The Iran deal could easily have been maintained had it not been for a series of perverse policy choices by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Now, with the deal scrapped, Israel and the US are once again threatening to attack Iran.
By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin
After a seemingly never-ending will-they-won’t-they on the US-Iranian revival of the Iran nuclear deal, we seem to have an answer: they won’t.
As of today, officials from the United States, Europe, and Israel all say that the deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is dead, at least for the foreseeable future. Reentering the deal was a major campaign promise of Joe Biden’s, it was something he didn’t need Congress to do, and it would have meant restoring one of the signature achievements of his Democratic predecessor, whose accomplishments Biden virtually treated as his own on the campaign trail. So how did it fail?
Hopes for renewing the agreement were, at first, raised after Tehran in August dropped its opposition to what seemed like the last sticking point in US-Iranian talks, namely the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) terrorist designation. That had been a poison pill deliberately issued by Donald Trump to complicate the deal’s revival, making Iran’s compromise on the matter significant.
But since then, new roadblocks arose. On the Iranian side, its hard-line government demanded extra guarantees to minimize the effects of a future US administration violating and pulling out of the agreement, which Trump had done in 2018.
Recent Posts
Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé: Despite Ceasefire, Palestinians Still Face “Elimination, Genocide”
Take Action Now “I hope that the world will not be misled that Israel is now ready to open a different kind of page in its relationship with…
Who Will Defend Ordinary Working People Against Trump And MAGA?
Take Action Now How powerful can this movement-based opposition be? That depends on what the ordinary Americans being harmed by the Trump regime…
Trump Labor Department Says His Immigration Raids Are Causing a Food Crisis
Take Action Now In a filing in the Federal Register, the Labor Department argues there are “immediate dangers to the American food supply” due to a…
Federal Judge Sides With Journalists, Protesters in Chicago Over Violent Tactics of Trump’s Federal Agents
Take Action Now “Individuals are allowed to protest,” the judge said. “They are allowed to speak. That is guaranteed by the First Amendment to our…