphorus today is still a really important chokepoint. The Suez canal is very important, and the Strait of Hormuz.“What’s different about economic warfare today is that throughout almost all of human history, up until 20 years ago, cutting off any of these chokepoints would have required taking a navy vessel and parking it there, and saying, ‘OK, thou shall not pass.’ The difference now is you can have an official in the treasury department sign a document and block a chokepoint from thousands of miles away. That’s why you’ve seen this sort of unchained economic warfare, because it’s not like military force, it’s not like you’re actually putting US troops and US ships in harm’s way.”Trump has implied willingness to use US troops, to seize the Panama canal or Greenland. Fishman sees actual deployments as a possible consequence of Trump fueling a breakdown of economic order.“The thing I worry about, about some of Trump’s rhetoric, not just about Panama but Greenland … is that I think that we are certainly headed toward a breakdown in globalization. I think that in order to regain a sense of economic security, we’re going to see an erosion of economic interdependence.”Economic nationalism is on the rise. Fishman worries that “Trump may be driving us towards deploying these weapons of economic warfare not just against the Chinas and Russias of the world, but against Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Colombia, Brazil – all these different countries he’s threatened tariffs and sanctions against.”His book ends on a pessimistic note. In conversation, he warns: “History shows us that when states can’t acquire markets and resources through open trade and finance, that’s when wars break out. They try to conquer them. If you have that mindset, if you say, ‘We don’t feel like we can access these resources unless we physically plant our flag there,’ then that’s not a world that any of us is going to be happy living in.”

      Chokepoints is out now More

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      Netanyahu seeks to draw Trump into future attack on Iranian nuclear sites

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      Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that, with Donald Trump’s support, his government will “finish the job” of neutralising the threat from Iran, amid US reports that Israel is considering airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites in the coming few months.Trump has said he would prefer to make a deal with Tehran, but also made clear that he was considering US military action if talks failed, and his administration has laid down an early maximalist demand: Iranian abandonment of its entire nuclear programme.“All options are on the table,” the US national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told Fox News on Sunday. The new administration will only talk to Iran, Waltz added, if “they want to give up their entire programme and not play games as we’ve seen Iran do in the past in prior negotiations”.Earlier this month, Trump offered the Iranian regime a stark choice.“I would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear,” he told the New York Post. “I would prefer that to bombing the hell out of it.”In politics as in business, Trump’s vaunted “art of the deal” has relied heavily on bluster and threats, but analysts question how well that will work with Tehran. They also warn that the window for a diplomatic resolution to the standoff with Tehran will get narrower with each passing month, as Iranian nuclear capabilities progress, and Netanyahu works to persuade Trump to participate in joint strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities while it is at its most vulnerable.Israel’s prime minister has tried and failed to convince successive US administrations to take part in military action against Iran, including Trump’s. During his first term in the White House, Trump declined, in line with his aim of keeping the US out of foreign wars.In 2018, however, Trump did fulfil another Netanyahu request, withdrawing the US from a three-year-old multilateral agreement that had constrained Iran’s programme in return for sanctions relief. Since then, Iran has pushed forward with nuclear development and now produces increasing amounts of 60%-enriched uranium, which means it is a small technical step away from the production of weapons-grade fissile material.Tehran insists it has no intention of making a nuclear weapon and remains a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, could upend that policy if Iran’s nuclear sites came under threat.Israel and Iran launched a series of tit-for-tat attacks on each other last year, culminating in substantial Israeli airstrikes on 25 October that inflicted significant damage on Iran’s air defences.That damage, combined with Israel’s crippling campaign over the past year against Iran’s most important ally in the region, Hezbollah, has left Iran in its most militarily vulnerable state for decades.View image in fullscreenStanding alongside the new US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Sunday, Netanyahu made clear he wanted to take advantage of that vulnerability.“Over the last 16 months, Israel has dealt a mighty blow to Iran’s terror axis. Under the strong leadership of President Trump, and with your unflinching support, I have no doubt that we can and will finish the job,” he said.US intelligence agencies have been briefing reporters over the past week that they believe Israel is likely to attack Iranian nuclear sites in the first half of 2025. But the intelligence assessments also underlined Israeli reliance on US support in the form of aerial refuelling, intelligence and reconnaissance. US officials also said such strikes would, at most, set back Iran’s programme by a few months, and could trigger Tehran’s decision to take the decisive step towards making weapons-grade uranium.Whatever the misgivings in Washington, the Trump administration approved the sale earlier this month of guidance kits for bunker-busting BLU-109 bombs, likely to be essential in inflicting damage on Iran’s most deeply buried enrichment plant at Fordow.Netanyahu was the first foreign visitor to be invited to the White House after Trump’s re-election, and according to the Washington Post, the two leaders discussed “several possible levels of American backing, ranging from active military support for a kinetic strike – such as intelligence, refuelling or other assistance – to more limited political backing for a coercive ultimatum”.Raz Zimmt, a research fellow and Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said there was another clock ticking on diplomacy with Iran. Under the 2015 nuclear agreement, its remaining signatories, including the UK, France and Germany, can trigger a “snap back” of all international sanctions on Iran, but that leverage expires in October this year, giving European capitals the options of “use it or lose it”. If the mechanism is triggered, it could lead to a further escalation, Zimmt said.“I think there is a very limited diplomatic window of opportunity until August or September, to reach some kind of settlement between Iran and the US,” he said. “If there is no agreement by then … I think it will be much easier for Netanyahu to get not just a green light [from Washington] but perhaps some kind of military capabilities which will make it easier for Israel to achieve a broader and more effective impact.”Netanyahu regularly describes Trump as the “best friend” Israel ever had in the White House, a description echoed by Rubio and other administration officials, but that friendship will be put to a decisive test as Israel continues to press the case for an attack on Iran.Ariane Tabatabai, a Pentagon policy adviser in the Biden administration, said it would fuel “tension between the ‘restraint’ camp in the administration and the more traditional Republicans who are more inclined toward a more forceful approach to Iran”.“It’s not clear yet in these early days which group will have more influence in the inter-agency process and ultimately drive policy, but that’ll be a factor as well.” Tabatabai said.Trump prides himself in keeping the US out of foreign wars, but he has shown himself ready to take military action against Tehran, ordering the assassination by drone of a Revolutionary Guards commander, Qassem Suleimani, in Baghdad in January 2020.Saudi Arabia is reportedly offering to mediate to avoid a conflagration, but even if Trump wanted to hammer out a deal, argued Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, Trump’s browbeating style of negotiation could easily backfire when it came to Tehran.“The Trump style is he goes in heavy,” Vatanka said. “But Ali Khamenei has to be extremely careful how he responds to Trump so his personal image is not damaged.”“Iran has been weakened in the region – no doubt about it – but they still claim to be leading proponents of the Islamic cause who stand up to western bullying,” he added. “So what might work with certain countries in Europe or in Latin America will not necessarily work with the Iranian regime.” More

