While the whole world, particularly Israel, has fixated on Iran’s potential nuclear weapons capability, Iran has concentrated on its non-nuclear capabilities. Israel may be wishing it had paid a little more attention. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:
Reactivating the JCPOA has drawn some unexpected advocates – top Israeli security officials wanting to pull Iran back into the JCPOA.
A top Russian official, last weekend, said something which pinpoints the times we are living today. It may seem a throwaway remark, but behind it, just out of sight, lies something profound. He said that the JCPOA, (for very many, and not just for Iran), had become the prime symbol of how the rules-based global order is used precisely to squeeze-out a peoples’ sovereignty and autonomy – and to Gulliverise them into its Siamese twin, the rules-based monetary order.
At first brush, such a comment might seem a bit exaggerated, even hostile – for surely the intent to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons by the U.S. is a laudable aim?
Ostensibly that may be seem the objective (and one shared by Russia). But it is also true that the JCPOA methodology fits to a particular pattern: Unilaterally declare a certain vision, together with its values, to be Universal, then lay down the ‘rules-of-the-road’ to this universal. These rules will not necessarily comport with international law, but then, in line with Carl Schmitt’s infamous phrase, “Sovereign is he who decides the exception (to law)”, and since universality takes itself to be a distinct cut-above backward, nationalist civilisations, in that measure alone, it claims exceptionality. And the rules-based ‘order’, on this reckoning, must supersede and supplant ‘law’.
In the case of Iran, the superimposed ‘universal’ rules-of-the road were intended to supplant Iran’s NPT legal rights: to walk-back the Revolutionary impulse in Iran; drain its residue of radicalism through the drudgery of complying with tedious JCPOA rules; and ultimately force Iran’s assimilation into the global monetary governance too.
