Tag Archives: Iran nuclear deal

Top Israeli military officials say Trump’s Iran deal exit was a ‘mistake,’ bad for Israel, by Mitchell Plitnik

Posted on December 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Iran nuclear deal was far from perfect, but Iran observed it and allowed the world to monitor what was going on inside the country. Trump thought by withdrawing he’d get an agreement that was less imperfect. That, he didn’t get. Now even some high Israeli officials are saying withdrawal was a bad idea, and at the time the deal was signed, official Israel was vehemently against it. From Mitchell Plitnik at responsiblestatecraft.org:

As talks resume to return to the JCPOA, unlikely voices are emerging to support its revival.

The United States, its allies, and Iran have returned to negotiations this week in Vienna aimed at restoring the JCPOA. All parties are expressing pessimism regarding the current round of talks. President Joe Biden is feeling pressure from Congress and from Israel to find ways to “improve” the deal, while the new, more hardline Iranian leadership is holding firm to its demands that Washington lift all sanctions imposed since 2018 immediately and offer a guarantee that it will not renege on its commitment to the deal, as President Donald Trump did.

Both sides are pointing fingers at the other and it may seem like there is no viable path forward. But one is suddenly presenting itself to the United States from a most unlikely source: Israel.

Earlier this week, an interview in the Israeli press appeared with Danny Cintrinowicz, who headed the Iran branch of the Israeli Military Intelligence’s Research and Analysis Division from 2013 to 2016. This was the period during which the moderate Hassan Rouhani took over the Iranian presidency from the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and spearheaded Iran’s effort to engage the West.

Cintrinowicz called Israel’s policy on Iran a “failure,” explaining that “[Israel] pushed the US side to leave the agreement when there are no other options.”

Cintrinowicz speaks from years of studying Iranian politics and policymaking regarding its military and security affairs. His view of Iran is far more nuanced and informed than most of what we hear from Israeli officials — or American and European ones for that matter.

“Iran is not a monolith,” Cintrinowicz told The Times of Israel. “And I’m sorry, but they don’t wake up in the morning and think about how to destroy Israel. It doesn’t work like that in Iran… It’s a basic misunderstanding of the Iranian system.”

Cintrinowicz laid out the reason the current impasse is so tricky. “Everything started going haywire when Trump left the agreement. Initially, Rouhani tried not to violate the deal. He took only very limited steps. But when he became so weakened and understood that nothing would change, he decided to break every restriction that had been placed on the regime.”

Cintrinowicz was not alone in bemoaning Trump’s arbitrary and dangerous decision to abandon the JCPOA. Other Israeli leaders, and prominent pro-Israel Americans, also voiced their consternation.

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Door Is Closing on an Iran Nuclear Deal, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on September 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Iran wants the deal from which Trump withdrew. The Biden administration wants a new and improved deal. The likely outcome is no deal at all. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

Critics of the foreign and national security policies of the Joe Biden regime were quick to note that the American soldiers being pulled out of Afghanistan were no doubt a resource that will be committed to a new adventure somewhere else. There was considerable speculation that the new model army, fully vaccinated, glorious in all its gender and racial diversity and purged of extremists in the ranks, might be destined to put down potentially rebellious supremacists in unenlightened parts of the United States. But even given an increasingly totalitarian White House, that civil war type option must have seemed a bridge too far for an administration plagued by plummeting approval ratings, so the old hands in Washington apparently turned to what has always been a winner: pick a suitable foreign enemy and stick it to him.

It is of course generally known that when Joe Biden was running for president, he committed himself to making an attempt to reenter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015 which placed limits on the Iranian nuclear program and also established an intrusive inspection routine. In turn, the Iranians were to receive relief from sanctions related to the program. In 2018 President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement based on the false argument that Iran was cheating on the arrangement and was secretly engaged in developing a weapon. Trump’s neocon supporters on the issue also argued without any evidence that Iran was intending to use the agreement as cover for its efforts to accumulate enriched uranium, guaranteeing that they would be able develop a weapon quickly when the inspection regime expires in 2025.

The Trump move was, of course, backed by the Israel Lobby and it was widely seen as deferring to Israeli interests at a time when the agreement was actually good for the United States as it blocked an unfriendly country’s possible nuclear proliferation. Unfortunately, a US government’s bowing to Israel is not exactly unusual and the withdrawal was subject to only limited criticism in the mainstream media.

