Jcpoa

Yesterday

Owen Matthews

Do Iran’s negotiators speak for the IRGC?

The infamous "Memorandum of Understanding" between the United States and Iran has broken down. One of the major points of failure has been the disagreement over which side controls the Strait of Hormuz.  Yesterday, President Donald Trump abruptly declared that his country should now be known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT" and "as such, as a matter of fairness, will be reimbursed at the rate of 20 percent on all cargo shipped." "POTUS is absolutely right," replied Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, on X. "Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service. Iran has always been the GUARDIAN of the Strait and will remain so FOREVER. 20 percent is of course too much. We will be fair.

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

Only Iran is happy with Trump’s peace deal

President Trump might have thought that negotiating an interim diplomatic understanding with Iran was going to be the hard part. But selling the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding to the public is proving to be just as laborious.  Trump deserves blame not because he negotiated a poor peace deal but rather because he decided to go to war in the first place Less than 24 hours after the document was released, virtually nobody is particularly satisfied with it. Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, normally deferential or wholly supportive of Trump’s agenda across-the-board, are already expressing nervousness at the terms and demanding a full briefing from the administration about how the White House plans on executing them.

iran

Friday

Daniel DePetris

Why Biden’s attempt to revive the Iran deal is faltering

Robert Malley may not technically be a diplomat, but he walks and talks like one. A specialist in the Middle East, Malley has extensive experience in government. He had an integral role in negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, the deal that limited Iran's nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief. President Biden brought him into his administration as his special envoy to Iran in the hope he could find some way to bring both Washington and Tehran back into an agreement. Nineteen months later, Malley himself bluntly admitted that the talks were, if not dead, then frozen for the foreseeable future. Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Malley said the Biden administration is no longer thinking much about the negotiations.

iran

Thursday

Adam Lammon

Learning to live with a nuclear Iran

A mere four years after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the international agreement that had constrained Iran’s nuclear program, Iran is closer to building a nuclear weapon than ever before. Both the Trump administration’s pressure and the Biden administration’s diplomatic campaigns have failed to yield Iran’s capitulation, yet still the United States has not changed tack. Instead, it has only raised fears of a cataclysmic clash in the Middle East. To be sure, while the Trump team’s maximum pressure strategy had great success in “crushing” Iran’s economy, it was far less effective in achieving any of its stated objectives.

Tuesday

Leon Hadar

Biden chickens out of Iran negotiations

We were promised a war of nerves in Vienna between Washington and Tehran, a game of chicken. Instead, President Biden has chickened out. He's also blaming Israel. Call it fowl play. Here's how it should be going. The United States wants Iran to re-commit to refreezing its nuclear program. Iran demands in exchange the revoking of the economic sanctions against it. Each side insists that it won't give up on its demands — even if that could lead to the collapse of the negotiations, the demise of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and eventually to a military confrontation. The diplomatic and military tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine involve just such an exercise in brinkmanship.

iran

Friday

Jake Wallis Simons

Why this Iranian assassination is all about Trump

From our UK edition

The news that Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen ‘father of the bomb’ Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, met his end in a hail of bullets near Tehran today comes as no surprise. As with so many things these past four years, this is all about Trump. Whoever carried out the hit, it is all but certain that Trump gave it the nod. Once again, he is trying to put a stamp on the Middle East that Biden will find difficult to scrub out. His actions would hardly be without precedent; Obama, Clinton and Reagan all made last-gasp moves in the region to shape it in their image. But none of these Presidents were anywhere near as belligerent or pro-Israel. First there was intense speculation that Trump was building up to a last-minute attack on Iran.