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      Joe Biden Faces a Dilemma Over Iran

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      Everything old is new again, at least when it comes to US President Joe Biden’s deterrence credibility problem with Iran. This must seem like déjà vu to him, since he witnessed similar dynamics play out during an earlier stint at the White House.

      Several weeks ago came news that the FBI had foiled a brazen scheme by an Iranian intelligence network to kidnap an Iranian-born US citizen who is a prominent critic of the Islamic Republic.  The apparent plan was to abduct her from the streets of Brooklyn, spirit her to Venezuela via “maritime evacuation” using “military-style speedboats” and from there deliver her to Iran.  The plan was part of a broader scheme entailing the seizure of other individuals in Canada and the United Kingdom.

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      The elaborate operation, which the head of the FBI’s New York field office described as “not some far-fetched movie plot,” is a flagrant gesture on Iran’s part at a time when the Biden administration is seeking to diplomatically engage Tehran on nuclear proliferation issues. What stands out from this episode is how much Tehran is willing to extend US–Iranian hostility onto the American homeland and how little it seems to fear the prospect of retaliation.

      The Saudi Ambassador

      The thwarted abduction is reminiscent of an even more audacious scheme on US territory by Iranian agents a decade ago. In the fall of 2011, the FBI broke up an operation to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. The plan was directed by the Quds Force, an elite branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that conducts clandestine operations beyond the country’s borders. The plot involved blowing up the Saudi diplomat at an upscale restaurant popular among Washington’s political elite, followed by the bombing of the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington and in Argentina. The high likelihood of mass casualties at the restaurant was dismissed by the operation’s US-based organizer as “no big deal.”

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      The plot organizer sought to outsource the bombings to the Los Zetas drug cartel in Mexico, which the FBI later described as having “access to military-grade weaponry and explosives, and has engaged in numerous acts of violence, including assassinations and murders.” As part of the deal with the cartel, the organizer promised to funnel tons of opium from the Middle East to Mexico. The plan unraveled when the organizer reached out to an individual he believed was a cartel member but who was actually an informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). 

      Reporting on the foiled plot, the Washington Post commented that it resembled “an international cloak-and-dagger operation that reads like the plot of a Bond novel.” Robert Mueller, the FBI director at the time, noted that “Though it reads like the pages of a Hollywood script, the impact would have been very real and many lives would have been lost.” James R. Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, cautioned that “some Iranian officials — probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived US actions that threaten the regime.”

      At the time, the Obama administration was looking to wind down the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as find a way to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Although then-Vice-President Biden described the botched assassination plot as “an outrage that violates one of the fundamental premises upon which nations deal with one another”, the White House did little beyond prosecuting the hapless Iranian organizer and imposing sanctions on several Quds Force officials.

      James Mattis on Obama’s Response

      The tepid response was particularly criticized by General James Mattis, the head of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), which directs military operations in the greater Middle East. He was dismayed that President Barack Obama kept the details of “the enormous savagery of the intended attack” from the American public and failed to respond forcefully to the provocation.

