Iran (Washington Insider Magazine) -When the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his administration began negotiating with Iran in the hopes of securing an agreement with the country to bring them back into the international community of nation, which would eventually occur in 2015, the notion behind this agreement was to create for Iran, another avenue for demonstrating its trustworthiness as a country on a global scale. In return for the end of numerous harmful American sanctions against the nation and regime, Iran would limit its nuclear refinement to civilian-grade levels; the beginning of more reasonable relations between the world at large and the Islamic Republic could finally arrive as well.
Almost immediately, however, Republicans, with still-candidate Donald Trump eventually coming to deride the agreement as well, called the deal a bad one, one that either gave billions of dollars to Iran, and one that essentially gave Iran the discretion to continue developing nuclear weapons while getting sanction relief. Therefore, it was a lose-lose for as far as conservatives could tell, and they worked to convince the population that it was, in fact, a lose-lose type of agreement that should be revoked at the earliest convenience.
When Republican candidate Donald Trump eventually won the 2016 Presidential Election in shock fashion, he would not immediately ax the deal, but complain and whine about it instead, He would flipflop and lie, moan and attempt to convince the world that the deal should certainly be reneged out of; the problem with all of this was simply that no one outside of the Republican Party and the ruling Party of Israel believed that the deal should be reneged upon. There was no evidence that Iran was breaking the agreement at or before the time that now-former President Donald Trump removed the United States from the JCPOA; the purported evidence, provided to the UN by former-Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, was analyzed and proven to be nothing new or worth canceling the entire deal over at any event.
Yet it would, on the American end at least, be reneged upon in 2018, and while this year, 2021, should be its sixth year in action, the historic agreement as originally negotiated barely survived much longer than the Obama Administration itself did. Now years later, Iran is governed by an originalist Cleric named Ebrahim Raisi, who, according to Amnesty International, was responsible for the mass murder of political and religious dissenters that took place in Tehran in 1988, and will likely be the current Ayatollah’s successor once he finally passes away.
Meanwhile, as Joe Biden’s administration looks to remake and recreate the original JCPOA, it must be understood that this isn’t the same Iran as it was when Barack Obama was able to make relations work with the administration of the mercurial Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as that of his successor, the moderate former Diplomat Hassan Rouhani. Iran has been suffering from increased poverty, COVID-19, a lack of resources, opiate addiction, and masses of refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq, from before the recent action, as well as in the aftermath of the Taliban resurgence in their neighbor to the east; the Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, wants a renewed Nuclear Deal, just as he wanted the original one over a decade ago, yet he is proud, as well as mistrustful of the United States. He remembers, not only how the previous Nuclear Deal disintegrated, but the greater history between America and Iran that spans not only decades, but even centuries.
Hence, the negotiations will be tricky. Iran is not so willing to tamely behave as the western nations would like for them to, especially after how Donald Trump behaved as President towards them across four years; he gave them leverage, and they are attempting to leverage that leverage further. They are playing hardball with international watchdogs, with nuclear monitors, with American and certain international diplomats, and ultimately with the administration of Joe Biden himself. This is thanks almost exclusively to Donald Trump, who was thoughtful enough to pull the United States out of a major piece of international nuclear and human rights diplomacy without looking to innovate further upon it, or even replace it with something different; regardless, however, the United States will have to overcome this self-induced setback in order to create a safer world, as well as a more integrated and amicable Iran, with people who can grow freer in the years to come, instead of more sickly, repressed or poverty-stricken.
“Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy….” – Sir Issac Newton
Conservatives, on the contrary, have been saying for years that the JCPOA or any revitalized, similar type of deal, would eventually hand Iran the power to build nuclear weapons anyway. They’ve famously said, in fact, that a bad deal is worse than no deal at all. When the JCPOA was agreed to all those years ago, a major gripe by these reactionaries was that Iran would be allowed to continue to refine nuclear material at and to certain levels of which are not strong enough for weapons-grade use. These folks argued that this would allow for the country of Iran to develop their own nuclear potential in secret as they seemed to be cooperating with the deal on the surface. This is a portion of the alleged logic behind forcing America from a relatively new and major piece of multilateral diplomatic innovation.
Now, years after the deal was departed from by the United States, Iran is actually further ahead in regards to their nuclear weapons development than they were when Barack Obama signed the original deal, and in fact much further along rhetorically as well. This progress wasn’t achieved when the deal was active, but in the years since the United States stopped participating in it and subsequently reimposed sanctions on Iran; reactionaries see this, likely, as vindication for their original stance vis-a-vis the Nuclear Deal and Iran in the first instance, yet this vindication betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of a few of the elements at play within the entire premise or discussion; as before, these reactionary arguments obfuscate certain key points and understandings that are not, on the surface at least, too difficult to understand.
Gaining nuclear weapons is not so much a practical, military goal for country’s as many might initially suspect or believe; Iran itself has actually stated numerous times that it has little interest in nuclear weapons, outside of their strategic usefulness of course. Gaining civilian-grade nuclear power is much more practically useful and desirable for any nation, while the only group of people to date that has dropped nuclear weaponry on people purposely is, indeed, the United States of America at the tail end of WWII.
