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Death Of Nuclear Deal With Iran Adds To Biden’s Failures In U.S. Foreign Policy
When the Biden administration came into office it had promised to reenter into the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran. Under Trump the U.S. had left the deal and had reissued sanctions against Iran. Tehran followed up by increasing its enrichment capabilities and by accumulating more enriched Uranium.
It would have been easy for Biden to immediately eliminate the sanctions and to rejoin the deal. Iran would surely have followed up by returning to the enrichment levels the deal allows for.
But Biden bungled the issue. For months nothing happened. Then he send negotiators to Iran who demanded additional concessions by Iran while offering less sanction relief. Iran rejected that. It demanded that Biden guarantees that the U.S. would stick to the deal under future administrations. The negotiations were drawn out and made little progress.
The European Union, which is part of the JCPOA deal, finally wrote a compromise draft agreement which was submitted to the Iranian negotiators in Vienna. Iran made some small changes to the draft and send it back. The EU foreign affairs representative Josep Borrell publicly said that Iran's changes were "reasonable" and that he hoped for a quick U.S. agreement to the draft. But the Biden administration, which worried about the midterm elections, called the Iranian changes "not constructive" and rejected the draft agreement.
Meanwhile old accusation were re-raised over alleged finds of radioactive substances at two places that had never been part of Iran's civil nuclear program. U.S. intelligence agrees that Iran never had a military nuclear program though it allegedly once studied how one could be set up. The IAEA demanded that Iran explains how the substances got there. Iran says it does not know. Further IAEA inspection demands were rejected and IAEA inspections of some elements of Iran's enrichment facilities were limited.
The Biden administration had thought that, under sanction pressure, Iran would eventually succumb to its demands. That was a rather stupid miscalculation. The revolutionary Iran is not a country that succumbs to pressure.
Iran is still ready for a deal but Biden has given up:
Biden in newly surfaced video: Iran nuclear deal is "dead"
President Biden said on the sidelines of a Nov. 4 election rally that the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is “dead,” but stressed the U.S. won’t formally announce it, according to a new video that surfaced on social media late Monday.
Why it matters: It's the strongest confirmation so far that the Biden administration believes there's no path forward for the Iran deal, which leaves key questions about the future of Tehran's nuclear program.
- In late October, U.S. envoy for Iran Rob Malley said that the administration is not going to "waste time" on trying to revive the Iran nuclear deal at this time considering Tehran's crackdown on protesters, Iranian support for Russia's war in Ukraine, and Iran's positions on its nuclear program.
Driving the news: Biden made the remark in a short conversation with a woman who attended an election rally in Oceanside, California.
- The woman asked Biden to announce that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran deal is formally known, is dead.
- Biden responded that he would not “for a lot of reasons."
- But then he added: “It is dead, but we are not gonna announce it. Long story."
- The woman replied that the Iranian regime doesn’t represent the people. “I know they don’t represent you. But they will have a nuclear weapon that they'll represent," he said.
What they're saying: "The JCPOA is not our focus right now. It’s not on the agenda," a White House National Security Council spokesperson told Axios.
- "We don’t see a deal coming together anytime soon," the spokesperson said, pointing to Iran's crackdown on protesters and support for Russia in the war in Ukraine. "Our focus is on practical ways to confront them in these areas."
The U.S. has supported the protests and arranged for the attacks on Iranian security personnel by armed ethnic Kurd and Baloch insurgents. It is the U.S. that had kept up the sanctions up. It is the U.S. that pushed the IAEA to investigate the old unfounded claims. Iran is free to sell and buy arms to and from whomever it wants.
If the U.S. really wants 'practical ways to confront Iran' over any of those issues it will have to fight against Iran. Without the JCPOA deal there will also be more pressure on Biden and whoever follows him to go to all out war against Iran. But Iran is well protected and its missiles can hurt a lot of U.S. installations and friends in the region. A war would likely end with huge damage to Iran and a U.S. retreat from the Middle East.
Iran will continue to increase its civil nuclear capabilities. But it is unlikely to start a military program to build nuclear weapons. Its religious leaders have decided that weapons of mass destruction are against their religious duties and beliefs.
