Iran has been telling Biden administration officials that it’s reluctant to reenter the Obama-era nuclear deal for fear that the next Republican president will withdraw from it as President Donald Trump did in 2018. But there’s no way for American negotiators to guarantee that a future administration will abide by an agreement that legalizes Tehran’s nuclear weapons program. So it seems President Joe Biden will have to make sure Iran gets the bomb on his watch.
It’s understandable that many Americans have little appetite for foreign policy at present. With political and media retainers undermining the foundations of our domestic life, it’s not easy to suffer Republican officials more concerned about the fate of Russian dissidents than Jan. 6 protestors illegally detained by the Biden faction. But as I explained in the first episode of the Epoch TV program “Over the Target,” giving a bomb to a terror state on the Persian Gulf will directly affect how Americans live.
The cost of energy has soared since Biden turned off the Keystone pipeline, and an Iran capable of threatening its oil-producing Arab neighbors with a nuclear arsenal will make the oil market even more volatile. And the Biden faction thinks that’s a good thing.
In July 2015, the Obama White House came to terms with Tehran and agreed on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and Biden is keen to protect his former boss’s signature foreign policy initiative. Accordingly, Biden has appointed key members of Obama’s Iran-deal team to senior roles in his own administration.
For instance, under Obama, current national security adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William Burns led back-channel talks with Iran a decade ago. Other former Obama hands who figured prominently in the initial JCPOA talks and are now part of Team Biden include Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of state, and Robert Malley, who leads the negotiations for the U.S. side.
According to Obama and his aides at the time, the deal was the only way to stop Iran from getting a bomb without going to war. So anyone who opposed the JCPOA was a warmonger. Further, since U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia were also against the deal, any Americans who criticized it were disloyal to their own country.
Sounds familiar, right? The framing and rhetoric the Obama administration used to sell the Iran deal were later employed to push serial information operations, from Russiagate to “insurrection,” targeting Trump and his deputies and supporters.
Trump, according to his enemies, wasn’t just a political outsider who mocked the establishment for its myriad failures—rather, he was an agent of an adversarial government, Russia. And the sometimes riotous Jan. 6 protestors weren’t just doubting the legitimacy of the 2020 election—no, they were anti-democracy activists bent on sedition. The larger message of all these operations is that anyone who opposes the oligarchy’s program to transform America is not really American.
The personnel used to sell the Iran deal—Democratic Party officials and operatives, the intelligence services, think-tank experts, and the media—were repurposed for these later information warfare campaigns. And like those operations, the Iran deal was premised on a lie: The purpose of the JCPOA was not to stop Iran from getting a bomb, but to legalize Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.
It’s all right there in black and white, in the so-called “sunset clauses.” The JCPOA’s various restrictions on Iran’s program are meant to expire, now in less than a decade. Once those restrictions are lifted, Iran’s bomb is fully legal in the eyes of the world.
The deal was crafted to protect Iran’s program by putting it under the umbrella of an international agreement backed by the United States. And Obama’s successor was going to make sure the JCPOA held. But then a funny thing happened—Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.
Biden can’t afford to take any more chances with Obama’s legacy, especially with his poll numbers crashing and a likely Trump run in 2024. There are also the 2022 midterms to worry about, with forecasts of GOP victories taking the House and Senate. And so within the next year, the Biden team will do everything it can to get Iran the bomb while it still has the time and the power to do so.
Why, you may well ask, are American statesmen so eager to supply the world’s leading state sponsor of terror with the most destructive weapon known to man?
Because the purpose of the Iran deal is to overturn the established order of the Middle East. The JCPOA downgrades relations with traditional regional partners Israel and Saudi Arabia and realigns American interests with a soon-to-be nuclear Iran. In other words, it’s a recipe for instability in a strategically vital part of the world that furnishes much of the world’s energy resources.
And that’s the end game. Further pushing up the price of gas and oil will undermine our carbon-based economy and help usher in an economy based on alternative energy sources. In effect, the JCPOA is an annex to the Green New Deal.
Nearly two years into the COVID response, it’s now easier to understand the establishment’s obsessive push for notoriously unreliable energy sources. Just as the first has nothing to do with public health, the latter has nothing to do with climate change. Rather, they’re both power plays designed to further enrich the oligarchy and the political, cultural, and media establishment that serves it, while targeting their opponents, the American working and middle classes.
Biden’s reentry into the Iran deal will have major consequences not just for U.S. allies, but for Americans here at home.
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