Nuclear weapons are, in fact, for all intents and purposes, the worlds most useful and contentious bargaining chip, one that even China and Russia do not wish for Iran to get; gaining theoretical or even practical ability or access to nuclear weapons makes any nation in question as potentially dangerous as any other nuclear power, while an unfriendly nuclearly capable country is possibly a major threat should that nation let this information leak out to less-responsible parties or groups still. Gaining access or the ability to create nuclear weapons, therefore, appears to be an ignored or ostracized nation’s best hope for being treated with some level of equality when in the midst of negotiations regarding sanctions, trade agreements, or anything else for that matter.
If it is understood that weaponized nuclear capabilities are, in fact, the bargaining chip of all bargaining chips, and that the mere threat of a real, dependable program, unlike North Korea’s, is a valuable tool to position oneself more favorably within global negotiations, then the entire circumstance appears less convoluted than certain parties or actors might attempt to make it all out to be.
First off, no country in their right mind would entirely cease their nuclear program in return for the opportunity to reconcile themselves with nations that have not always treated them very well. As if the United States and the United Kingdom do not have a difficult enough historical relationship with Iran to use to pick and choose a possible example, the 45th American President was kind enough to give us an extraordinarily recent and specific one when he unilaterally pulled the United States out of the JCPOA during his, at the time of this piece, lone term in office. If America can unilaterally cancel a profound, multilateral diplomatic innovation, despite that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing to warrant as much, then what incentives do any nations have to completely cease any type of nuclear development in the hopes of being treated properly in a multilateral, diplomatic agreement themselves?
The diplomatically naive Trump administration demanded something from another country that was as unreasonable then as it would’ve been had Barack Obama demanded it; ironically, of course, Trump then proceeded to behave in such a way as to demonstrate precisely why it was an unreasonable request to make in the first instance. In the bigger picture, by removing America from this deal so quickly after the President who signed it had left office, and for no actual or good reason, the 45th President and his Republican colleagues have irreparably damaged the integrity of any initial negotiations with nations around the world, as well as any subsequent deals that the United States makes with anyone, friend or foe moving forward.
Secondly, as previously mentioned, while the conservatives were fearful that Iran would somehow parlay its civilian-grade nuclear enrichment, while under the watchful eye of watchdogs and monitoring institutions, into a secret nuclear stockpile as now former Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accused them of attempting to muster, there was, at no time, any evidence that this was happening or might happen; the same cannot be said in the time since America left the deal, however. Another linked premise of the disdain for this deal, was the idea that Iran would be renegotiating the deal at some point in the distant future, having had the ability to continue developing weapons-grade nuclear material under the guise of continuing to produce civilian-grade nuclear material, and that at that point, America and the rest of the world would somehow be caught comparatively flatfooted; this argument too has been used to assault the efficacy of the deal in stopping Iran from gaining weapons-grade resources and technology moving into the future.
It is this here, for me at least, where the fundamental conceptualization of so many aspects of this discussion becomes more interesting to discuss. For if we, as previously mentioned a few times, understand that nuclear weapons are a bargaining chip more than a practical, useful tool of war, it is not very difficult to understand the disconnect, whether it be real or insincere, that is occurring between individuals who believe the Iran Deal was a giveaway to Iran and those who understood it to be a prudent piece of diplomacy, that, of course, might’ve been better, as any deal might always be, but that was positive and got the ball rolling on the path to reconcile Iran with not only the United States but much of the rest of the world too.
Let us use the general framework from the last, reneged upon JCPOA to perform a simple, quick, semi-hypothetical thought experiment. If a country is using its own nuclear potential to regain entry into the greater international community of nations, and this creates the desirable outcome of negotiations, and an eventual international and multilateral agreement with the most powerful country and countries in the world, then the need to then further develop a malevolent or threatening nuclear potential is substantially lessened. Those powerful nations of the world, by acting in this way, remove nuclear potential, for the time being at least, from the diplomatic equation moving forward; at that point, it becomes necessary to ask oneself “what would produce the next most desirable results,” having gotten the first desirable results when negotiations began and the next when an agreement was reached between all parties. Out of all the potential choices to make at this point, the logical one would not be to push the nuclear envelope, as it might have previously been. Instead, the next positive step would then turn to demonstrating amicability, compliance, cooperation, growth, reconstruction, respect, mutuality, and consistency with its international counterparts.
This is, according to the information that I’ve been able to gather on the topic, generally what was in the still-early stages of going on. Had all of this continued undisturbed for the life of the agreement, some 15 years or so, it is unknowable just exactly how Iran as a country would look by then from a political, economic, and humanitarian standpoint, yet for the deal to have lasted the full 15 years would have meant that things had been continuing to go in a very positive trajectory; while there are those analysts or pundits who suggest that, at this point, Iran would unfurl its secret, nearly-two-decades-in-the-making nuclear arsenal out, my singular question in response to these suggestions is always, again, simply why?
