With Republicans and Democrats in Congress having openly expressed their united opposition to the Biden administration reentering the nuclear agreement with Iran (the JCPOA), it should come as no surprise that negotiations have gone nowhere.
The reason?
Beneath all the bluster about nefarious Iranian activities in the Middle East and the back and forth over lifting the sanctions Trump’s team imposed on Tehran after unilaterally ripping up the JCPOA in the first place, Joe Biden is a wimp afraid of facing political backlash for undoing one of Trump’s worst foreign policy decisions.
Afterall, it was Biden’s own current team of Malley, Blinken, and Sullivan who worked out the nuclear deal with Iran while working for Obama.
So even though Biden has admitted Trump pulling out of the deal was a “gigantic mistake,” he won’t agree to lift sanctions neocon Trump officials like Elliot Abrams admitted were only put in place to try and prevent Biden from reentering the deal in the first place.
This includes the labeling of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, which though Biden had been using it as an excuse not to get back into the deal Tehran has recently dropped it as a demand in negotiations – this while the Wall Street Journal openly reports the Israeli military and intelligence services are assassinating Iranians left and right, including inside Iran itself.
The truth, unfortunately, is that Biden lacks the courage of his convictions and is no longer serious about getting back into the deal. As a consequence, war with Iran looks increasingly likely – and over nuclear weapons our own CIA director, William Burns, says publicly the Iranians aren’t pursuing making.
Despite the fact that every U.S. intervention in the Middle East over the past twenty years, from Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Syria, to Yemen, has strengthened Iran’s position in the region, the groundwork for the next disastrous war has already been laid – building on the foundation of the Abraham Accords to bring India on board with Israel, Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia to gird for direct conflict with Iran. Speaking in Israel, Biden has already gone so far as to threaten the use of force to prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb they aren’t pursuing, but which, if they were wise, Tehran would start building as a deterrent immediately.
Apart from the pressure from our “allies” in Riyadh and Jerusalem, the former a regime so despotic Freedom House ranks it lower than China, while the latter simply needs an enemy to keep the billions in annual U.S. aid flowing, the Abraham Accords already have their own caucus in Congress, and the military industrial complex salivates at the prospect of a Middle East NATO to buy even more of their products.
Poor Iran – not so bad as to prevent Ronald Reagan selling them weapons through Israel during the 1980s, as Gareth Porter has convincingly documented, after the first Cold War ended Tehran found itself picked out as one of the new threats that would continue to justify the empire.
So as increasingly delusional screeds by walking disasters like John Bolton populate the opinion pages of the major papers and Republican and Democrats unite to bully a weak President already inclined to serve the interests of our ostensible client states, who benefits from our Iran policy is as obvious as who doesn’t: the American people.