President Obama had invested quite a lot to get the JCPOA done. One wonders what he thinks of Biden's decision to not resurrect but to destroy his signature foreign policy achievement.
For other countries the U.S. behavior towards the nuclear deal demonstrates again that the U.S. is not-agreement-capable. That alone is already a huge failure for U.S. foreign policy.
@ Dan Farrand | Dec 20 2022 21:24 utc | 46
Here is the whole totality of the nuclear issue.
Yes, proliferation is bad, because the more different centers of power have nuclear weapons, the more likely nuclear war by mistake, accident, or intention becomes. But who is responsible for this situation?
When nuclear weapons were first invented and violently used in 1945, the US had a temporary monopoly on them that the US leadership desired to maintain but correctly doubted that it could continue to do (On this, see Michael D. Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly). Nevertheless, the postwar US forged ahead with its attempts to gain “full spectrum dominance,” in that felicitous and frank later neocon formulation. That is, the US was to be the absolute ruling state in the world, having ultimate sovereignty over everyone else, being a law to itself, etc. This was and remains very similar to the ultra-aggressive attitude and behavior of the Roman Republic in the 2nd century BC.
The trouble was, nuclear weapons completely vitiated and checkmated this desire for dominance. And worse, from the mid-1960s, the USSR achieved nuclear parity, making it completely invulnerable, except to a world-destroying nuclear exchange. Efforts to create an anti-missile shield proved completely abortive and fruitless, so the US actually gave up on that, and to this day, every man, woman, and child in the US remains vulnerable to nuclear annihilation falling on them out of the sky at any moment. This is hardly a situation any hegemonist can tolerate, but it exists, so their way of dealing with it is mostly to ignore it, to push it out of their consciousness.
So did the US become more cooperativist as a result? After all, it would be in the interests of all both to limit proliferation and to reduce the nuclear arsenals. Some of the latter was done, but not the former. That is because cooperativism completely contradicted the US elite’s dominationist and unilateralist playbook. So instead of holding back, they blasted away in country after country. By their multiple, frequent aggressions, what they were essentially telling the world was: “Countries of the world, arm yourselves with nuclear weapons as much and as fast as you can! That way, you can be treated like China when it forced down the American spyplane over Hainan Island in 2001 instead of like Korea, Vietnam, Laos Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela.” The US has even threatened to invade the Netherlands over the International Criminal Court.
Thus, it is US imperialism that is the primary source of nuclear proliferation in the world. Today, there is no attempt by the US leadership to reign in nuclear weapons at all. Instead, stupid idiots who ought all to be locked up actually promote the idea that a nuclear war is “winnable.”
So the the US has absolutely zero moral authority trying to tell any other country, even Liechtenstein, that it can’t have nuclear weapons. Rather, North Korea has a better moral standing to make nuclear weapons than the US has to oppose that. Obviously, this applies to Iran as well. Nevertheless, it is indeed way unproven that Iran actually would like to get nuclear weapons, and it has officially denied that that is its intent, as has already been noted in this discussion.
As for nuclear-armed Israel, what claim does it conceivably have either to deny Iran to have the very selfsame right to nuclear weapons, especially when some Israelis openly threaten it and other Middle Eastern countries with annihilation, nuclear or otherwise? The coming of the Great Equalizer has made for a completely different set of situational ethics, and those leaderships mired in 19th-century dominationist ideas have failed utterly to adapt to this. The ethics of the US and Israel are driven by nationalist logic, basically what they want is right, and no one else’s opinion counts for anything. Too bad when contending with nuclear annihilation, nationalist logic is the first thing to fall.
Posted by: Cabe | Dec 21 2022 2:49 utc | 68
Goldsteindiamongbergman and friends planned to wrap up Iraq quickly, then move on Syria and Iran way back in 2003-2005 but got extended with nation building. The “Libyan revolution” in 2011 was great success, so they opted to repeat that everywhere in ME. Prof Michel Chossudovskys long time analysis seems to support that these plans were indeed in place.
May 2003: Theater Iran Near Term TIRANNT war games simulated invasion of Syria first stage, Iran second stage.