      Obama would eventually fire Mattis from his CENTCOM post, in part due to the latter’s frequent criticism of the president’s approach toward Iran. Once in civilian life, Mattis publicly lambasted Obama’s response to the attempted assassination. Speaking at a conference in 2013, he claimed the plot was the result of a decision “taken at the very highest levels in Tehran.” He further asserted that “We caught them in the act and yet we let them walk free,” and “They have been basically not held to account. … I don’t know why the attempt on [the Saudi ambassador] wasn’t dealt with more strongly.”

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      In his 2019 memoir, Mattis blamed the lax US reply on Obama’s keenness to strike a nuclear deal with Iran. He also elaborated on his earlier criticism, lamenting that “We treated an act of war as a law enforcement violation.” He added:

      “Had the bomb gone off, those in the restaurant and on the street would have been ripped apart, blood rushing down sewer drains. It would have been the worst attack on us since 9/11. I sensed that only Iran’s impression of America’s impotence could have led them to risk such an act within a couple of miles of the White House, Absent one fundamental mistake — the terrorists had engaged an undercover DEA agent in an attempt to smuggle the bomb — the Iranians would have pulled off this devastating attack. Had that bomb exploded, it would have changed history.”

      In the end, it was Obama’s successor who delivered the kind of reprisal Mattis thought necessary. In early January 2020, the Trump administration launched a drone strike that killed Major General Qassem Soleimani, the long-time Quds Force commander, while he was on a secret visit to Baghdad. Hundreds of miles away on the very same night, a drone strike in Yemen targeted but missed Abdul Reza Shahlai, a senior leader in the Quds Force. Washington had long accused Soleimani and Shahlai of being the key Iranian officials in putting the bomb plot into motion.

      Biden’s Conundrum

      Like Obama, President Biden now confronts a conundrum: how to shore up eroding US deterrence resolve vis-à-vis an increasing risk-acceptant Tehran while also keeping it in good enough humor to extract significant nuclear concessions. So far, he has eschewed Mattis’ advice about how to dissuade Iran from mounting further attacks on American soil.

      In contrast to his outrage a decade ago, Biden has opted to keep personally silent about the Brooklyn abduction plot while his administration treats it as a matter for law enforcement. It seems unlikely that the incoming Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, will find this response a cause for restraint.

      The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Iran’s Hardliners Are Back

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      To some critics, US elections are managed affairs. According to this cynical view, the “powers that be” narrow the field of candidates, the two parties don’t represent the real range of public opinion in the country, and periodic elections are just shadow plays staged by powerbrokers behind the scenes. In this way, US democracy is a sham.

      Although certainly distorted by the powerful, US democracy is not entirely scripted. If nothing else, the victory of Donald Trump in 2016 should have dispelled this particular misconception since the array of forces within the Republican Party, the intelligentsia and Wall Street were initially unified against him. By the same token. the come-from-behind victory of Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush in her House race in Missouri in 2020 also demonstrates, on a smaller scale, that US elections cannot be predicted in advance.

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      Iranian elections, on the other hand, are generally considered semi-democratic at best. Here, a true deep state of clerics and security organs really does stage-manage the elections in often quite transparent ways. This year, for instance, the Guardian Council of clerics and lawyers qualified only seven presidential candidates out of the 592 that registered. Forty women threw their hats into the ring, but the council rejected all of them. It also made sure that no viable reformist candidates would compete in the race.

      As a result, hardliner Ebrahim Raisi handily won the election last week. Just as US President Joe Biden was declaring in his first European trip that “America is back” — by which he meant that an internationally engaged America is back — the recent Iranian election has been an opportunity for the Iranian conservatives known as principlists to declare their return to power. Raisi will take over from the reformist President Hassan Rouhani, who had staked his political career on a nuclear deal with the United States and a reduction of US economic sanctions, which was initially a winning bet. Thanks to Trump’s rejection of that nuclear deal and his ratcheting up of sanctions, however, the reformist agenda lost credibility, if not among the population then at least among Iran’s ruling elite.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Many Iranian voters were so disgusted by what was on offer in the recent election that they refused to vote. The turnout, under 50%, was the lowest since the revolution of 1979. Perhaps most telling was the candidate who came in second place. Actually, it wasn’t a person at all: it was “void.” More than 4 million votes were declared invalid.

      Combined with the number of voters who stayed home, those who voided their ballots sent a signal that they, at least, know a sham when they see one. If one wants to be optimistic, the low-turnout election reveals just how strong the pro-democratic constituency is in the country. And ironically, this poor showing demonstrates that elections do matter in Iran since the Guardian Council had to go to great lengths to guarantee its preferred outcome.

      When Trump won in 2016, he set about transforming US foreign and domestic policy. The swing in Iranian governance from reformist to conservative might be expected to produce a similar sea change in how Iran deals with the economy, its nuclear program and the outside world. But Raisi may end up selling the reformist agenda better than the reformists themselves.

      The Nuclear Deal

      The United States and Iran have just concluded a sixth round of negotiations on reviving the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). It’s just possible that the two sides, in negotiations facilitated by the European Union, will come to an agreement before Raisi assumes the presidency in August. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, for instance, is upbeat about a quick and positive conclusion to the talks.

