Translated from GegenStandpunkt 2-18
Comments on D. Trump’s withdrawal
from the nuclear agreement with IranThe content of the nuclear deal
The JCPOA – Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – was agreed on by the five permanent UN Security Council members, Germany, the EU, and Iran, and contains a series of provisions designed to keep or reduce Iran’s nuclear-industrial complex at a level which guarantees that Iran can’t exploit its civilian capacities for militarily purposes. It essentially concerns
– on the one hand, technological capabilities: The number and technological level of UF6 centrifuges are limited under the JCPOA; Iran must destroy, dismantle, mothball, etc., all capacities beyond this; the same applies to reprocessing capacities, heavy water technology, etc.;
– on the other hand, access to and possession of the material basis (fissile material of varying degrees of purity, the necessary precursor uranium ore, heavy water): Iran must export prescribed quantities of fuel abroad; the amount of heavy water Iran is allowed to have is also restricted.In order to ensure compliance with its conditions, the agreement required Iran to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities, any facilities related to them, or even those only presumably used in its nuclear program; this also specifically included granting international inspectors access to military facilities if they believed that the relevant activities associated with Iran’s nuclear program might be taking place there.
In return, the sanctions imposed against Iran were to be lifted; the legal reasoning for this was frowned on by the powers on the opposing side because Iran’s nuclear program was defined as a nuclear weapons program. This included the provision that, in case of a – even by a single state on the opposing side – delay or violation of the relevant stipulations, no matter at what stage or factual section of the “plan’s” implementation, the sanctions would immediately and fully come back into force (the “snap-back mechanism”). All the other sanctions against Iran, in particular those imposed by the USA and to a lesser extent by the EU, which were imposed with reference to the Iranian missile program, support for terrorism, etc., remained expressly unaffected by the nuclear deal and therefore in force.
The political content and imperialist purpose of the nuclear deal
In its efforts to achieve technological mastery and industrial use of nuclear energy, Iran is clearly not interested in possessing operational nuclear weapons. But neither is it merely interested in a bit of nuclear power and using isotopes for radiological medical purposes. What it is aiming for is – or was – the technical prerequisites and material means for autonomously developing and producing the ultimate deterrent weapon. And for a very compelling reason.
After all, for decades Iran been subjected to militant American hostility; through it, the Iraqi president, who himself later morphed into the USA’s main enemy, once found encouragement to wage his long-running war against the Empire of the Mullahs. Old and new regional rivals have been armed by America and are waging one war or another against Iranian forces and protégés, either directly or through proxies. The American military itself maintains a massive presence in the region and acts as a deterrent. Iran’s domestic oppositional forces are being equipped and encouraged to carry out subversive actions. And, above all, the USA is successfully imposing far-reaching economic sanctions on the country, accompanied by even more far-reaching threats. Its goal is to break the will of the Iranian state to assert itself, by means of intimidation and by degrading and destroying its means of power. The Iranian leadership is taking this scenario seriously enough to at least develop the option of the ultimate means of violent deterrence as a guarantee of its sovereignty.
It is precisely this defensive posture that the USA, not just under Obama, has made into an additional point of in its hostility to Iran. It explicitly and uncompromisingly insists that the regime must under no circumstances succeed in becoming a military nuclear power, or even come close to the status that is permitted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – which Iran has ratified. For America, Iran’s insistence on its – NPT-compliant – sovereign right to a national nuclear energy industry is conclusive proof of how necessary and justified all measures are to contain this regime and to sabotage and prevent its nuclear ascent. Nor does the oversight power lack these measures. After all, it has – together with the allied de facto nuclear power Israel – set a first example of practical cyber warfare with its use of the “Stuxnet virus” against Iranian uranium centrifuges. A “classic” military attack on nuclear capacities is threatened by Israel at any time and is always kept in mind by the USA itself as an option that’s always “on the table.”