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Let’s Talk U.S. Foreign Policy: It Is the Root Cause of Many Evils, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on August 29, 2020 | Leave a comment

For those who love bipartisanship, US foreign policy has been a bipartisan disaster. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

As the United States sinks deeper into a multi-faceted global crisis that no politician seems able or even willing to address, one hears more and more often demands for radical change in who runs the country and to what end. Of course, Donald J. Trump offered such a dramatic shift in priorities four years ago, but he has been unable to deliver due to his own inability to execute and the ill-conceived machinations of those whom he has chosen as advisers. The Democrats for their part are offering little beyond a repeat of their 2016 pander to grievance groups in an effort to cobble together an unassailable majority based on buying off the party’s various constituencies.

But there is one area where change could come dramatically if either party were actually motivated to do something that would truly benefit the American people, and that is in the area of foreign and national security policy where the president has considerable power to set priorities and redirect both the State and Defense Departments. Unfortunately, foreign and national security policy is almost never discussed during the presidential campaigns and this time would already appear to be no exception. That means that the one thing that is a constant amidst all the smoke and mirrors is the continued bellicosity of both parties on the world stage.

The Republicans are apparently eager to “democratize” Latin America while the Democrats in particular are wedded to the “foreign interference” angle to explain their loss in 2016, with Hillary Clinton predictably advising in her Democratic National Convention speech that the public should “Vote to make sure we — not a foreign adversary — choose our president.” Indeed, the tendency to create and then demonize “foreign conspiracies” is generally supported by the establishment and its parasitical media, since it enables the billionaire oligarchs who really run the country to grow fatter while also avoiding any blame for the declining fortunes of most of the American people.

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Pompeo’s Iran Failures Make War More Likely, by Ron Paul

Posted on August 25, 2020 | Leave a comment

Trump and Pompeo said we’d get a better nuclear deal with Iran if we backed out of Obama, and five other nations’, deal. They backed out, but to date have no better deal with Iran. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

The US foreign policy establishment has for decades been dominated by neoconservative interventionists and falsely-named “humanitarian” interventionists. These people believe that because the United States is the one “exceptional nation,” no conflict anywhere in the world could possibly be solved without our butting our noses into it.

One of President Obama’s few foreign policy successes was to work with European countries on a deal that would see a reduction of sanctions on Iran in exchange for a series of Iranian moves demonstrating its abandonment of a nuclear weapon.

The American neocons as well as the hardliners in Saudi Arabia and Israel were furious at the compromise, but for a couple of years it showed real promise. Trade between Europe and Iran was increasing and there was no evidence that Iran was reneging on its obligations. Even American companies were looking to Iran for business opportunities. Whenever goods flow between nations, war becomes less likely.

President Trump has had problems with policy consistency throughout his first term in office. But, unfortunately, his few policy consistencies have been the most ill-advised ones. On the campaign trail Trump relentlessly attacked Obama’s Iran policy and promised to pull the US out of the JCPOA Iran agreement.

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Americans Are Ready for a Different Approach to Nuclear Weapons, by Lawrence Wittner

Posted on December 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

It’s been fifty years since “duck and cover” but people are still scared to death of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Imagine that. From Lawrence Wittner at antiwar.com:

Although today’s public protests against nuclear weapons can’t compare to the major antinuclear upheavals of past decades, there are clear indications that most Americans reject the Trump administration’s nuclear weapons policies.

Since entering office in 2017, the Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from the nuclear agreement with Iran, scrapped the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia, and apparently abandoned plans to renew the New START Treaty with Russia. After an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations agreed on a landmark UN Treaty on the Prohibitions of Nuclear Weapons in July 2017, the Trump administration quickly announced that it would never sign the treaty. The only nuclear arms control measure that the Trump administration has pursued?an agreement by North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program?appears to have collapsed, at least in part because the Trump administration badly mishandled the negotiations.

Moreover, the Trump administration has not only failed to follow the nuclear arms control and disarmament policies of its Democratic and Republican predecessors, but has plunged into a renewed nuclear arms race with other nations by championing a $1.7 trillion program to refurbish the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Perhaps most alarming, it has again and againpublicly threatened to initiate a nuclear war.

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Iran Sanctions a Reminder of How America Militarized the Financial System, by Tho Bishop

Posted on May 15, 2018 | 1 comment

The US cutting off access to the global financial system is a powerful weapon. From Tho Bishop at mises.org:

Only CNN was surprised by Donald Trump’s recent announcement that he was pulling the United States out of the Iran Deal negotiated by his predecessor. Following the same failed approach of the last Republican administration, the President opted for confrontation with the Iranian regime rather than uplifting more moderate factions within the country through trade. The decision has already increased tensions in the volatile region, with Iran and Israel exchanging fire in Syria.

