US (Washington Insider Magazine) – While much of the world watches Ukraine as the conflict it is embroiled in with Russia continues to sinisterly unfurl, there are other parts of the world whose eyes find themselves upon the US negotiation with Iran regarding a reworked JCPOA. So many prior and previous hurdles have been overcome to this date, and yet, at least one further hurdle reportedly remains to be jumped. It was the 45th President who, after leaving the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2018, chose to sanction the Islamic Royal Guard Corps of Iran in its famously failed “maximum pressure” campaign during 2019.
While his successor, the 46th and current President of the United States Joe Biden, has walked back much of Trump’s tough-talking and pressure campaign regarding Iran, he has thus far kept that innovation of his predecessor in place. For Iran, this is simply intolerable, and for the US, keeping the Trump innovation has little positive or meaningful effect on anything, actually. It would be like if another nation wanted to get along well with the US and then said that the Green Berets or Marines were terrorists; the US would be unhappy about it regardless of the evidence used to come to that conclusion.
Now, there are a few ways of looking at this situation of course: One is that Donald Trump did what he thought was right and that it just happened to coincide with that body’s support of the Yemenese Houthi people in the nation of Yemen that are being barbarized by a Saudi Arabian-led coalition of nations. Another is that it was no coincidence at all. This is of course, not to say that the IRGC or their most powerful unit, the infamous Quds Force that was once led by the since-assassinated General Qasem Soleimani, are, again, the greatest of groups either; their human rights record is pretty terrible, yet this is not always a distinction that raises American ire, to be sure.
No, that is a distinction that is used sometimes and with some nations, but not at all times and with all nations, as I have previously mentioned here. But, once we move past the coincidental timing of the move initially – as well as how it coincides with a bit of failed, but related, Trump-era foreign policy – we come back to the present, to the 46th President and his administration. Will Joe Biden allow for this Trump-era innovation to derail the JCPOA? You know, the desperately required JCPOA that, had it not been revoked by the previous President, would be nearing its decade anniversary with, it is reasonable to state, far less nuclear progress attained by Iran than they have managed today without a JCPOA in place; the same JCPOA that, had it been in place, might have saved thousands – if not millions of lives – in Iran itself?
I do not personally believe that the current President will allow for the former President’s declaration to stop this newly reformed JCPOA in its tracks, yet he is not taking the lost leverage of the Trump-era lying down either. As was alluded to and reported recently in other publications, I believe that there will be a compromise between the US and Iran that splits this final question down the middle so to speak: the Islamic Royal Guard Corps will likely be taken off the list, while the Quds Force will likely remain on the list for at least the time being, although in my estimation, agreements would be in place that would see that distinction revoked should greater international progress be made regarding Iran’s relationship with the rest of the world.
Hence, this entire final hurdle is more of a negotiating tactic that will be resolved only once the proper appearances can be made, and only once each nation has had the chance to flex itself a bit. Iran makes it clear that this is unacceptable, the US makes it clear that it stands where it stands regarding the issue, and then each party compromises and brags to their people that neither side really gave up anything too important anyway.
This would make the most sense, and would also lead to the best innovation yet. A newly revised Iran-JCPOA would be a positive innovation for the entire world, especially as that world watches how difficult dealing with Russia is with their supply of nuclear arms, mixed with their doubtful capabilities, can truly be in times of crisis. I recently, in fact, argued for progress regarding North Korea for much the same reason – if at all possible, anyway – and based upon much of the same logic as well; when those times finally arrive for those perennially disenfranchised nations, and they have both the nuclear technology and the ability to use it, the leverage that much of the world, including the United States, has had to date will have been long gone.
And while the world would benefit from this mutuality and security, Iran too would be on a better path to international cooperation and functionality that it has long been outside of. “Forever sanction” regimes have annihilated other countries and their economies before as well, and the current one has taken aim at Russia, but Iran has suffered as much as anyone throughout their ordeal of over forty years. There is great poverty in Iran, great drug addiction, great suffering and great frustration in that nation. The last years, dealing with all of those issues plus the COVID-19 pandemic, has drawn the nation gaunter still and back away from the ambitions of reformers and into the waiting arms of Principlists and demagogues.
If the innovation of the era of the 45th President is used by the administration of the 46th as nothing more than a final, scrap of leverage in a position where the former gave up massive amounts of leverage with his decision to leave the Iran-JCPOA the first time in 2018, then this current delay is well and good. It is, in this circumstance, nothing more than the diplomatic games of competing parties in the midst of international negotiations; little bits such as that have been wielded and argued about by opposing sides for as long as opposing sides have been meeting to negotiate deals between polities of any size. But should this administration not find compromise, and still choose to uphold the actions of his predecessor, despite that the man who first signed the deal, Barack Obama, did not include as much in the original deal, then priorities are surely not in the proper order.
While few are saying that the Quds Force are fantastic – I, myself, do not find really any military body to be too fantastic in either practice or in theory – the principal objective in this current exercise is to, first and foremost, relieve Iran of the need to develop a military-grade nuclear program. Furthermore, of course, it also serves Iran, as well as the international community of nations, for a real road to normalized, positive diplomatic and economic relations with that country, for not only the world and Iran as polities, but for the Iranian people and their society as well.
Sanctions, especially of the “forever” variety, are not the answer to most of our international problems, and will not solely fix any of even the most vile or intricate of military or diplomatic issues, no matter how much we would like for them to. While they find themselves being applied regarding Russia in this current circumstance, that pressure campaign is, according to many sources, only one to push Russia off of Ukraine and into both bilateral and eventually multilateral negotiations. They will not and frankly should not be applied to Russia for as long as they have been applied to nations like North Korea, Cuba or Iran, as nothing positive would come from doing so once this conflict has been resolved in some mutually acceptable manner. All they would accomplish is the disintegration of relations, of peoples’ lives and of the society of which they find themselves applied to.
And the relationships that the United States and much of the western world have long had with those three nations should illustrate how, far from creating amicability out of nowhere, sanctions – and prolonged sanctions in particular – only sour the moods of people, societies and nations the longer they are suffocated by them. Joe Biden likely understands this as well as Barack Obama, and better than Donald Trump, but the world is different today than it was during the Obama administration, and the current President must keep appearances up for all of those folks who think he’s “weaker” in whatever senses than his predecessors.
But to be sure, there is nothing weak about negotiating. To find a solution that spares the lives of millions of people across the world without having to resort to physical aggression and violence is, without a doubt, some of the greatest and truest strength one might imagine finding upon this planet. For centuries and centuries, great swaths of humanity have resorted to violence, and to the easiest and most primitive of interpersonal recourses to solve their problems with one another; far fewer, proportionately speaking, sought to avoid that madness with as great an ambition, yet for those lofty aims, they should not be castigated or derided as cowards, but as heros who helped to further evolve in more civilized ways how groups of people solve issues and problems amongst one another without violent recourse.
The United States is on the precipice of making another such stride in the eternal goal of reducing the chances of future conflict between nations. As the famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith once noted, “War remains the decisive human failure,” and in finding diplomatic recourse to create a path forward between nations that have long held great animosity towards one another, nations are acting internationally mutually and responsibility towards a more cooperative and egalitarian world. Compromise must be found and this newly reworked Iran-JCPOA must come into effect and be lauded as precisely what it is, another step towards a more inclusive international community, where differences can be worked out and worked on in civil manners and without the need for policies of war – either economic or traditional.