As an alternative to this, as a non- or pre-war equivalent to outright invasion, the Obama administration introduced the “Plan of Action.” The negotiations between the collective of imperialists and Iran, and the agreement that was ultimately reached, did not take back anything from the hostility toward this state, from the uncompromising determination to substantially weaken its power and its will to assert itself. This reflected the assessment of the Obama administration that there was an opportunity, but also a certain necessity, to move closer to the goal of neutralizing Iran’s efforts to establish a strategic defensive option in a different way than through the extortion methods that had been used to date.
Obama saw an opportunity in the success – namely, in the impact inside Iran and on its government – that the USA was having with its harassment of the country, or that was being done under its leadership. Indeed, the Iranian state has been surrounded by militant enemies, embroiled in military operations, and marginalized in world politics. Its economy was suffering massively from the American, or American-initiated, sanctions, which particularly affected the country’s main source of income, the sale of oil and gas. It is no coincidence that the Iranian state organizes its economic life under the banner of a “Resistance Economy”; its foreign relations in the meantime depend entirely on how much suspicion or hostility from America the respective partner thinks it can tolerate. On this basis, according to the American calculation, even the more or less vague prospect of lifting at least the collectively imposed sanctions based on its nuclear energy program would have to seem attractive enough for the regime to abandon this part of its self-assertion policy.
For the Obama administration, the other side of the balance sheet of decades of exclusion, damage, and harassment of the “mullah regime,” spoke in favor of such a “supply-side policy,” which was fiercely contested in the USA: all America’s pressure had not persuaded the Iranian enemy to give up at least its claim to a national nuclear industry with all the associated capacities and dual-use capabilities. For Iran, the fight against America and its encroachments on steadfast peoples like the Persians is not an option, but a reason of state; and this includes – given the current state of affairs in the prevailing military world order – the ability to gain respect by means of nuclear weapons. Decades of US hostility have, if anything, strengthened the Iranians’ resolve in this respect. And they have at least actually found the necessary partners for this ultimate defensive strategy – however limited and unreliable – which, from the US perspective, is an additional unacceptable annoyance in the long run: with its total hostility towards Iran, it has obviously not been able to rally the decisive third powers behind it to the extent that would be sufficient to strangle the Islamic outlaw as an internationally recognized order issue.
The Obama administration therefore took steps to remedy the situation in both respects. The offer was made to Iran to be treated as a respected negotiating partner – in the view of the world power, already a major concession – and. in exchange for its right to fully utilize the license of the NPT for developing a nuclear industrial capacity, the economic sanctions which, in addition to the unilateral American sanctions for “supporting terrorism,” arming missiles, and other types of insubordination, had been collectively imposed or threatened in order to prevent a nuclear “break out,” would be ended. The three major European partners, as well as the official nuclear powers China and Russia, were included in the negotiations – in the American view, a significant concession to its imperialist rivals – with the aim of cutting Iran off from any potential backing from reputable powers; together in the spirit of the imperialist general line that gets the world of states, and especially its most important members, involved in the US regime over them, thus functionalizing them for it. In the spirit of this world political order and at the same time as an important element in the offer to Iran to submit to the American program of disempowerment in exchange for a bit of recognition and relief, the agreement imposed restraints on the war readiness of the Islamic Republic’s main regional enemies, Israel against its bitter protests, and Saudi Arabia – while, at the same time, guaranteeing that the superpower would ensure Israel’s military superiority in event of war.
Trump’s criticism of the nuclear deal and its objective content
The new president has aborted the test of how far the “mullah regime” will allow its intransigent program of self-assertion to be negotiated and forced to realize that resistance to American state power is in no way worthwhile. After all, Trump already knew this when the “plan” was being negotiated and he was campaigning on the insight that this deal was fundamentally wrong – “the worst deal ever.” The fact that the JCPOA has been in place for over two years has only confirmed him in this assessment.
