Alwaght- The US President Donald Trump has announced withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal with the world powers fulfilling one of his key and most controversial presidential campaign-time promises. He has pulled out of the seven-party agreement after verifying it three times. The deal required the US president’s verification every three months.
On January 12, he extended the suspension of the anti-Iranian sanctions, saying that it was the last time he would do so.
During his pullout declaration address, Trump claimed that the main drive behind his decision was the deal’s inability to check what he called Iran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.
His allegations come while the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the sole valid international body with authority to report on the countries’ nuclear programs, before and after the deal has reported that the Iranian nuclear program has been peaceful.
This makes the American leader’s real goals to withdraw from the accord as well as the short, mid, and long-term consequences of the deal of significance to explore.
Beside the fact that many international diplomats and experts did not hesitate to call Washington’s reasons for scrapping the multi-nation agreement baseless, the key motivation for the Americans’ move should be seen as resting in their brazen hostility to Tehran after the Islamic Revolution of the late 1970s brought down the US-backed Shah regime and installed the Islamic Republic. Up to 1979 and under Mohammad Reza Shah rule, Iran was a leading ally of the US in the region, labeled as Washington’s gendarme in the oil-rich strategic West Asia and operating as a strong hand in the protection of the US interests and repression of the pro-independence movements.
Iran was seen by both the Republican and Democrat administrations so crucial to the American interests that after the Second World War period which marked ascendance of the US as a world hegemonic power, the Americans openly swayed Iran’s domestic affairs. In association with Britain, they orchestrated a military coup in 1953 and toppled democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after his push to nationalize the country's oil industry.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought about drastic changes to Iran’s foreign policy, something not appealing to various US governments who spared no efforts to overthrow the Iranian religious democracy as they feared that the political system model could spread to the regional states ruled by despotic regimes that were heavily dependent on the West. The US anti-Iranian measures ranged from supporting coup, triggering armed rebellions against Tehran, helping Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein’s, aggression on Iran in the early 1980s, threatening with direct military action, imposing economic sanctions and moving to isolate the Islamic Republic regionally and internationally.
Therefore, the current breach of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCOPA) was a sequel to the US anti-Tehran enmity ongoing for the past four decades, although different administrations differed tactically in the way of curbing Iran’s power gain.
In the heated present regional conditions, the US also spearheads a camp confronting the Iran-led Axis of Resistance in such regional hot spots as Syria, Iraq, and Yemen but is receiving back-to-back defeats and viewing its self-proclaimed interests at stake as the Resistance camp broadens its strategic depth regionally.
Hoping to garner the powerful pro-Israeli lobbies– such as AIPAC– as well as the weapons manufacturers’ patronage, Trump since the early days of the presidential race hawkishly promised pressures against Tehran and called the nuclear deal “terrible.”
So naturally, when Trump became president began to violate the deal’s terms by declining to show commitment to it. Trump embarked on a policy of imposing new bans on Iran– that was illegal according to the JCPOA– seeking to provoke Iran into withdrawing to foist the costs of the collapse of the internationally-reached accord on Tehran. The post-deal bans went into effect in several stages under the ruse of human rights violations and the support for terrorism, the last one of them being “H. R 4744” Congress bill. But Iran unwaveringly stayed committed to the deal’s terms and so refrained from giving Trump a pullout pretext. He, however, withdrew on Wednesday, unilaterally.
The economic pressures via sanctions are adopted as the policy of choice for the regime change in Iran. But the US embargo is never new to the Iranians. The ban may negatively affect Iran in the short run, but four-decade record proves that self-reliance has worked for the good of developing indigenous technologies in such areas as military, industry, health, and agriculture, which could finally lead o weaning the country off the oil.
The US exit in the first place exhibited to the world governments and nations Washington’s untrustworthy nature and disqualification regarding international responsibilities, and made it clear that Washington can easily reneged on his promises and abandon its international commitments whenever its interests rule. Now Washington is engaged in a process to start negotiations with North Korea, its long-time opponent, to denuclearize the East Asian state. Watching the White House wantonly abandon the international deal, without a shadow of a doubt, Pyongyang and its ally Beijing will flavor their talks with the Americas with doubt and skepticism, something triggering extraordinary strictness of their negotiators in the face of the Americans.
On the other side, Washington’s allies in East and Southeast Asia, Europe, and America, who are urged by the Trump administration to pay for the protection they receive from the US, will rethink the idea of extremely relying on the US support for protection. Turkey is a glaring example. For long years a friend and ally of the West and a member of the NATO, Ankara through the Syria crisis figured out that Washington unexceptionally puts its interests above its allies’. In this reality rested an influence that carried Turkey to fill the security vacuum by heading to cooperation with the US rivals Russia and China.
In short, Trump’s exit from Iran deal will not go without ramifications, which include erosion of trust to the US, shrink of the international organizations and laws’ validity, reduced will to peace and dialogue, resorting to force on the global stage, and consequent global chaos.