Meanwhile European leaders are meeting Iranian officials to try to design a way to bypass new American sanctions. Others have vocally attacked Trump’s actions and attacked the US playing the role of “economic policeman.”

As French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said after the decision:

Do we want to be vassals who obey decisions taken by the United States while clinging to the hem of their trousers? Or do we want to say we have our economic interests, we consider we will continue to do trade with Iran?

According to reports, European officials are looking at a few different options to help salvage their economic relationship with Iran.

One is by reviving “blocking statutes” such as the ones the EU threatened in response to sanctions on Cuba, Libya, and Iran in the 1990s. The mechanism works similar to the anti-commandeering doctrine, ordering European officials to refuse to comply with US sanctions. As Reuters notes, blocking statutes have “never been used and is seen by European governments more as a political weapon.” They were successful in the past because the Clinton Administration simply backed down, something that seems unlikely with President Trump.

The other is to establish new financial institutions with no connection to the US financial system. Iran has already made the euro the official reporting currency for foreign exchange, so on the surface this seems like a viable alternative.

The problem European decision makers face, however, is that the US has gone to great lengths to militarize the banking industry in recent years.

To continue reading: Iran Sanctions a Reminder of How America Militarized the Financial System

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Europe May Fold, but China and Russia See Opportunity, by Michael Krieger

Posted on May 14, 2018 | 1 comment

If one were to look at Iran as an opportunity, rather than as an enemy who will destroy everything that is good and right, then the US’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal forcloses US opportunities and creates them for other nations, notably Russia and China. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

And we recently discovered, if it was not known before, that no amount of power can withstand the hatred of the many. 

–  Marcus Tullius Cicero

Although European leaders are talking a big game about keeping the Iran deal (JCPOA) alive following Trump’s unilateral withdrawal, there’s a good chance nations across the pond, especially the UK and France, will ultimately fold to U.S. demands. This is despite the fact these countries stand to lose far more economically than America. Acquiescing to U.S. imperial demands as submissive client states is simply what Europe does. On the other hand, China and Russia sense opportunity for major geopolitical gains and will not back down.

Political leaders in China and Russia must be licking their chops at the short-sighted stupidity of Donald Trump’s decision to ditch the Iran deal. As mentioned in previous pieces, the Trump administration isn’t just saying the U.S. will sanction Iran from its end, but that it could leverage the global financial system and its dependency on the USD, to punish those who dare defy U.S. policy.

As discussed in the recent post, The Road to 2025 (Part 3) – USD Dominated Financial System Will Fall Apart, this unilateral move against Iran is likely to be a key catalyst in the planet transitioning away from a financial system completely and totally dominated by the USD into a more multi-polar currency world. Trump’s essentially willing to trade away U.S. global geopolitical and financial dominance because he’s obsessed with taking out the Iranian regime.

While Europe may not be willing to make a huge fuss about all this right now, its leaders, and more importantly its citizenry, know exactly what this means. As long as the global financial system is totally dominated and controlled from the U.S. via the USD, no country on earth can be truly sovereign, in terms of economic or foreign policy.

To continue reading: Europe May Fold, but China and Russia See Opportunity

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Netanyahu: “Let’s You and Him Fight”: Brandishing the American Military, by Fred Reed

Posted on May 13, 2018 | 3 comments

Fred Reed says Trump reneged on the Iran nuclear deal for one reason: Israel. From Reed at theburningplatform.com:

Why did the Cockatoo-in-Chief renege on the Iran deal deeply prized by Russia, China, France, Germany, England, and the European Union? Why did he deliberately damage relations with Europe and cost American workers many thousands of jobs at Boeing among others? Why do all of this to hurt a country that poses no danger to the United States?

Israel.

Israel, Israel. Israel. Israel.

Always Israel.

If Iran were a threat to the existence of Israel, things would be different. If Muslims conquered the Jews, they would presumably treat them as badly as Israelis, and very likely worse. It would be ugly in the extreme. To prevent this, use of the American military would be justified.

But Iran does not threaten the existence of Israel. It does threaten Israel’s dominance in the Mid-East. Iran is far larger and more populous than Israel, strategically located, and has vast amounts of oil. It is a large market for many European products. By contrast, Israel is small and has nothing anyone needs or wants. Left to itself, Iran would become the dominant regional power. It moves fast in that direction now with burgeoning trade with Europe in, among many other things, airliners. With economic influence comes political influence.

Consequently Israel does not want Iran to prosper. If it can, Israel will use the American military to prevent this prospering. It will destroy America’s relations with the rest of the world to prevent it. It is doing so.