When Iran had relatively no seat at the negotiating tables, before they entered into a deal with the most powerful nations of the world, it would make a lot of sense to intimate the continued development of nuclear weaponry. After 15 to 20 years of positive, mutual, and continually developing relations, on the other hand, what exactly would be the logic behind going ahead and setting that progress and trust back so far by using this threat or menace out of the blue? With nearly two decades of improving relations under their belts, both Iran and the involved nations of the world would have developed more understanding of each other and more amicable feelings towards one another, and the Islamic Republic would be foolish to risk those gains at that point.
“The only deadly sin I know is cynicism….” – Henry L Stimson
Positives over this time would’ve fostered budding opportunities for greater cooperation, and the specifics of the following deal, whatever it might be referred to as, would quite likely be born directly out of the successes of the previous, just recently finished agreement. In short, were relations to improve as they had been before Donald Trump stopped this volition itself, for a span of 15 years, going back to base nuclear threats would not only be counterproductive, but simply nonsensical because the means for acquiring progress had been altered through real diplomatic work so long ago.
Therefore, because of agreements in the same spirit as the Iran Nuclear Deal, nuclear proliferation, as Barack Obama was likely able to foresee, can actually be diminished this way. Far from giving Iran carte blanche to develop nuclear weapons, Barack Obama was actually diminishing the need for the development of nuclear weaponry in the first instance. For nations and polities of the world, with what is known about nuclear weapons and the literal fallout, both diplomatically and practically speaking, of using them on this planet against other nations, cities, or their citizens, they exist nearly exclusively for the purpose of creating a practical and theoretical leverage against other nations.
Yet, as Joe Biden looks to recreate the Iran Nuclear Deal for this day and age, with so many differences from the Obama days blatantly obvious, one would have to be hard of hearing to miss that conservative and reactionary politicians, some on each side of the aisle mind you, are once again decrying the possibility of a renewed JCPOA getting done before the midterm elections of 2022, while Democrats wish to build an even more comprehensive deal with and for Iran. They wish to inculcate in the American people a sense of mistrust in the new deal, just as many of them attempted to do so during the Obama administration’s final years as well. But the majority of Americans, as well as Iranians, actually support another Iranian Nuclear Deal, or a return to the old one, suggesting that the people of this nation have come to understand the circumstances and consequences surrounding this real-life running drama better than politicians might give the people credit for, while the people of Iran wish for their lives to improve once again in tangible, meaningful ways.
While the Representatives and Senators, moneyed by interests and lobbyists as they are, vacillate back and forth as the wind appears to be blowing, the actual people of the country do recognize the proper, humane route to go further onward as a country. The 46th President must also understand as the people of the nation do, and he must find a means of consummating a new deal with Iran, for the sake of economic and international relations, as well as, most importantly, for the well being of so many suffering Iranians, Afghans, identifying Kurds of the country, and anyone else that calls the country home.
This will not put Iran on the road to nuclear proliferation. When one understands that the original JCPOA, in its own, previously described way, was actually designed to eliminate the incentive to proliferate weapons-grade nuclear resources and technology, the conclusion can actually be drawn that Donald Trump, far from ceasing the march of Iran towards nuclear development of which was handed to them with the signature of the JCPOA, not only stopped progress in regards to this, but actually set the process back in dangerous and still looming ways. Far from preventing nuclear proliferation, Trump actually incentivized it with his behavior and actions, not only by axing participation in the JCPOA, but by further actions, such as assassinating Qasem Soleimani and attempting to further nuclearize Iran’s neighbors, Saudi Arabia and potentially the United Arab Emirates too.
Escorting America out of the Iran Nuclear Deal was not only diplomatically green, politically naive, and practically useless, but it was ultimately damaging to both the United States as well as Iran. Iran would likely look a different place today was the original agreement still being abided by, even with the hardships, such as COVID-19, that have enveloped the entire world to date; the United States too, would have a different perception of Iran and its people as the Taliban surged across Afghanistan across the last few months. With this nasty innovation, and the knowledge that Iranians hate the Taliban, yesterday’s foe might have been a friend of today and tomorrow, and far from an attempted Islamisation from both the top-down, as well as the bottom up, as is being attempted in Iran by the new, hardline originalist administration of Ebrahim Raisi, a different President or regime might be in charge in Iran altogether. In any event, with improving relations and comprehension of each others varied and diverse people and traditions
As it stands, that is not where we are. Instead, we are trying to get back somewhere near where we were, although it can never be exactly replicated of course, and the road ahead remains difficult and, therefore, somewhat ominous and treacherous. A new, reimagined JCPOA could put America, Iran, and the rest of the world back on track towards more positive, cooperative days going forward into the future.
If Joe Biden has the creative imagination and courage to do what must be done to create real progress in this theatre of international diplomacy, with so many countless and innocent lives hanging in the balance, then he will be able to fix the mistake of his Presidential predecessor, even with the new roadblock that could very well be President Ebrahim Raisi. If he is not able to, then he and his successors, whoever they may be, will be tasked to deal with an Iran whose nuclear bargaining chip will be, surely by that time, much more developed and threatening than it was when Barack Obama tried to create an alternative path towards a real, mutually beneficial solution so many years ago.