By Mohammad Sadat Khansari
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been out of compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal for at least two and a half years. Supporters of the agreement may be inclined to blame that on the fact that the United States pulled out in May 2018. But there are serious questions as to whether Iran was ever really in compliance. And there is a growing body of evidence to support the previous American administration’s conclusion that the deal was too weak to actually accomplish its stated goals.
The most basic such goal was to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons capability in the near future. But commentators often overlook the fact that the preamble to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) frames that goal as part of a larger effort to reduce preexisting tensions and to facilitate peace and stability in the region and the world. That project has conclusively failed, as Iran remains a driving force behind most regional crises and has lately expanded its ballistic missile program, seized commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and maintained its destructive influence over militant groups in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
In June 2018, less than two months after the first confirmed Iranian violations of the JCPOA, the Iranian regime even tried to perpetrate a terrorist attack on European soil. Early this month, the former third counsellor at the Iranian embassy in Vienna, Assadollah Assadi, was convicted of plotting terrorist murder by a Belgian court. The evidence showed that Assadi had personally smuggled highly explosive material from Iran into Europe, then handed it off to two co-conspirators with instructions to place it as near as possible to the Iranian Resistance leader Maryam Rajavi at a gathering of tens of thousands of Iranian expatriates near Paris.
Before the ink was dry on Assadi’s sentencing documents, the European Union announced its intention to sponsor an online conference called the Europe-Iran Business Summit. The event had previously been scheduled for December, before being cancelled in the face of international outrage over the Iranian regime’s killing of a dissident journalist, Ruhollah Zam. At the time, the event was a symbol of the EU’s willingness to overlook Iran’s violations of the nuclear agreement. With its new schedule running from March 1 to 3, the event now stands as a symbol of the EU’s willingness to overlook so much more.
Zam’s killing, Assadi’s conviction, and a range of other recent developments have been accompanied, in recent months, by new revelations about Tehran’s long history of efforts to violate and undermine the JCPOA. On February 9, Iranian Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi contradicted years of official talking points by acknowledging the possibility that Iran may indeed pursue nuclear weapons capability. Alavi pointed to a fatwa from the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei which declares that goal to be against Islam, but he then indicated that the edict could be reversed, in which case “those who pushed Iran in that direction will be to blame.”
Such statements represent transparent efforts to manipulate the JCPOA’s Western signatories into providing new concessions. But unfortunately, incidents like the announcement of the new Europe-Iran Business Forum suggest that there is still a significant chance of that manipulation being successful. Of course, there is plenty of counter-pressure within European policy circles, with dozens of lawmakers having signed onto statements warning that a conciliatory Western posture threatens to embolden all of Iran’s malign activities. Yet these statements haven’t prompted much response from leading figures like Josep Borrell, the EU head of foreign policy who is slated to deliver a keynote speech at the Business Forum.
If that event goes forward as planned, it will no doubt lead the Iranian regime to believe it still has support from all of Europe in its bid to compel the US into suspending sanctions once again, without any new concessions on the Iranian side. So far, the new US administration has defied expectations by keeping in place the sanctions that were ordered by the previous administration and demanding that Iran first resumes compliance with all the restrictions that had been imposed on its nuclear program.
But even that position is not strong enough, in that it reflects the false assumption that those restrictions had ever been genuinely adopted in the first place. This notion was contradicted more than two years ago by none other than Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. On January 22, 2019, he gave an interview on Iranian state television in which he detailed some of the ways in which Iran had deceived the international community into believing that it had, among other things, complied with the order to deactivate the core of the plutonium-producing heavy water facility at Arak.
These remarks, and others like them, went a long way toward explaining the speed with which Iran was able to ramp up uranium enrichment, re-install enrichment centrifuges, fortify its nuclear facilities, and begin production of uranium metal. Every measure that the regime has implemented has been further confirmation that there were never any meaningful restraints on the nuclear program and that the Iranian regime never had any intention of negotiating in good faith with its foreign adversaries.
This should yield an unmistakable lesson for those who are poised to pursue further negotiations with Iranian entities between Monday and Wednesday. It should reveal the inherent lack of value in those efforts and in the underlying desire to use commerce as a starting point for promoting the regime’s moderation.
The fact is that no such moderation is forthcoming. Salehi, Alavi, and other high-ranking officials have rejected it out of hand. Their counterparts in the West cling to it at their own peril. But in the wake of all that has happened in the nuclear sphere and beyond, it should be clear to them by now that serious restrictions on Tehran’s behavior can only be enforced through coordinate pressure, absent friendly negotiations, diplomatic ties, and expansions in trade with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
This article was first published by ncr-iran
Iranian Voice News 