As thinking people know, the twaddle about the Iranian’s development of an atomic bomb is just that–twaddle. The Europeans know this, which is why they are not alarmed. The US government know it, since the intelligence agencies have repeatedly said that Iran does not have a program aimed at producing a nuclear weapon.

But: Whenever the Amrican government, or those controlling it, wants to drive the US into a war, it invents a frightening danger and warns of it over and over and over until a poorly educated public believes it: The Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq’s WMD, the Iranian bomb. It’s a frightening world, Washington tells us. Things go bump in the night. Boo.

To continue reading: Netanyahu: “Let’s You and Him Fight”: Brandishing the American Military

 

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Will Trump Torch the Global Economy on the Bonfire of his Vanity? by Tom Luongo

Posted on May 13, 2018 | 1 comment

There may be financial market ramifications from Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

At least it is confirmed for us.  Donald Trump wants regime change in Iran.  His cancellation of the JCPOA was a decision born his myopia.  He has surrounded himself with people who reinforce his view and manipulate him via his vanity.

And the price of implementing his current plan will be a global debt crisis which no one will escape.  The problem will be very few will see the links.

He wants to remake America and the world in his image while undoing anything President Obama touched.  Most of this I’m wholly on board with.  Obama was a vandal.  So, however, were Bush the Lesser and Bill Clinton.

We’re All Neocons Now

We have a leaked (yeah, right) memo explaining this is the plan.  But, we didn’t need this if we were being honest with ourselves.  Nothing Trump has done since he’s been in office has been contra to this goal; overthrowing the theocracy in Iran.

In fact, it has been a step-wise move in this direction with each decision he’s made.  Commentators I respect and have learned at the knee of still want to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.  Not me.

It’s right there in plain text.

Trump has capitalized on the insane Deep State opposition to his presidency to politicize this goal and get his base to ab-react for regime change, when he explicitly said that was off the table at his inauguration.

If the Democrats and Merkel want to stay in the deal, then the deal must be bad.  Obama Bad, Trump Good.  Trump is Orange Jesus.  He knows stuff, man.

What was a worry about Israeli influence in his administration in 2017 has now morphed into a call to duty to create chaos in Iran to assuage the American ego by saving the Iranian people from themselves.

You have to hand it to these folks, they understand how to run a successful mass psy-op.  Beware the Master Persuader, as Scott Adams would put it, his skills can be put to any use.

These men and their Deep State handlers/billionaire donors have had a strategic goal for decades, remake the Middle East for Israel and the Oil Complex, bottle up Russia and China.

To continue reading: Will Trump Torch the Global Economy on the Bonfire of his Vanity?

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The Real Reason Trump Abandoned the Iran Nuclear Deal, by Darius Shahtahmasebi

Posted on May 13, 2018 | 1 comment

What exactly is wrong with Iran nuclear deal? Is it not working, or is it working too well? From Darius Shahtahmasebi at theantimedia.org:

Donald Trump doesn’t hate the Iran deal because it is a bad deal. He hates it because it is by all accounts a decent deal that has actually been working.

If you doubt this statement, ask yourself: What sensible argument has Trump ever offered to support his opposition to the deal? Sure, he has used his ever-expanding and descriptive vocabulary to call it some grandiose names, but he hasn’t actually explained what is wrong with it.

If the deal is so bad, why would he even want to bother pursuing a deal with North Korea? What deal could he possibly make that wouldn’t involve an arrangement similar to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)? (We will turn to this point in a moment).

As Vox explained last year:

“Trump doesn’t hate the Iran deal for policy reasons. He’s never offered a detailed public policy case against it, and experts don’t really believe he has one. ‘I don’t think anyone actually thinks he knows anything about the particularities of this agreement,’ says Sarah Kreps, a professor at Cornell University who studies arms control agreements.”

So what could he possibly hate about the Iran deal? If he does have sound reasons, why has he never presented them? What can he possibly hope to achieve with North Korea after proving to the entire world that the U.S. can renege on its word at any given time?

The blunt truth about the Iran deal is that Donald Trump rejects it because it has been working. His own administration has been forced to consistently certify Iran as compliant with the terms. The neocon dream for people like Trump and the warmongers who advise him is to prevent the U.S. from being the unilateral cause of the destruction of the deal (as it transpired, the U.S. was one hundred percent responsible for its demise). Rather, the strategy appears to be to devise a deal so impossible for Iran to accept that Iran will, in the eyes of the international community, become the dangerous and untrustworthy party in major need of a military intervention, as the U.S. has long painted the situation.

To continue reading: The Real Reason Trump Abandoned the Iran Nuclear Deal

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