      But even if such an early agreement is not forthcoming, there’s no reason to expect that Iran will suddenly pull out of the negotiations. True, the JCPOA was integral to the reformist program, and the reformists were just voted out of office. But Ayatollah Ali Khamenei backed the agreement in 2015 and continues to do so. Raisi himself has expressed support for the deal, with the caveats that it was America’s fault for jeopardizing the agreement and that he’s no fan of negotiations for the sake of negotiating.

      Raisi is looking to tread a fine line. His election campaign was based largely on improving the Iranian economy, and that will require the reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear-related sanctions. At the same time, he has made clear that he’s not interested in following the reformist agenda of using the nuclear deal as a cornerstone of rapprochement with the West. He stated this week that Iran’s missile program is not up for discussion — something that might have figured in post-JCPOA negotiations — and he is not looking to meet with President Biden.

      “The Americans trampled on the JCPOA and the Europeans failed to live up to their commitment,” Raisi pointed out. “I reiterate to the US that you were committed to lifting the sanctions — come back and live up to your commitments.”

      That’s a fair assessment of what happened under Trump (the trampling part) and what has so far failed to happen under Biden (the lifting of sanctions part). Still, if both sides return to the JCPOA even without future agreements, it would be an improvement over the dangerous impasse of the last few years.

      So, the message is acceptable. The messenger, however, is problematic. Accused of gross human rights violations from his time as a prosecutor in the 1980s and a judge after that, Raisi was included in a 2019 Treasury Department sanctions list. So, Iran’s new president is going to face some difficulties traveling to the West and will not likely give a speech at the UN General Assembly meetings in New York as his predecessors routinely did. Given his reception in the West, it’s not surprising that Raisi is unenthusiastic about a detente with his detractors.

      Yet because Raisi will now be presiding over a state that hews closer to the conservative views of the clerical establishment, there will be less political infighting at the top and Raisi may very well be able to sell an agreement at home more effectively than the reformists.

      The Economy

      The Iranian economy is a mess. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the country experienced significant contractions in GDP of 6% in 2018 and nearly 7% in 2019. With Trump applying maximum pressure on Iran, Europe was supposed to pick up the slack. In fact, trade with Europe dropped by an astonishing 85% after 2017 as European countries buckled under the threat of secondary sanctions from the Trump administration.

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      The rise in prices for consumer goods, particularly gas, prompted widespread protests throughout Iran at the end of 2019, to which the government responded with force. US-imposed sanctions, the disruptions of COVID-19 and chronic budget deficits have all contributed to the inflation that generates a good deal of public discontent in the country.

      In the late 1990s and the 2000s, Iran experienced a huge expansion of its middle class from below 30% of the population to nearly 60%. This middle class generally supported the modern, outward-looking agenda of reformists like Rouhani, who served two presidential terms beginning in 2013.

      Instead of cultivating that constituency, however, the Trump administration undercut the reformists by withdrawing from the JCPOA in 2018 and applying punitive measures that hurt the middle class. This was not a case of unintended consequences. As Ryan Costello explains at Responsible Statecraft, elements of the US far right quite consciously supported hardliners in Iran as the political figures most likely to unwittingly precipitate an uprising and, ultimately, the collapse of the regime. The maximum pressure campaign of the Trump years was designed with the same ends in mind.

      Instead of mobilizing another Green Movement, which protested the last hardliner to preside over Iran’s political system, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the return of the conservatives to power will more likely provoke apathy or even eventually support for anti-Western policies. “A decade of economic stagnation caused by sanctions and broken international promises has brought Iran’s middle class to a point that it may reconsider its future as a force for political moderation and globalization,” economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani concludes.

      Raisi, meanwhile, has promised to fight corruption and economic mismanagement in the Iranian economy. He has his work cut out for him. The country ranks 149 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Bribery and favoritism are widespread, while a number of officials have been prosecuted for embezzlement and influence-peddling. It’s going to be difficult to root out corruption since the system basically runs on clientelism. The new patrons who take over the government apparatus expect to siphon off a portion of the state’s wealth for distribution through their patronage system.

      As a result, Raisi might find it easier to improve Iran’s economy by negotiating a reduction of external sanctions than a reduction of internal corruption.

      Regional Relations

      One of the side benefits of the Biden administration’s rethink of relations with Saudi Arabia is that it has forced Riyadh to hedge its bets in the region. Trump lavished praise on the Saudis, even as they were killing Yemenis, assassinating a Washington Post columnist and jailing human rights activists. Under Trump, the United States and Saudi Arabia bonded on their anti-Iran agenda.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Now, with the Biden administration pulling back from its support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen and criticizing the Saudi record on human rights, Riyadh has begun secret negotiations with Iran to mend their relationship. Those discussions, which began last month in Baghdad, cover a number of flashpoints, but particularly the places where the two countries are competing for influence such as Yemen and Iraq.

