By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
February 16, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - As Congress still
struggles to pass a
COVID relief bill, the rest of the world is
nervously
reserving judgment on America’s new president
and his foreign policy, after successive U.S.
administrations have delivered unexpected and
damaging shocks to the world and the international
system.
Cautious international optimism toward Biden is
very much based on his commitment to Obama’s
signature diplomatic achievement, the JCPOA or
nuclear agreement with Iran. Biden and the
Democrats excoriated Trump for withdrawing from it
and promised to promptly rejoin the deal if elected.
But Biden now appears to be hedging his position in
a way that risks turning what should be an easy win
for the new administration into an avoidable and
tragic diplomatic failure.
While it was the United States under Trump that
withdrew from the nuclear agreement, Biden is taking
the position that the US will not rejoin the
agreement or drop its
unilateral sanctions until Iran first comes back
into compliance. After withdrawing from the
agreement, the United States is in no position to
make such demands, and Foreign Minister Zarif has
clearly and eloquently
rejected them, reiterating Iran’s firm
commitment that it will return to full compliance as
soon as the United States does so.
Biden should have announced US re-entry as one of
his first executive orders. It did not require
renegotiation or debate. On the campaign trail,
Bernie Sanders, Biden’s main competitor for the
Democratic nomination, simply
promised, "I would re-enter the agreement on the
first day of my presidency."
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Then-candidate Senator Kirsten
Gillibrand said during the Democratic primary,
"We need to rejoin our allies in returning to the
agreement, provided Iran agrees to comply with the
agreement and take steps to reverse its breaches …"
Gillibrand said that Iran must "agree" to take those
steps, not that it must take them first, presciently
anticipating and implicitly rejecting Biden’s
self-defeating position that Iran must fully return
to compliance with the JCPOA before the United
States will rejoin.
If Biden just rejoins the JCPOA, all of the
provisions of the agreement will be back in force
and work exactly as they did before Trump opted out.
Iran will be subject to the same IAEA inspections
and reports as before. Whether Iran is in compliance
or not will be determined by the IAEA, not
unilaterally by the United States. That is how the
agreement works, as all the signatories agreed:
China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, the United
Kingdom, the European Union – and the United States.
So why is Biden not eagerly pocketing this easy
first win for his stated commitment to diplomacy? A
December 2020
letter supporting the JCPOA, signed by 150 House
Democrats, should have reassured Biden that he has
overwhelming support to stand up to hawks in both
parties.
But instead Biden seems to be listening to
opponents of the JCPOA telling him that Trump’s
withdrawal from the agreement has given him
"leverage" to negotiate new concessions from
Iran before rejoining. Rather than giving Biden
leverage over Iran, which has no reason to make
further concessions, this has given opponents of the
JCPOA leverage over Biden, turning him into the
football, instead of the quarterback, in this
diplomatic Super Bowl.
American neocons and hawks, including
those inside his own administration, appear to
be flexing their muscles to kill Biden’s commitment
to diplomacy at birth, and his own hawkish foreign
policy views make him dangerously susceptible to
their arguments. This is also a test of his
previously subservient relationship with Israel,
whose government vehemently opposes the JCPOA and
whose officials have even
threatened to launch a military attack on Iran
if the US rejoins it, a flagrantly illegal threat
that Biden has yet to publicly condemn.
In a more rational world, the call for nuclear
disarmament in the Middle East would focus on
Israel, not Iran. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote
in the Guardian on December 31, 2020,
Israel’s own possession of dozens – or
maybe hundreds – of nuclear weapons is the
worst kept secret in the world. Tutu’s article
was an open letter to Biden, asking him to publicly
acknowledge what the whole world already knows and
to respond as required under US law to the actual
proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
Instead of tackling the danger of Israel’s real
nuclear weapons, successive US administrations have
chosen to cry "Wolf!" over non-existent nuclear
weapons in Iraq and Iran to justify besieging their
governments, imposing deadly sanctions on their
people, invading Iraq and threatening Iran. A
skeptical world is watching to see whether President
Biden has the integrity and political will to break
this insidious pattern.
The CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation
and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), which stokes
Americans’ fears of imaginary Iranian nuclear
weapons and feeds endless allegations about them to
the IAEA, is the same entity that produced the lies
that drove America to war on Iraq in 2003. On that
occasion, WINPAC’s director, Alan Foley,
told his staff, "If the president wants to go to
war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow
him to do so" – even as he privately admitted to his
retired CIA colleague Melvin Goodman that US forces
searching for WMDs in Iraq would find, "not much, if
anything."
What makes Biden’s stalling to appease Netanyahu
and the neocons diplomatically suicidal at this
moment in time is that in November the Iranian
parliament
passed a law that forces its government to halt
nuclear inspections and boost uranium enrichment if
US sanctions are not eased by February 21.
To complicate matters further, Iran is holding
its own presidential election on June 18, 2021, and
election season – when this issue will be hotly
debated – begins after the Iranian New Year on March
21. The winner is expected to be a hawkish
hardliner. Trump’s failed policy, which Biden is now
continuing by default, has discredited the
diplomatic efforts of President Rouhani and Foreign
Minister Zarif, confirming for many Iranians that
negotiating with America is a fool’s errand.
If Biden does not rejoin the JCPOA soon, time
will be too short to restore full compliance by both
Iran and the US – including lifting relevant
sanctions – before Iran’s election. Each day that
goes by reduces the time available for Iranians to
see benefits from the removal of sanctions, leaving
little chance that they will vote for a new
government that supports diplomacy with the United
States.
The timetable around the JCPOA was known and
predictable, so this avoidable crisis seems to be
the result of a deliberate decision by Biden to try
to appease neocons and warmongers, domestic and
foreign, by bullying Iran, a partner in an
international agreement he claims to support, to
make additional concessions that are not part of the
agreement.
During his election campaign, President Biden
promised to "elevate diplomacy as the premier tool
of our global engagement." If Biden fails this first
test of his promised diplomacy, people around the
world will conclude that, despite his trademark
smile and affable personality, Biden represents no
more of a genuine recommitment to American
partnership in a cooperative "rules-based world"
than Trump or
Obama did.
That will confirm the steadily growing
international
perception that, behind the Republicans’ and
Democrats’ good cop-bad cop routine, the overall
direction of US foreign policy remains fundamentally
aggressive, coercive and destructive. People and
governments around the world will continue to
downgrade relations with the United States, as they
did under Trump, and even traditional US allies will
chart an increasingly independent course in a
multipolar world where the US is no longer a
reliable partner and certainly not a leader.
So much is hanging in the balance, for the people
of Iran suffering and dying under the impact of
US sanctions, for Americans yearning for more
peaceful relations with our neighbors around the
world, and for people everywhere who long for a more
humane and equitable international order to confront
the massive problems facing us all in this century.
Can Biden’s America be part of the solution? After
only three weeks in office, surely it can’t be too
late. But the ball is in his court, and the whole
world is watching.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of
CODEPINK for
Peace, and author of several books,
including
Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the
Islamic Republic of Iran. She is a member
of the writers’ group Collective20.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent
journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the
author of
Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and
Destruction of Iraq.