Essay on Etemad Newspaper, July 5, 2020 -
The original text is in Persian and the following translation was done by Ai.
The Security Council meeting on the JCPOA and Resolution 2231 is an event that occurs twice a year, and the members of the Council, along with the Iranian representative, express their positions on this issue. Although these official statements of positions, of course, remain dry and repetitive speeches, they are both the result of many consultations and negotiations and are the introduction to subsequent discussions and contacts.
The distinctive point of the latest meeting in this series of meetings was that it was held online in terms of form, and in terms of content, the topic was the United States' efforts to extend the arms embargo on Iran after October of this year. The first point made it possible for Zarif to speak at the meeting without the need for a US visa, despite the fact that the US government had recently prevented Zarif from attending the UN with childish excuses. The other country that was present at the ministerial level, in accordance with the content of the meeting, was of course the United States.
The reality is that since the United States withdrew from the JCPOA, imposed unilateral sanctions, and threatened international companies, Iran has faced serious hardships in terms of both economic and industrial cooperation and oil sales, and its effects can be observed in various economic and social indicators. In any case, what was considered a project and even a special task of the government of prudence and hope, although it proceeded and was completed with exemplary success, subsequently faced serious problems due to a hand that came from nowhere and changed the governance of the White House to something different from the past decades. Obviously, despite the country's official positions on this matter, due to the imbalance in economic and political power, the Iranian government had a difficult task ahead of it, and no common sense could have expected that the Iranian government would be able to easily overcome these obstacles in a situation where the world's leading economic and political power - which is even capable of threatening and punishing the world's largest countries and companies with an executive order - has used all its might to exert maximum pressure on Iran. But in the meantime, two points should not be forgotten: First, with all the pressures that the Iranian society, people, and government are enduring, the United States' efforts to impose these pressures have fundamentally failed and have not come close to achieving their goal. Because a superpower of the size of the United States did not expect this much from using all its capacities. Rather, what was expected was for Iran to reach the conditions for meeting the basic needs of all its people and for the situation to become unbearable in such a way that Iran would collapse much sooner than it has now or enter the negotiating room with Trump on its knees. But regardless of how correct and comprehensive the policy of non-negotiation was, it must be acknowledged that life in Iran continues today and, despite all the pressures, is significantly distant from the ideal image of the United States.
On the other hand, now that the US elections are approaching and the Trump administration has failed in various aspects - including the management of the Covid-19 disease, the economic crisis, peace with North Korea, the management of economic tension with China, and the decisive political and trade disputes with the European Union, and most importantly, the propaganda of his former close associates and some members of the Republican Party against him - has made the US president more eager than ever to negotiate with Iran and present it as an achievement of his foreign policy from day one. The game has taken a different form. Instead of creating incentives for the Iranian side, Trump and his State Department team have been tempted to shorten the path by threatening Iran with jeopardizing the political nature of the JCPOA - and not its technical and economic content - and create tangible incentives for Iran to negotiate.
At the same time, what we witnessed from the speeches of the representatives of the sixteen countries present at the recent Security Council meeting, as well as the representative of the European Union, was that the world, even though it is under various pressures from the United States and the arrangement and selection of the countries present at the meeting does not necessarily represent the true diversity of the positions of the United Nations member states, has still passed the era of unilateralism to such an extent that, in the author's opinion, even Mike Pompeo himself and his colleagues at the US State Department were astonished to hear the positions of other countries. The Iranian audience, which does not have much experience of this kind, also witnessed by following all the speeches that fourteen countries, from Niger to the country closest to the US - namely Britain - all supported Iran's position on the full implementation of the JCPOA and the full adherence of all members to it, condemned the US's unilateral withdrawal from it and called for the return of the US to it. At the same time, these same positions opposed the US's current demand, namely the indefinite extension of the arms sanctions on Iran.
It should be noted that standing at this point in international politics, especially given Iran's circumstances, is not an easy task. First, Iran, in comparison, does not have a variety of tools to put pressure on the other side's position. Second, if there is no active diplomacy and the arguments of Iranian diplomats are heard, not only the European Union and non-permanent members, but even China and Russia themselves will simply use Iran as a compromise for their other issues with the United States: an event that we bitterly witnessed when the Security Council imposed sanctions through successive resolutions, most importantly Resolution 1929.
Therefore, even the proximity of countries like Russia and China, their distance from the positions of the United States and no other component will put Iran on a safe political edge, unless the foreign policy of the words, while maintaining its positions, has such bargaining power that it can advance its position with all the issues that have happened to its economy and trade. And not to the extent of a few countries, but to the extent that it will completely isolate the world's largest material power in its own home.
With the history of diplomacy and negotiations between Iran and the world, at least on the nuclear issue, at various highs and lows, and which the people have witnessed up close, it is appropriate today to emphasize the conclusion that regardless of the situation created by the balance of power and the positions of different countries (from reaching an agreement under Obama to the peak of tension under Trump), with specialization, political sobriety, and calculated action, one can find the upper hand within the same situation. The opposite of this meaning is evident in today's policymaking of the Trump administration on the international stage, which, despite having all the necessary levers, turns various meetings into scenes of failure for itself by not utilizing its real expertise in foreign policy: from the Security Council meeting chaired by Trump himself on Iran, which suddenly changed its subject, to the failed meetings against Iran in Warsaw and Manama, the noisy press conferences against Iran on missile and regional issues, and this latest Security Council meeting that brought things to a point where the resolution proposed by the US government may not even reach a vote.
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