      Shortly after his electoral victory, Raisi announced that he wanted to improve relations with the Gulf Arab states. He singled out Saudi Arabia, which severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 2016. “There are no obstacles from Iran’s side to re-opening embassies,” Raisi said. “There are no obstacles to ties with Saudi Arabia.”

      A rapprochement between these two regional hegemons, however superficial, could significantly improve the prospects for reducing tensions in the region. And that, in turn, could be good news for a Biden administration that so desperately wants to shift its attention away from Middle East conflicts.

      In contrast to hawks like Elliott Abrams, I certainly do not root for the hardliners to win in Iranian elections. I believe that the Iranian system, led by the reformists, can evolve in a more democratic, more peaceful and more equitable direction.

      But in the short term, the victory of Ebrahim Raisi might just be good news. After all, he supports the nuclear deal, needs the reduction of US sanctions to fulfill his economic promises and is open to better relations with his neighbors. Imagine if Ahmadinejad, Iran’s version of Trump, had returned to power. Fortunately, the Guardian Council disqualified him as well. That’s not a bad lesson for Congress, as it confronts the possibility of Trump’s return to public office.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      How Biden Helped Hardliner Raisi Win in Iran

      by

      It was common knowledge that a US failure to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) before the Iranian presidential election would help conservative hard-liners to win. Indeed, on June 18, the conservative Ebrahim Raisi was elected as the new president of Iran.

      Raisi has a record of brutally cracking down on government opponents, and his election is a severe blow to Iranians struggling for a more liberal, open society. He also has a history of anti-Western sentiment and says he would refuse to meet with US President Joe Biden. While incumbent President Hassan Rouhani, considered a moderate, held out the possibility of broader talks after the US returned to the JCPOA, Raisi will almost certainly reject broader negotiations with Washington.

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      Could Raisi’s victory have been averted if Biden had rejoined the Iran nuclear deal right after coming into the White House and enabled Rouhani and the moderates in Iran to take credit for the removal of US sanctions before the election? Now we will never know. 

      The US withdrawal from the agreement under Donald Trump in 2018 drew near-universal condemnation from Democrats and arguably violated international law. But Biden’s failure to quickly rejoin the deal has left Trump’s policy in place, including the cruel “maximum pressure” sanctions that are destroying Iran’s middle class, throwing millions of people into poverty, and preventing imports of medicine and other essentials, even during a pandemic. 

      US sanctions have provoked retaliatory measures from Iran, including suspending limits on its uranium enrichment and reducing cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Trump’s, and now Biden’s, policy has simply reconstructed the problems that preceded the JCPOA in 2015, displaying the widely recognized madness of repeating something that didn’t work and expecting a different result.

      If actions speak louder than words, the US seizure of 27 Iranian and Yemeni international news websites on June 22, based on the illegal, unilateral US sanctions that are among the most contentious topics of the Vienna negotiations, suggests that the same madness still holds sway over US policy.

      Biden Takes His Time

      Since Biden took office on January 20, the critical underlying question is whether he and his administration are really committed to the JCPOA or not. As a presidential primary candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders promised to simply rejoin the nuclear deal on his first day as president. Iran has always said it was ready to comply with the agreement as soon as the United States rejoined it. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Biden has been in office for five months, but the negotiations in Vienna, Austria, did not begin until April 6. His failure to rejoin the agreement on taking office reflected a desire to appease hawkish advisers and politicians who claimed he could use Trump’s withdrawal and the threat of continued sanctions as “leverage” to extract more concessions from Iran over its ballistic missiles, regional activities and other questions. 

      Far from extracting more concessions, Biden’s foot-dragging only provoked further retaliatory action by Iran, especially after the assassination of an Iranian scientist and sabotage at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, both probably committed by Israel. 

      Without a great deal of help, and some pressure, from America’s European allies, it is unclear how long it would have taken Biden to get around to opening negotiations with Iran. The shuttle diplomacy taking place in Vienna is the result of painstaking negotiations with both sides by former European Parliament President Josep Borrell, who is now the European Union’s foreign policy chief.

      The sixth round of shuttle diplomacy has now concluded in Vienna without an agreement. President-elect Raisi says he supports the negotiations, but would not allow the US to drag them out for a long time. 

      An unnamed US official raised hopes for an agreement before Raisi takes office on August 3, noting that it would be more difficult to reach an agreement after that. But a State Department spokesman said talks would continue when the new government takes office, implying that an agreement was unlikely before then. 

      Will They or Won’t They?

      Even if Biden had rejoined the nuclear deal, Iran’s moderates might still have lost this tightly managed election. But a restored JCPOA and the end of US sanctions would have left the moderates in a stronger position. It would have also set Iran’s relations with the United States and its allies on a path of normalization that would have helped to weather more difficult relations with Raisi and his government in the coming years.

      If Biden fails to rejoin the JCPOA, and if the US or Israel ends up at war with Iran, this lost opportunity to quickly rejoin the deal during his first months in office will loom large over future events and his legacy as president.

