Trump’s hypocritical deal is a fantasy. Iran will never give up its nuclear dreams

According to Donald Trump, the US and Iran are moving closer to a deal on how to bring about an end to the war he and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu started on 28 February, when they launched air strikes against Iranian targets.

Provided there is no resumption of hostilities, not just in the Gulf but also in Lebanon, Yemen and other countries, both sides look set to agree to extend the current ceasefire, with thirty days of further talks to demine and reopen the Strait of Hormuz and sixty to resolve the Iran nuclear issue.

Despite Trump’s often violent rhetoric, it seems that even he is belatedly recognising that talking and negotiating is better than fighting and killing. This is perhaps because the US, which has the world’s most powerful military, failed to deliver on the shifting goals that Trump gave for Operation Epic Fury.

Even so, the deal that is being discussed shows both Trump’s hypocrisy – having slammed previous deals put in place by his predecessors like Barack Obama – and the hard sell he will have to do to convince US voters that the war has been worth it; both in lives lost and in the damage to their wallets with rising petrol prices and other costs.

For Trump, the glaring issue that will come to the fore in the coming weeks is the fate of Iran’s nuclear dreams.

It is a fantasy to believe that Iran’s desire to eventually obtaining nuclear weapons has changed – if anything it has become more pressing for the country, offering the ultimate deterrent to conventional attacks. In the last two years, Iran has been attacked twice by the US and Israel. It will want to avoid a third time.

Also, without guarantees from the UN Security Council that Iran won’t be attacked again, Tehran won’t sign any deal.

For most Americans, a de-nuclear Iran was the reason for this conflict in the first place. But Trump will have a hard time convincing anyone that Iran’s nuclear ambitions and threat are even slightly reduced (Iran implausibly insists it only wants nuclear fuel so it can generate electricity).

US intelligence agencies concluded that Iran gave up the ambition of building a nuclear bomb sometime in the early 2000s, but opinions will have hardened since then.

Not one ounce of Iran’s unaccounted-for 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium have been recovered, let alone sent abroad. Buried deep under rubble it would be hard to extract anyway. There is also no mention of Iran’s ballistic missiles in the new agreement. Both will be part of future discussions, and we can assume that those discussions will be tough and will likely prove inconclusive. Without ballistic missiles, Iran would be defenceless versus Israel or the most hawkish of its Gulf neighbours.

Sources have said that Iran has expressed a willingness to give up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Tehran would likely drive a hard bargain for it, and there would be little to stop the country rebuilding that stockpile.

Trump needs a win and wants to be able to claim that Iran has forsaken its desire to get its hands on nuclear weapons. But Iran has at-most offered a five-year pause in its uranium enrichment. Trump wants to show his voters he got 20 years but will likely have to settle for a lot less.

At the same time, ballistic missiles weren’t included in Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran – which was part of the reason it was much scorned by Trump. They are unlikely to be part of any current deal.

Not only does Iran still have an estimated sixty per cent of its ballistic missile arsenal, ominously targeted on the Gulf neighbours, but it has managed to weaponise geography, plunging much of the global economy into crisis by blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

Since reopening the strait is in the economic interests of Iran, that should not be unsolvable in discussions, provided certain incentives are involved. It is not inconceivable that both Iran and Oman will quietly be allowed to charge pilotage fees, with everyone pretending that this isn’t just a way for Tehran to level tolls on international shipping – tolls that didn’t exist before the war. The fees for these ‘services’ will be paid via Omani banks in cryptocurrencies, or Chinese RMB.

Meanwhile, for Iran to show its resistance was worth it – to a highly sceptical Iranian public – the US will likely have to agree to unfreezing roughly $25 billion of Iranian overseas assets, which will enable the regime to boast of some positive economic benefits to a war-weary population, 75 per cent of whom depend on state handouts.

Maybe Iran will also agree to cease funding its various external allies, whose military prowess it overrated. This has become deeply unpopular in Iran, too. People who can’t afford a monthly chicken on the table don’t care about Lebanon, Gaza or Yemen. Trump might be able to sell that to his own war-weary voters.

Regime change in Iran was always an Israeli fantasy. In reality, the clerics have been displaced by a generation of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) leaders, including the new Supreme Leader and the very powerful Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, whose formative experience was eight years of resistance to a Western-backed Iraq, the real founding myth of the Islamic Republic.

While Iran has no hope of extracting $300 billion worth of war reparations from the US, as it has asked, it will be looking for sanctions relief, including the terrorism-related sanctions imposed on IRGC commanders.

Distraction may be the name of the game in Washington in the coming weeks. Team Trump may hope that beating the war drums for a possible confrontation with Cuba will mask the fact that any Trump ‘peace deal’ with Iran will simply take the US back to the 2015 deal that Obama negotiated without firing a shot, up to and including the return of Iran’s frozen assets abroad. The deal could be worse.

Trump may soon boast that he has successfully concluded a war he and Netanyahu started, but he will struggle to convince the world that Iran’s regional power has been eviscerated, along with its nuclear ambitions.

Trump won’t care if Iran hawks in the US or Israel regard this as a ‘bad deal’, he just wants to be able to sell a win to his supporters. The global relief if the Strait of Hormuz reopens in the coming days may offer him that chance. But make no mistake, Iran will already be planning its next move, having hit on a defence formula that has proven its worth.

Michael Burleigh is a Senior Fellow at LSE Ideas.

المصدر: iNews