JCPOA’s Half-life is Rapidly Expiring

Kevin Barrett

Shawwal 20, 1442 2021-06-01

News & Analysis

by Kevin Barrett (News & Analysis, Crescent International Vol. 50, No. 4, Shawwal, 1442)

In nuclear physics, half-life is the time it takes for a decaying radioactive substance to reach half its initial value. Poetically, the term suggests a life only half lived—the life of an inauthentic person like T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, or the life of someone forced to live under the onslaught of fear-mongering propaganda, lockdowns, and other draconian public health measures.

International treaties can also exist in the doomed limbo of half-life. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) offers an example.

The JCPOA, popularly known as the Iran nuclear treaty, was signed in July 2015. It imposed a long list of restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, while opening up Iran to inspections by hostile powers dedicated to reimposing Zionist-imperialist control of the Islamic Republic. Despite Iran’s record of compliance with international law on nuclear and other issues, and despite the blatant ongoing violation of international law by the US, Israel, and other nuclear powers, Iran agreed to severely restrict its nuclear program and forgo a potentially lucrative role as exporter of nuclear material. In return, the US and other signatories agreed to drop the sanctions they had imposed on Iran.

But almost before the ink on the treaty was dry, the US began violating it. Instead of dropping all sanctions on Iran, the Americans said: “We’ll relax a few sanctions, but we’re keeping the other ones in place to try to pressure Tehran into dropping its support for regional allies and giving up its missile deterrent program.” Frustrated, the Iranian side engaged the Obama regime in give-and-take in hopes of ultimately reaching the goal the treaty promised: the complete end of all US sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

Then came Trump. A lifelong money launderer for Jewish-dominated New York organized crime, Trump got an offer he couldn’t refuse from Israel and rode into the White House in 2016 on the back of support from the Zionist state. The quid pro quo: all-out US backing for extremist Likud Zionism. Such support entailed approving the Zionist theft of Occupied Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and other occupied territories; pressuring corrupt Arab monarchs to “normalize” with the Zionist entity; and tearing up the JCPOA in preparation for a Zionist-imposed US war on Iran.

The unilateral, utterly arbitrary US abrogation of the JCPOA proved to Iran and the world that Washington could not be trusted to keep its promises. Why bother signing a treaty with a country that will just rip up that same treaty a year later?

Since the US signally failed to comply with its solemn pledge to end sanctions against Iran, the Iranian side had no choice but to stop respecting the restrictions imposed by JCPOA. It has done so moderately, progressively, in step-by-step fashion, holding out the possibility of a return to the nuclear deal if the US somehow proves it can and will hold up its end of the bargain.

But given the events of the past six years, how could the US possibly prove any such thing? Even if the Biden regime were to actually comply with its obligations—and remember, the Obama regime never fully complied—how can Tehran be sure that Trump or another Likud-owned Republican won’t be elected in 2024 and tear up the treaty yet again, returning the whole process to square one?

Many Iranian strategists understand that the US cannot be trusted. In their view, Iran cannot afford to risk its security by making agreements with entities that are, as the Russians say, “недоговороспособны” (“non-agreement-capable”).

Others argue that even if that turns out to be the case, Iran should make clear its willingness to abide by the terms of the JCPOA, so that the world clearly and unambiguously understands that it was the Americans who destroyed the deal. In this view, Iran should make clear its intention to return to JCPOA if and only if the US unambiguously and verifiably drops all sanctions against Iran. This seems to be the current position of the Iranian government.

Will the Biden regime re-enter the JCPOA by admitting the mistakes of its predecessors and dropping all US anti-Iran sanctions? Possibly. But such a move would be out of character for the arrogant US, and for President Joe “I am a Zionist” Biden. Though most US leaders and experts have long recognized that the US has treated Iran badly, notably regarding the 1953 CIA coup against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, none have been able to bring themselves to wholeheartedly apologize, turn the page, and build a new mutually-respectful relationship with a fully-independent Iran. Admitting your country’s mistakes and atoning for its crimes is not something Americans excel at.

Even if Biden wanted to drop all Iran sanctions and re-enter JCPOA, powerful political forces might prevent such a sensible move. Biden is surrounded by Zionist advisors who to some extent share the predominant Israeli feeling that Iran is Israel’s existential enemy. Those advisors will point out that if Biden “surrenders to Iran,” Republicans in Congress with have a field day attacking his supposed weakness and raising vast piles of campaign money from their Zionist billionaire backers. Ending Iran sanctions, these Zionists will insist, could ensure that the Democrats collapse in the 2022 midterms and lose the presidency in 2024.

So, it will probably be politically impossible for Biden to restore the JCPOA. Once again, the USA will be proved non-agreement-capable.

In a sane world, the collapse of the JCPOA would not matter very much. Iran is subject to religious rulings that ban nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. The idea that Iran could threaten nuclear aggression any time in the foreseeable future is preposterous. It is the nuclear aggressors—the US and Israel—who project their own psychology on Iran, imagining that “if we were in Iran’s position, we would go all-out for nuclear weapons, and then threaten to use them.”

But the world is far from sane. The leading powers dominating today’s world are rogue psychopath states armed to the teeth with nuclear and biological weapons. They created the delusion of a supposed “Iranian nuclear threat” as a pretext to justify their whole array of anti-Iran, anti-Islam policies. And they may try to use the collapse of the JCPOA as a pretext to ramp up their ongoing fourth generation war on Iran.

Iran will be well-served by a policy of frankly speaking truth to power, while amplifying its non-WMD deterrents, including its rocket force and its network of regional and global allies, in order to dissuade the real rogue states—the Americans, Israelis, and their accomplices—from going too far. One day, God willing, it will be Iran spearheading a global pressure campaign aimed at forcing the world’s real nuclear rogue states to immediately relinquish all of their nuclear weapons—which have been illegal under international law since the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was ratified by the requisite 50 countries in January of this year.