      If the United States does not rejoin the JCPOA before Raisi takes office, Iran’s hard-liners will point to Rouhani’s diplomacy with the West as a failed pipe-dream, and their own policies as pragmatic and realistic by contrast. In the US and Israel, the hawks who have lured Biden into this slow-motion train-wreck will be popping champagne corks to celebrate Raisi’s inauguration, as they move in to kill the JCPOA for good, smearing it as a deal with a mass murderer.

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      If Biden rejoins the JCPOA after Raisi’s inauguration, Iran’s hard-liners will claim that they succeeded where Rouhani and the moderates failed and take credit for the economic recovery that will follow the removal of US sanctions. 

      On the other hand, if Biden follows hawkish advice and tries to play it tough, and Raisi then pulls the plug on the negotiations, both leaders will score points with their own hard-liners at the expense of majorities of their people who want peace. In doing so, the United States will be back on a path of confrontation with Iran. While that would be the worst outcome of all, it would allow Biden to have it both ways domestically, appeasing the hawks and telling liberals that he was committed to the nuclear deal until Iran rejected it. Such a cynical path of least resistance would very likely be a path to war.

      Move Faster

      On all these counts, it is vital that Biden and the Democrats conclude an agreement with the Rouhani government and rejoin the JCPOA. Rejoining it after Raisi takes office would be better than letting the negotiations fail altogether, but this entire slow-motion train-wreck has been characterized by diminishing returns with every delay, from the day Biden took office. 

      Neither the people of Iran nor the people of the United States have been well served by Biden’s willingness to accept Trump’s Iran policy as an acceptable alternative to Barack Obama’s, even as a temporary political expedient. To allow Trump’s abandonment of Obama’s agreement to stand as a long-term US policy would be an even greater betrayal of the goodwill and good faith of people on all sides — Americans, allies and enemies alike.

      Biden and his advisers must now confront the consequences of the position their wishful thinking and dithering has landed them in. They must make a genuine and serious political decision to rejoin the JCPOA within days or weeks.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Is Israel’s Bite as Strong as Its Bark?

      by

      At the end of April, days before the latest conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians surged into the headlines, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a meeting in Washington with two Israelis: the head of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, and the Israeli ambassador to the United States. The Israelis were seeking to prevent the US from returning to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal with Iran from which Donald Trump had unilaterally withdrawn in 2018. 

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      On April 29, Reuters reported that Blinken’s meeting with the two officials “followed talks … between US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and his Israeli counterpart in which the Israeli delegation stressed their ‘freedom to operate’ against Iran as they see fit.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Freedom to operate:

      Impunity

      Contextual Note

      Israel believes in its “freedom to operate” as adamantly as some Americans do in their constitutional right to bear arms. It is difficult to understand Israel’s notion essentially of freedom to aggress in any other sense than that of seeing itself as above the law of nations. In one sense, the Israelis are right. There is no international law on the books that enforces compliance. In an era of rising populist nationalism, many leaders are tempted to claim the freedom to operate as a natural right. Only the military and economic might of the US threatens to hold some of them back. Assured of Washington’s support of any of its aggressive actions, Israel believes it has exceptional freedom to operate.

      The Israeli government made it clear in January that it would actively counter any attempt by the new Biden administration to return to the JCPOA. “Reiterating Israel’s position that it does not consider itself bound by the diplomacy, Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen said, ‘A bad deal will send the region spiralling into war,’” Reuters reported. Is this a bluff or a sinister threat? Or both? No one should feel surprised, given Israel’s aptitude to flex its muscles whenever it feels threatened and every US administration’s habit of regularly inclining to Israel’s will.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Every observer of the ongoing drama in the Middle East should be wondering whether it makes any sense at all to be asking such questions. The spiraling war in the Middle East Cohen evokes would not resemble in scale or catastrophic consequences the kind of skirmish that last month’s 11-day conflict over the Israel-Gaza border turned out to be. Iran is a large and powerful oil-producing nation that does not yet possess nuclear weapons but has extensive resources. It has significant potential allies in Asia, including China, though it would be utterly unlikely that in the event of a shooting war between Israel and Iran, China would allow itself to be drawn into a military conflict.

      Israel, of course, has the advantage of being a nuclear power, though no one acknowledges that in official circles. That non-acknowledgment has conveniently spared Israel the duty of taking a position on non-proliferation. As its government refuses, in Cohen’s telling, to be “bound by the diplomacy” while at the same time expecting the United States to support even its most aggressive initiatives taken in the name of self-defense, Israel’s threat of a spiraling war should offer a lot of people cause for concern.

      Most observers believe that everything will depend on the role the US may or may not accept to play if there is an eventual conflict. In its first few months, the Biden administration has, perhaps artfully, disguised its deeper inclinations. At the same time, it has given some people the impression of being rudderless. That has added to the overwhelming uncertainty that makes prognostication about future events in the region a particularly delicate exercise. But given the stakes — according to Israel, a possible third world war — it may be time to address the underlying problems.

      Israel appears to be invoking the logic of MAD (mutually assured destruction) that reigned during the Cold War. But what was true of the US and the Soviet Union is difficult to imagine applying to a state the size of Israel.