Above all, Trump thinks it is absurd that an avowed enemy of the USA has managed to get away with it virtually unpunished, that is to say, somehow, for decades. The only explanation he can give – like a true American president – is that America let them get away with it. For Trump, the continued existence of Iran as a problem and trouble spot with all the crimes that the USA accuses this state of, is proof that the American world power has simply not brought its potential to bear in resolving this case. Instead, his predecessors apparently thought they had to deal calculatingly with Iran’s power and then also with the concerns and calculations of others, which Obama took to the extreme: He not only granted the enemy a conditional right to exist, but officially allowed it to abuse the world oil market to procure nice American dollars for its anti-American reign of terror and even gave it the Iranian funds that had been frozen in America in return (“in cash!!”). Trump denounces the very core of the agreement: the separation of the nuclear issue from the rest of what bothers the USA about Iran, which is what the agreement is based on, is its main flaw; the fact that the missile issue, the question of Iran’s regional policy, etc., were not included in the agreement, and thus allowed Iran to sign something other than its comprehensive surrender, is for Trump the flaw in the JCPOA.
In essence, this fundamental criticism is aimed – once again – at the traditional element of American imperialist leadership that concedes to its followers some respect and some freedom for their own national self-interest so as to give them a good reason to subordinate themselves; that is, at the fact that Iran and the other partners of the agreement have exploited this very thing in their own way.
Iran agreed to the “plan” – amid some controversy within the politico-religious elites – in order to advance its program of economic development for the purpose of asserting itself as an ambitious regional power. Those in charge in Tehran never viewed their signature as the beginning of a turn away from their raison d'êtat as the religiously legitimized leading power in the region; rather, they viewed it as an opportunity to counteract the global political ostracism pursued by the USA and to strengthen the economic basis of their power. Accordingly, with their ambitious policy in the region, aimed in particular at their competitor Saudi Arabia and their enemy Israel, they actually provided all the evidence Trump likes to cite for his radical condemnation of the nuclear agreement. This was only confirmed by the opposition faction within Iranian politics which, for its part, always viewed the agreement with skepticism or even complete rejection, believing it to be a sell-out to its arch-enemy.
Although Russia – as a Security Council member and signatory to the JCPOA – played a constructive role in Iran’s nuclear expropriation as stipulated in the treaty, it didn’t do it in order to contribute to the gradual destruction of Iran’s Islamic revolutionary state constitution. Rather, it insisted on its status as the world’s second largest nuclear power which has a right to have a say in matters relating to states’ nuclear capabilities. It shares none of America’s more far-reaching reasons for hostility toward Iran; on the contrary, Russia sees a strong Iranian regional power as an effective means of countering the USA’s claim to total hegemony in this region, which it pursues with the help of its allies and vassals. So it arms Iran with weapons, cooperates in crucial petro-industrial sectors, and – itself the object of increasing American financial sanctions – seeks ways with Iran to relativize the hermetic nature of the American sanctions regime by establishing joint financial structures beyond the dollar financial market, also as a model for and offer to other affected countries. With its contribution to the peaceful “solution to the problem” – it takes over all the nuclear material that Iran must forego – Russia becomes part of the larger problem in that America’s extortionate power to crackdown continues to encounter considerable obstacles.
China also saw this as confirmation of its claim, as a member of the Security Council with nuclear weapons, to have a say in deciding whether and under what conditions a third country, Iran in this case, is entitled to use nuclear technology. Beijing wanted the fact that this issue had been settled in an agreement between the decisive powers in terms of both claims and substance to form the basis for Iran’s comprehensive integration into the Chinese “New Silk Road” project, i.e. China’s economic and strategic expansion into Central and Western Asia and into Europe. This is anything but a constructive contribution to the realization of America’s idea of order in the Middle East and in general, but rather the opposite. China has therefore been trying to expand its relations with Iran – both before and after the conclusion of the JCPOA: It is not only trading with the country on an increasing scale, but is also explicitly promoting its currency in more and more areas, even explicitly using its currency as an alternative for the business that Iran can no longer, or cannot yet, do with Western states or within the dollar sphere. For China, these relations are a welcome testing ground and model for economic and political influence outside the reach of the power of the dollar.
