by Yigal Carmon and A. Savyon
Trump's speech announcing his withdrawal from the JCPOA significantly alters the strategic power balance in the Middle East and the world.
U.S.
President Donald Trump's May 8, 2018 speech turned the tables on Iran,
on the European parties to the JCPOA and on the supporters of the deal
around the world. Trump reiterated the basic truths about the Iranian
regime, which the Obama administration had swept aside in its eagerness
to attain the deal.
Announcing
his withdrawal from the JCPOA, Trump clarified that he refused to go
along with the Obama administration's and the Europeans' deceptive
presentation of Iran and of the nuclear deal.
Significance And Implications:
Trump's speech announcing
his withdrawal from the JCPOA significantly alters the strategic power
balance in the Middle East and the world. The Trump administration has
completely reversed Obama's U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran, resuming the
strategic political-military alliance with America's traditional allies,
Israel and Saudi Arabia, against Iran, which Obama supported, and
against the Shi'ite resistance axis.
Iran now faces two fronts
working in tandem: a political-economic front led by the U.S., and a
military front for expelling Iran from Syria, led by Israel. On both
fronts, Iran is on the defensive and is openly adopting a policy of
restraint. Iran has no means, neither political nor military, to
confront this old-new coalition of the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Israel,
and it has not dared to retaliate for Israeli strikes in Syria targeting
its troops and military infrastructures there.
Trump's new Iran policy
is also a firm message to North Korea, that the U.S. will not be party
to deceptive and fraudulent agreements, and will act against dictatorial
regimes that employ terror and develop nuclear weapons.
Parameters Of The New U.S. Policy On Iran:
In his speech, Trump presented the principles of the new U.S. policy on Iran:
-
The Iranian regime is an oppressive
totalitarian theocratic regime which is still under sanctions for human
rights violations and does not merit a Western seal of approval. In its
30 years in power, it has murdered thousands of Iranian citizens, and it
imprisons political dissidents and abducts Western nationals and holds
them hostage.
-
The Iranian regime is the main
supporter and disseminator of global terror, responsible for the murder
of many Americans, and is under sanctions for this terrorist activity.
-
The Iranian regime is striving for regional expansion throughout the Middle East, destabilizing countries that are U.S. allies.
-
The Iranian regime is developing
missiles for offensive purposes (its claim that the missiles are
defensive is false. The 2000-km range missiles, which Iran was allowed
to develop following the JCPOA, are clearly offensive).
-
The JCPOA is rooted in a U.S.
capitulation to Iran's demand to recognize it as a nuclear power, and in
a complete disregard of the fact that Iran had a detailed program for
manufacturing nuclear weapons and missile delivery capabilities – as was
already known and was comprehensively corroborated by Israel's recent
exposure of Iran's nuclear archive.
Components Of The JCPOA Deception
-
U.S.-Iran negotiations secretly began during the presidency of
Ahmadinejad, not after the election of Rohani, as the Obama
administration deceptively claimed.
-
Negotiations began only after an initial capitulation by president
Obama, who met Iran's demand to recognize its right to enrich uranium,
after years of negotiations in which the Europeans persistently refused
to recognize this as an Iranian right.
-
The Iran deal is not a signed document, because Iran refused to
commit to a bilateral or multilateral agreement. The unsigned document
was approved by the UN Security Council under the heading "Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)," which means that it is only one
of thousands of decisions passed by the Security Council.
-
In stark contrast to the claim of Obama and his spokespersons, that
the JCPOA is "the most comprehensive and intrusive inspection and
verification regime ever negotiated," the JCPOA actually
employs the laxest inspection mechanism ever negotiated with a country
that has been caught lying to the IAEA and the Security Council and
failing to comply with the NPT, to which it is a signatory. The
inspection mechanism is outrageously inadequate, since it does not allow
the inspection of military sites and other suspected sites of military
nuclear activity.
-
Obama transformed Iran from a suspect state, accused of military
nuclear activity, which must be subjected to constant and meticulous
scrutiny, into a partner allowed to negotiate the mechanisms of its own
inspection. The Obama administration and the Europeans surrendered to
the refusal of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to allow the
questioning of Iranian nuclear scientists and the inspection of military
facilities, and agreed to close Iran's Possible Military Dimensions
(PMD) case in an outrageous process, in which the Parchin military
compound remained closed to IAEA inspectors and soil samples from the
site were supplied by Iran itself.
-
The nuclear negotiations were based on a constant surrender to Iran's
conditions and demands. The few conditions it is required to meet are
unverifiable: the uranium that was removed from Iran has disappeared,
the heavy water it is producing – contrary to the usual procedure
applied to heavy water producing countries – is stored in Oman, within
Iran's reach, and the inspection procedures agreed upon do not include
military bases and sites suspected of military nuclear activity, but
apply only to nuclear sites that were declared by Iran itself (and even
this only after they were exposed by foreign forces, as in the case of
Fordo).
-
Acting in an unprofessional and non-independent manner, the IAEA and
its secretary-general, Yukiya Amano, agreed to these scandalous
inspection procedures. Amano closed Iran's PMD case in complete
disregard of the IAEA's own findings, published in a 2011
secretary-general report, which found Iran guilty of pursuing nuclear
weapons. Amano's justification for closing the case was the ridiculous
claim that no evidence had been found that the Iranian regime was behind
the suspicious findings collected at Iranian sites. Amano agreed to
downgrade the IAEA from an independent body to one that is
professionally subordinate to a political forum: the JCPOA Joint
Commission. This means that any Iranian violation of the JCPOA is
automatically defined as a contested issue that must be forwarded to the
political echelon, namely the Joint Commission. This applies, for
example, to IAEA inspection of Section T of the JCPOA, which allows Iran
to develop theoretical simulations of nuclear explosions as long as
they are for non-military purposes and subject to inspection. The IAEA
reports confirming Iranian compliance with the agreement are
meaningless, because the IAEA is barred from inspecting any site that
was not accepted by Iran in advance as a site subject to inspection.
-
The European countries, which had led the nuclear negotiations with
Iran until Obama assumed the presidency, and had espoused a principled
position that mandated stringent inspection, the questioning of
scientists, and a refusal to recognize uranium enrichment as an Iranian
right, fell in line with Obama, who led the nuclear negotiations,
relinquishing all their demands.
-
Obama and the Europeans consented to Iran developing missiles with a
range of up to 2000km, a range which covers the entire Middle East but
not Europe.
-
The Obama administration and the Europeans accepted the Iranian lie
regarding Khamenei's fatwa banning nuclear weapons, endorsed it and used
it to justify the JCPOA, even though they knew Iran was developing such
weapons.
Yigal Carmon is the President and Founder of MEMRI; A. Savyon is Director of MEMRI's Iran media project.
Source: https://www.memri.org/reports/trumps-iran-speech-no-more-surrendering-bullying-dictatorial-regimes
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment