"The "memorandum of understanding" that's supposedly going to bring the war on Iran to at least a temporary end was released Wednesday afternoon. The New York Times published an annotated version that had been dictated to reporters by senior White House officials. The text makes it even more clear than I asserted here Sunday that Donald Trump's "peace deal" is not better than the one signed in 2015 by President Barack Obama after 20 months of negotiations by the U.S.,Iran, China, Russia, France, the U.K and Germany.
That agreement focused entirely on Iran's nuclear development and economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic. It created the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a detailed arrangement that both curtailed and slowed Iran's nuclear development. It verified compliance with on-site monitoring more extensive and intensive than anything in the International Atomic Energy Agency's past work. If Trump had not removed the United States from the agreement, many of its restrictive provisions would still be in place.
Since the 2015 agreement was signed, Trump has railed against it, calling it "horrible," and "the worst deal ever." But with the MOU in hand, in an interview at the end of the G7 meeting Wednesday in Evian, France, Trump went even farther with his odious lies. While answering a reporter's question about the MOU, he interjected a line about the 2015 agreement: "You know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and said he's a stupid son of a bitch." Another fabricated story to launch the latest jab of his Obama hate.
He went on: "It's a memorandum of understanding. If I don't like it, if they don't behave, we'll go right back to dropping bombs right on their heads." No word yet from him about whether this bombing would be civilization ending.
If the MOU is implemented, it definitely contains some good. No more shooting. Passage through the Hormuz Strait. An end to economic sanctions. But most of it doesn't relate to anything in the 2015 agreement at all. While the JCPOA created under Obama was all about Iran's nuclear development, only a single paragraph in the MOU covers this:
Paragraph 8.
The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled, enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon in accordance with the schedule mentioned in Paragraph 7, with the minimum methodology to be down-blending on site under the supervision of the I.A.E.A. The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on the statutory framework being agreed upon in the final deal. The final deal will confirm the provisions of this paragraph. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran acknowledge the critical importance of the nuclear issues above mentioned, and express their intention to immediately address these issues in the negotiation in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.
In the G7 interview, Trump intones one of his favorite lines "Nobody could have made a deal" with Iran like his. He also loves to pretend that he invented the idea that Iran should never have a nuclear bomb. That, in fact, has been the stance of every president since Reagan, it's what the Iranians who signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and the Iranians who signed the JCPOA in 2015 agreed to. Here are the first three provisions of that document:
i. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the E3/EU+3 (China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States, with the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) have decided upon this long-term Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This JCPOA, reflecting a step-by-step approach, includes the reciprocal commitments as laid down in this document and the annexes hereto and is to be endorsed by the United Nations (UN) Security Council.
ii. The full implementation of this JCPOA will ensure the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear programme.
iii. Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.
There are now 60 days during which the details in Paragraph 8 of the MOU will be worked out. Given that Trump has exposed his abysmal negotiating skills to the Iranians, it's likely they're laughing at him as they calculate how to exploit those weaknesses.
When it comes to nuclear weapons and who gets to have them and how that is policed, more discussion is needed that goes far beyond the narrower discussion of Iran's purported nuclear ambitions. The 58-year-old relic that is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty needs rejuvenation or rewriting. The nine nuclear powers — five of them signatories of the NPT — are all engaged in modernizing and upsizing their nuclear arsenals.
Trump's prancing around because he supposedly convinced a nation that repeatedly has declared in writing it will never build nukes to declare so again while he sits atop one of the two biggest nuclear arsenals on the planet is just one more example of how the big picture so often gets squelched.
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