The European powers are happy to seize the opportunity offered by the nuclear deal to establish themselves as strategic partners of the USA whose constructive influence is indispensable to the great world power; they sometimes even consider themselves the actual inventors of this deal, the ones who brought the USA on board, so to speak. They celebrated the agreement for neatly separating the vexed nuclear issue, which the USA has declared to be a potential reason for war, from all the other issues in the Iran case, thus making perspectives predictable in relations with Iran as well as America. For them, this was the basis for them to make a reappearance as Iran’s superior partner, for creating new dependencies that would not only gild their trade balances: In a mediating role between the ostracized regional power and the American supervisory power, they counted on new opportunities for their access to the Middle East, which is so conflict-ridden and therefore so interesting for meddling and involving themselves in global governance. Iran – as a power that had then been at least partially rehabilitated by the USA – was to be integrated into a regional ‘order’ that was fundamentally more in line with European ideas simply because Europe was playing a prominent role in shaping it.
So Trump was by no means off the mark when he noted, from the perspective of his radical supremacist nationalism, that the world order nationalism practiced by his predecessors favored and justified nothing but a host of selfish competitors who are unscrupulous enough to pander to America’s outspoken enemies if it benefits their competitive ambitions.
The new situation after the announcement of the termination ...
The US President’s announcement that he will – “most likely!” – bring back the sanctions against Iran which were canceled by the agreement, thus shirking the established stipulations, creates a new situation for the contracting parties.
For Iran, in any case, the state must reckon with its renewed and intensified exclusion from the global dollar business and see how it manages to achieve its economic survival as a participant in the capitalist world market in its dealings with the five other major capitalist powers and participants in the JCPOA as well as the rest of the world. It can expect that the world power will do its utmost to block all its attempts to play a respected role in relations between states, and that its regional enemies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, will find themselves not only empowered, but encouraged or even called upon to take military actions.
Russia has suffered the embarrassment that its involvement as a mediating power, which practically oversaw the dismantling of the Iranian nuclear industry, was thereby primarily serving the American-European hostility against “the mullah regime,” but it at least acquired the status of a somehow recognized protective power of the state.
The PR China is confronted with the clarification that its status as an official nuclear power and a permanent member of the UN Security Council in no way means that the world power respects it as a co-founder and co-guarantor of its established supervisory regime over the world of states.
And the three major European powers are confronted with a unilateral act by their all-powerful leading nation which constitutes a flagrant breach of treaty; and this is more than just another sobering experience for them. After all, they acted as willing allies of the USA, even if out of self-interest, and supported America’s threat to boycott Iran and maxed out every shakedown until the negotiations were concluded. Now they have not even been consulted on the issue of renewed hostile dealings with the Iranian adversary. By announcing that he will keep the decision on a further suspension of the joint sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program open until the last minute and will make it entirely on his own, Trump is attesting to their irrelevance in a highly belligerent affair in their immediate neighborhood and, as such, to their subordination, even insignificance, in terms of alliances and global order policy.
The Europeans’ response is so defensive that it practically confirms this brutal assignment of status. They acknowledge their ostentatious exclusion from the US government’s decision-making process with a request to be heard. They preface all their concerns with the assurance that the transatlantic partnership is always more important to them than anything else. The points of view they put forward in terms of the existing agreement bear no resemblance to a warning against going it alone, let alone a threat; they point to the advantages of the “joint plan,” particularly for the USA and its interests in world order – in the way that the Europeans would like them to be – which the President should not relinquish lightly. The American accusations justifying the withdrawal from the agreement are largely upheld. The exclusion of Iran’s missile program and other undesirable activities from the nuclear agreement, at one time the conditions for Iran’s compliance on the main issue, is being criticized in an effort to reach consensus with Trump, as a shortcoming that will be remedied with every possible type of extortion: a premature accommodation to American demands that the US government had no intention of making a subject of negotiations, let alone of a renewed binding agreement. What the Europeans are trying to salvage has little to do with Iran in particular or with exerting influence on world-order in general and in the Middle East region in particular, but rather with the appearance of global political significance.