      Despite Israel’s belief in its “freedom to operate,” the idea that it could unilaterally start a war with Iran simply because it didn’t like the deal the US agreed to is on its face absurd. It would be tantamount to declaring war on the US simply because the Americans failed to respect Israel’s wishes. This degree of geopolitical absurdity illustrates the specific kind of diplomatic hyperreality Israel has successfully cultivated, thanks in large part to the pattern of accommodation exhibited by every recent US administration.

      Al Jazeera published its own version of the Reuters’ piece from April, reprinting most of its substance before adding some remarks of its own. After expanding its commentary on the various threats and hypotheses, including Cohen’s vision of  “spiralling into war,” it adds this troubling conclusion: “The source declined to say how Blinken and his aides responded.” As with so many of President Joe Biden’s real intentions, on both domestic and foreign policy, and his capacity to deliver on promises and commitment, the pundits for the moment are condemned to wait and see. 

      Historical Note

      Despite the current vacuum of power in Israel itself, likely to be provisionally resolved by a new coalition government, all of the nation’s current and future leaders — including the military — are opposed to the idea of the US revitalizing the JCPOA. But does Israel still have the clout to influence US policy? Donald Trump solidified the belief among the Israelis that the US is capable of betraying its own interests to please Israel. It played the same game reasonably successfully with Barack Obama, who consistently vowed to defend Israel’s interests. But it couldn’t prevent Obama from promoting and signing the JCPOA in 2015.

      Just before leaving office, Obama broke with another tradition by abstaining from using the US veto on a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding a halt to Israeli’s construction of settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. To counterbalance the effect of the affront, two months earlier, the lame duck president signed off on a historic and astonishingly generous promise of military aid for Israel to the tune of $38 billion over 10 years.

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      Daniel Sonnenfeld, writing for The Media Line, an American website specialized in coverage of the Middle East, offers his update on the state of negotiations around a revitalized JCPOA. “While all the signatories have expressed their desire to see the deal revived, American allies in the Middle East have voiced concerns about this intention. Most notable is Israel, which opposed the deal strongly when it was first signed in 2015,” he writes. This sentence is remarkable for the carefully crafted reference Sonnenfeld makes to a group of Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia. Calling them “American allies” avoids evoking either the stigma associated with the autocratic Arab regimes, the most prominent of which has dramatically exercised its “freedom to operate” by murdering and dismembering a Washington Post journalist.

      By the end of his article, Sonnenfeld resigns himself to concluding that, despite Israel’s objections, the US will return to the JCPOA. He cites Dr. Raz Zimmt, an Iran expert at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, who affirms that “Israel has ‘no chance’ at changing the US approach to the deal.” Unlike the Israeli officials threatening to throw the region and into a catastrophic war, Sonnenfeld sees no prospect of the Israelis carrying out such a move or even challenging the Biden administration’s decisions on the matter. Instead, citing Zimmt again, he describes a future diplomatic ballet in which Israel will simply “focus on ‘formulating agreements with the Americans about what comes next.’”

      Since the end of the 11-day conflict in May, things have dramatically changed for both the Israelis and Palestinians. As The New York Times reports, the latter now feel they “are part of the global conversation on rights, justice, freedom, and Israel cannot close it down or censor it.” Even The Times has taken a solid interest in their plight. Israel is struggling to close the chapter on Benjamin Netanyahu’s seemingly perennial premiership. Joe Biden has an open field in front of him to clarify some of the complex issues in the Middle East. The world is waiting to see how he handles it.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in World Politics

      Biden Should Rejoin the Iran Deal Before It’s Too Late

      by

      As Congress still struggles to pass a COVID relief bill, the rest of the world is nervously reserving judgment on the new US president and his foreign policy after successive administrations have delivered unexpected and damaging shocks to the world and the international system.

      Cautious optimism toward President Joe Biden is very much based on his commitment to Barack Obama’s signature diplomatic achievement in 2015: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear agreement with Iran. Biden, along with his fellow Democrats, excoriated then-President Donald Trump for withdrawing from the JCPOA in 2018 and promised to promptly rejoin the deal if elected. But Biden now appears to be hedging his position in a way that risks turning what should be an easy win for the new administration into an avoidable and tragic diplomatic failure.

      Will the US and Iran Meet Jaw to Jaw?

      READ MORE

      While it was the United States under Trump that withdrew from the nuclear agreement, Biden is taking the position that the US will not rejoin the agreement or drop its unilateral sanctions until Iran first comes back into compliance with the terms of the JCPOA. After withdrawing from the agreement, the US is in no position to make such demands, and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has clearly and eloquently rejected them, reiterating Iran’s firm commitment that it will return to full compliance as soon as the US does so.

      Biden should have announced US reentry as one of his first executive orders. It did not require renegotiation or debate. On the campaign trail, Senator Bernie Sanders, Biden’s main competitor for the Democratic nomination, simply promised, “I would re-enter the agreement on day one of my presidency.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      It wasn’t just Sanders. Then-candidate Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said during the Democratic primary, “We need to rejoin our allies in returning to the agreement, provided Iran agrees to comply with the agreement and take steps to reverse its breaches.” Gillibrand said that Iran must “agree” to take those steps, not that it must take them first, presciently anticipating — and implicitly rejecting — Biden’s self-defeating position that Iran must fully return to compliance with the JCPOA before the US will rejoin.