November 2004: NATO-Israel protocol: Israel’s IDF delegation to the NATO conference met with military brass of six members of the Mediterranean basin nations, including Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. NATO seeks to revive the framework, known as the Mediterranean Dialogue program, which would include Israel. The Israeli delegation accepted to participate in military exercises and “anti-terror maneuvers” together with several Arab countries.
January 2005: the US, Israel and Turkey held military exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean, off the coast of Syria. These exercises, which have been held in previous years were described as routine.
February 2005. Following the decision reached in Brussels in November 2004, Israel was involved for the first time in military exercises with NATO, which also included several Arab countries.
February 2005: Assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The assassination, which was blamed on Syria, serves Israeli and US interests and was used as a pretext to demand the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.
February 2005: Sharon fires his Chief-of-Staff, Moshe Ya’alon and appoints Air Force General Dan Halutz. This is the first time in Israeli history that an Air Force General is appointed Chief of Staff. The appointment of Major General Dan Halutz as IDF Chief of Staff is considered in Israeli political circles as “the appointment of the right man at the right time.” The central issue is that a major aerial operation against Iran is in the planning stage, and Maj General Halutz is slated to coordinate the aerial bombing raids on Iran.
March 2005: NATO’s Secretary General was in Jerusalem for follow-up talks with Ariel Sharon and Israel’s military brass, following the joint NATO-Israel military exercise in February. These military cooperation ties are viewed by the Israeli military as a means to “enhance Israel’s deterrence capability regarding potential enemies threatening it, mainly Iran and Syria.” The premise underlying NATO-Israel military cooperation is that Israel is under attack.
March 2005: News leaks in Israel indicated an “initial authorization” by Prime Minster Ariel Sharon of an Israeli attack on Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant “if diplomacy failed to stop Iran’s nuclear program”. (The Hindu, 28 March 2005)
March-April 2005: The Holding in Israel of Joint US-Israeli military exercises specifically pertaining to the launching of Patriot missiles.
April 2005: Donald Rumsfeld was on an official visits to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan. His diplomatic endeavors were described by the Russian media as “literally circling Iran in an attempt to find the best bridgehead for a possible military operation against that country.”
April 2005: Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon meets George W Bush at his Texas Ranch. Iran is on the agenda of bilateral talks. More significantly, the visit of Ariel Sharon was used to carry out high level talks between US and Israeli military planners pertaining to Iran.
April 2005: President Vladmir Putin is in Israel on an official visit. He announces Russia’s decision to sell short-range anti-aircraft missiles to Syria and to continue supporting Iran’s nuclear industry. Beneath the gilded surface of international diplomacy, Putin’s timely visit to Israel must be interpreted as “a signal to Israel” regarding its planned aerial attack on Iran.
April 2005: US pressure in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been exerted with a view to blocking the re-appointment of Mohammed Al Baradei, who according to US officials “is not being tough enough on Iran…” Following US pressures, the vote on the appointment of a new IAEA chief was put off until June. These developments suggest that Washington wants to put forth their own hand-picked nominee prior to launching US-Israeli aerial attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. (See VOA). (In February 2003, Al Baradei along with UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix challenged the (phony) intelligence on WMD presented by the US to the UN Security Council, with a view to justifying the war on Iraq.)
April 2005. Sale of deadly military hardware to Israel. GBU-28 Buster Bunker Bombs: Coinciding with Putin’s visit to Israel, the US Defence Security Cooperation Agency (Department of Defense) announced the sale of an additional 100 bunker-buster bombs produced by Lockheed Martin to Israel. This decision was viewed by the US media as “a warning to Iran about its nuclear ambitions.”
May 2005: Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Israel for follow-up talks with Ariel Sharon. He was accompanied by his Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul, who met with senior Israeli military officials. On the official agenda of these talks: joint defense projects, including the joint production of Arrow II Theater Missile Defense and Popeye II missiles. The latter also known as the Have Lite, are advanced small missiles, designed for deployment on fighter planes. Tel Aviv and Ankara decide to establish a hotline to share intelligence.
May 2005: Syrian troops scheduled to withdraw from Lebanon, leading to a major shift in the Middle East security situation, in favor of Israel and the US.
Posted by: experienced | Dec 21 2022 7:21 utc | 90
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