… and after its execution
In this respect, the situation and balance of power between the USA and its European partners was already clear before, and even more so after, the trips to Washington by the French President, the German Chancellor, and the British Foreign Secretary. Nevertheless, the implementation of the de facto termination of the JCPOA represents a significant step forward. For it not only irrevocably excludes the allies from American policy toward the Middle East, but also practically confronts them with the already sufficiently drastically announced demand to cooperate, under penalty of massive damage, in the exclusion of Iran from civilian interstate commerce and the global market for money, credit, and commodities. They are being forced to show their colors, i.e. to participate in the American total boycott or make themselves very unpopular in Washington by adhering to compliance with the treaty and the agreement with Iran, with all the consequences this entails. As those directly concerned and affected, they become acquainted with America’s violent dollar imperialism: business with Iran, precisely that permitted under the JCPOA, is punished by excluding companies from the dollar market, i.e., in practice from the world market; the right of states, especially of US allies, to make the world available to their companies as a business sphere at their own discretion is broken by the right of the USA to decree exceptions to this fundamental question of imperialist freedom, and by its power to make this right effective across borders.
It does not at all bother the president responsible for this that he has invalidated one of, if not the, fundamental constants of the globalized capitalism of recent decades: this is precisely what he is aiming to do, because his country had actually renounced its right of the strongest and its ruthless assertion – admittedly, in favor of an objectified, generally pro-American regime, but nevertheless... As a result, while the USA’s power and wealth have grown enormously, the international balance of power has changed and in some respects shifted to the disadvantage of the organizer. Trump is thus denouncing a principle of traditional US imperialism. And he is doing so in a way that assigns a status to America’s most important allies that only leaves them with the choice of either voluntarily abandoning their divergent self-interests as mere agents of the “America First!” president’s free discretionary decisions – or of being punished with blackmail as violators of American law, thus being brought “into line,” or being marginalized themselves.
The Europeans’ reaction is exactly what the Americans anticipated in their threat of sanctions against companies and countries that wish to keep doing business with Iran. They declare that they are sticking to the agreement with Iran; they owe this declaration – not to the Iranians, not to the other two contracting parties, but to themselves: to their inalienable right, as imperialist powers, to ensure that their own interests are respected. They also declare that they will continue to prioritize their partnership with the USA over all other relationships and obligations. They do everything in their power to act as if it were an important issue, even an exemplary one in some ways, but ultimately nothing more than a question of dealing with the “security problem” of Iran, which they also acknowledge. They cannot and do not want to rebuff the US president’s termination of all imperialist respect; they do not even make an issue of what is really affecting them, the embarrassing status they have been assigned by the superpower; they take the way out of simply not wanting to take the decree from Washington as such. They admit their powerlessness, their inability to counter the US government with anything like counter-blackmail, with the already rather outdated, forward-looking slogan that Europe must now really and finally establish itself as an independent shaper in world affairs with its many conflicts. Their firm intention to neither subordinate themselves to the Trump line nor to thwart it is expressed in their declaration of intent to peacefully take away from Iran everything that has always bothered the USA about this power, apart from its nuclear program – ultimately, its existence as a force that cannot be ignored in the region, with influence, sympathizers, and weapons in its vicinity – in order to keep themselves in the game as a regulatory power, locally and in general. The US government sees this for what it is: solely a calculated evasive maneuver in the face of its “America first” policy; thus, it makes harsh threats against the continued business relations with the ostracized country. In contrast, the Europeans, cautiously and without too much seriousness, evoke their right to prohibit EU companies from complying with the American bans, as well as the – limited! – funds which they could use to compensate any losses incurred by companies affected by the US’s punitive measures. At the same time, they also recall that, in the wonderful world of capitalist freedom, no one can force an entrepreneur to do business (meaning: with Iran) if they don’t want to. And that European companies, after briefly weighing up the options between the Iranian and the American markets, are unlikely to want to, is openly admitted by their spokespeople.
* Honor to the mullahs: Irritated not by their nuclear program, but by their calculated abandonment of it, the new US presidency is making significant progress in abolishing the old, romanticized form of US imperialism called “rules based” and in replacing it with the right of universal bilateral American superiority; it is destroying the imperialist contradiction known as “the West” and relegating Europe to a rank somewhere between an irrelevance and a disorder.