The details are not yet final, but the second agreement to stop Iran’s nuclear program is ready to be signed. In so doing, the US is correcting Donald Trump’s disastrous 2018 withdrawal, the immediate effect of which was that the Islamic Republic was on the verge of receiving the bomb, probably just six months before it became a new nuclear power. The five permanent members of the Security Council and the EU achieved paralysis of Iran’s uranium enrichment program in 2015, which has since been subject to a strict regime of international inspections, in exchange for the benefits of lifting European sanctions and Americans weighed over the radical Shi’ism dictatorship. This agreement, which was laboriously achieved after many years, can be revoked by the President, as Trump did in his day.
Guaranteeing its continuity is the last remaining hurdle for the Iranians, who enjoyed a sanctions-free economy between 2015 and 2018 and are calling for safeguards not to face another cancellation of the deal due to US election odds in the future. . . The Iranian demand that the US remove the Revolutionary Guards from the repertoire of terrorist organizations has disappeared, just as the case for keeping them on this international blacklist has been reinforced. Washington is investigating a conspiracy to assassinate former National Security Advisor John Bolton on behalf of a member of the Iranian military, apparently in revenge for the assassination of the organization’s top commander, General Qasem Soleimani.
There is no shortage of characters on both sides of the negotiation who are willing to boycott the agreement. The French expert Gilles Kepel has not hesitated to attribute the assassination of Salman Rushdie by a Shiite national of Lebanese origin to what is known as “atmospheric jihadism”, in which apparently isolated individuals act according to an aggressive culture disseminated by social networks, which in this case would correspond Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian party in Lebanon. Although the criminal action against the writer does not respond to any preconceived plan, it fits perfectly with the joy expressed by the official media and with Ayatollah Khamenei’s dogged doctrine of the validity of Khomeini’s fatwa.
Despite the difficulties, there are many other factors that speak in favor of concluding the negotiations as quickly as possible. For Iran, it would relieve the standard of living of the population, whose income has fallen by a third in the last decade. There is also an urgent need for regional stability and non-proliferation goals to halt a nuclear program that is perilously approaching the irreversible threshold of production. For Ukraine’s allies, it prevents the consolidation of the bloc of anti-Western countries around Russia. For the world economy, the market entry of Iranian oil relieves the price pressure. The success of the current negotiations involving China and Russia would send a message of de-escalation amid the Ukraine crisis and tensions in the Taiwan Strait. On the other hand, failure would immediately become an opportunity for those in Israel and Saudi Arabia who favor a military solution to disrupting Iran’s nuclear program. Only those who trust in the path of confrontation, even war, and reject diplomacy and multilateralism will rejoice at the failure of the pact.