      If Biden just rejoins the JCPOA, all of the provisions of the agreement will be back in force and work exactly as they did before Trump opted out. Iran will be subject to the same International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections and reports as before. Whether Iran is in compliance or not will be determined by the IAEA, not unilaterally by the United States. That is how the agreement works, as all the signatories agreed: China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, the United Kingdom, the European Union — and the United States.

      Neocons and Hawks

      So, why is Biden not eagerly pocketing this easy first win for his stated commitment to diplomacy? A December 2020 letter supporting the JCPOA, signed by 150 House Democrats, should have reassured Biden that he has overwhelming support to stand up to hawks in both parties. But instead, he seems to be listening to opponents of the Iran deal telling him that Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement has given him “leverage” to negotiate new concessions from Iran before rejoining. Rather than giving Biden leverage over Iran, which has no reason to make further concessions, this has given opponents of the JCPOA leverage over Biden.

      American neocons and hawks, including those inside his own administration, appear to be flexing their muscles to kill Biden’s commitment to diplomacy at birth, and his own hawkish foreign policy views make him dangerously susceptible to their arguments. This is also a test of his previously deferential relationship with Israel, whose government vehemently opposes the JCPOA and whose officials have even threatened to launch a military attack on Iran if the US rejoins it, a flagrantly illegal threat that Biden has yet to publicly condemn.

      In a more rational world, the call for nuclear disarmament in the Middle East would focus on Israel, not Iran. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently wrote in The Guardian, Israel’s own possession of dozens — or maybe hundreds — of nuclear weapons is the worst kept secret in the world. Tutu’s article was an open letter to Biden, asking him to publicly acknowledge what the whole world already knows and to respond as required under US law to the actual proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

      Instead of tackling the danger of Israel’s real nuclear weapons, successive US administrations have chosen to “cry wolf” over non-existent nuclear weapons in Iraq and Iran to justify besieging their governments, imposing deadly sanctions on their people, invading Iraq and threatening Iran. A skeptical world is watching to see whether President Biden has the integrity and political will to break this insidious pattern.

      The CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), which stokes Americans’ fears of imaginary Iranian nuclear weapons and feeds endless allegations about them to the IAEA, is the same entity that produced the lies that drove America to war on Iraq in 2003. In December 2002, WINPAC’s director, Alan Foley, told his staff, “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so” — even as he privately admitted to his retired CIA colleague Melvin Goodman that US forces searching for WMDs in Iraq would find “not much, if anything.”

      What makes Biden’s stalling to appease Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the neocons diplomatically suicidal at this moment in time is that in November 2020, the Iranian parliament passed a law that forces its government to halt nuclear inspections and boost uranium enrichment if US sanctions are not eased by February 21.

      It’s Getting Complicated

      To complicate matters further, Iran is holding its own presidential election on June 18, and election season — when this issue will be hotly debated — begins after the Iranian New Year on March 21. The winner is expected to be a hawkish hardliner. Trump’s failed policy, which Biden is now continuing by default, has discredited the diplomatic efforts of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif, confirming for many Iranians that negotiating with America is a fool’s errand.

      If Biden does not rejoin the JCPOA soon, time will be too short to restore full compliance by both Iran and the US — including lifting relevant sanctions — before Iran’s election. Each day that goes by reduces the time available for Iranians to see benefits from the removal of sanctions, leaving little chance that they will vote for a new government that supports diplomacy with the United States. The timetable around the JCPOA was known and predictable, so this avoidable crisis seems to be the result of a deliberate decision by Biden to try to appease neocons and warmongers — domestic and foreign — by bullying Iran, a partner in an international agreement he claims to support, to make additional concessions that are not part of the agreement.

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      During his election campaign, candidate Biden promised to “elevate diplomacy as the premier tool of our global engagement.” If President Biden fails this first test of his promised diplomacy, people around the world will conclude that, despite his trademark smile and affable personality, he represents no more of a genuine recommitment to American partnership in a cooperative “rules-based world” than Trump or Obama did.

      That will confirm the steadily growing international perception that, behind the Republicans’ and Democrats’ good cop-bad cop routine, the overall direction of US foreign policy remains fundamentally aggressive, coercive and destructive. People and governments around the world will continue to downgrade relations with the United States, as they did under Trump, and even traditional US allies will chart an increasingly independent course in a multipolar world where the US is no longer a reliable partner and certainly not a leader.

      So much is hanging in the balance, for the everyday people of Iran suffering and dying under the impact of US sanctions, for Americans yearning for more peaceful relations with our neighbors around the world, and for people everywhere who long for a more humane and equitable international order to confront the massive problems facing us all in this century. Can Biden’s America be part of the solution? After just weeks in office, surely it can’t be too late. But the ball is in his court, and the whole world is watching.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More