Pepe Escobar reports on a
searing account by Iran’s foreign minister of his country’s relations with the
U.S.
Just in time to shine a light
on what’s behind the
latest sanctions from Washington, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad
Zarif in a speech at the annual Astana
Club meeting in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, delivered a searing account of
Iran-U.S. relations to a select audience of high-ranking diplomats, former
presidents and analysts.
Zarif was the main speaker in
a panel titled “The New Concept of Nuclear Disarmament.” Keeping to a frantic
schedule, he rushed in and out of the round table to squeeze in a private
conversation with Kazakh First President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
During the panel, moderator
Jonathan Granoff, president of the Global Security Institute, managed to keep a
Pentagon analyst’s questioning of Zafir from turning into a shouting match.
Previously, I had extensively
discussed with Syed Rasoul Mousavi, minister for West Asia at the Iran Foreign
Ministry, myriad details on Iran’s stance everywhere from the Persian Gulf to
Afghanistan. I was at the James Bond-ish round table of the Astana Club, as I
moderated two other panels, one on multipolar Eurasia and the post-INF
environment and another on Central Asia (the subject of further columns).
Zarif’s intervention was
extremely forceful. He stressed how Iran “complied with every agreement and it
got nothing;” how “our people believe we have not gained from being part of the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action; how inflation is out of control; how the
value of the rial dropped 70 percent “because of ‘coercive measures’ – not
sanctions because they are illegal.”
He spoke without notes,
exhibiting absolute mastery of the inextricable swamp that is U.S.-Iran
relations. It turned out, in the end, to be a bombshell. Here are highlights.
Zarif’s story began back
during 1968 negotiations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, with
the stance of the “Non-Aligned Movement to accept its provisions only if at a
later date” – which happened to be 2020 – “there would be nuclear disarmament.”
Out of 180 non-aligned countries, “90 countries co-sponsored the indefinite
extension of the NPT.”
Moving to the state of play
now, he mentioned how the United States and France are “relying on nuclear
weapons as a means of deterrence, which is disastrous for the entire world.”
Iran on the other hand “is a country that believes nuclear weapons should never
be owned by any country,” due to “strategic calculations based on our religious
beliefs.”
Zarif stressed how “from 2003
to 2012 Iran was under the most severe UN sanctions that have ever be imposed
on any country that did not have nuclear weapons. The sanctions that were
imposed on Iran from 2009 to 2012 were greater than the sanctions that were
imposed on North Korea, which had nuclear weapons.”
Discussing the negotiations
for the JCPOA that started in 2012, Zarif noted that Iran had started from the
premise that “we should be able to develop as much nuclear energy as we wanted”
while the U.S. had started with the premise that Iran should never have any
centrifuges.” That was the “zero-enrichment” option.
Zarif, in public, always comes
back to the point that “in every zero-sum game everybody loses.” He admits the
JCPOA is “a difficult agreement. It’s not a perfect agreement. It has elements
I don’t like and it has elements the United States does not like.” In the end,
“we reached the semblance of a balance.”
Zarif offered a quite
enlightening parallel between the NPT and the JCPOA: “The NPT was based on
three pillars: non-proliferation, disarmament and access to nuclear technology
for peaceful purposes. Basically, the disarmament part of NPT is all but dead,
non-proliferation is barely surviving and peaceful use of nuclear energy is
under serious threat,” he observed.
Meanwhile, “JCPOA was based on
two pillars: economic normalization of Iran, which is reflected in Security
Council resolution 2231, and – at the same time – Iran observing certain limits
on nuclear development.”
Crucially, Zarif stressed
there is nothing “sunset” about these limits, as Washington argues: “We will be
committed to not producing nuclear weapons forever.”
All About Distrust
Then came Trump’s fateful May
2018 decision: “When President Trump decided to withdraw from the JCPOA, we
triggered the dispute resolution mechanism.” Referring to a common narrative
that describes him and former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry as obsessed
with sacrificing everything to get a deal, Zarif said: “We negotiated this deal
based on distrust. That’s why you have a mechanism for disputes.”
Still, “the commitments of the
EU and the commitments of the United States are independent. Unfortunately, the
EU believed they could procrastinate. Now we are at a situation where Iran is
receiving no benefit, nobody is implementing their part of the bargain, only
Russia and China are fulfilling partially their commitments, because the United
States even prevents them from fully fulfilling their commitments. France
proposed last year to provide $15 billion to Iran for the oil we could sell from
August to December. The United States prevented the European Union even from
addressing this.”
The bottom line, then, is that
“other members of the JCPOA are in fact not implementing their commitments.”
The solution “is very easy. Go back to the non-zero sum. Go back to
implementing your commitments. Iran agreed that it would negotiate from Day
One.”
Zarif made the prediction that
“if the Europeans still believe that they can take us to the Security Council
and snap back resolutions they’re dead wrong. Because that is a remedy if there
was a violation of the JCPOA. There was no violation of the JCPOA. We took
these actions in response to European and American non-compliance. This is one
of the few diplomatic achievements of the last many decades. We simply need to
make sure that the two pillars exist: that there is a semblance of balance.”
This led him to a possible ray
of light among so much doom and gloom: “If what was promised to Iran in terms
of economic normalization is delivered, even partially, we are prepared to show
good faith and come back to the implementation of the JCPOA. If it’s not, then
unfortunately we will continue this path, which is a path of zero-sum, a path
leading to a loss for everybody, but a path that we have no other choice but to
follow.”
Time for HOPE
Zarif identifies three major
problems in our current geopolitical madness: a “zero-sum mentality on
international relations that doesn’t work anymore;” winning by excluding others
(“We need to establish dialogue, we need to establish cooperation”); and “the
belief that the more arms we purchase, the more security we can bring to our
people.”
He was adamant that there’s a
possibility of implementing “a new paradigm of cooperation in our region,”
referring to Nazarbayev’s efforts: a real Eurasian model of security. But that,
Zarif explained, “requires a neighborhood policy. We need to look at our
neighbors as our friends, as our partners, as people without whom we cannot
have security. We cannot have security in Iran if Afghanistan is in turmoil. We
cannot have security in Iran if Iraq is in turmoil. We cannot have security in
Iran if Syria is in turmoil. You cannot have security in Kazakhstan if the
Persian Gulf region is in turmoil.”
He noted that, based on just
such thinking, “President Rouhani this year, in the UN General Assembly,
offered a new approach to security in the Persian Gulf region, called HOPE,
which is the acronym for Hormuz Peace Initiative – or Hormuz Peace Endeavor so
we can have the HOPE abbreviation.”
HOPE, explained Zarif, “is
based on international law, respect of territorial integrity; based on
accepting a series of principles and a series of confidence building measures;
and we can build on it as you [addressing Nazarbayev] built on it in Eurasia
and Central Asia. We are proud to be a part of the Eurasia Economic Union, we
are neighbors in the Caspian, we have concluded last year, with your
leadership, the legal convention of the Caspian Sea, these are important
development that happened on the northern part of Iran. We need to repeat them
in the southern part of Iran, with the same mentality that we can’t exclude our
neighbors. We are either doomed or privileged to live together for the rest of
our lives. We are bound by geography. We are bound by tradition, culture,
religion and history.” To succeed, “we need to change our mindset.”
Age of Hegemony Gone
It all comes down to the main
reason U.S. foreign policy just can’t get enough of Iran demonization. Zarif
has no doubts: “There is still an arms embargo against Iran on the way. But we
are capable of shooting down a U.S. drone spying in our territory. We are
trying simply to be independent. We never said we will annihilate Israel.
Somebody said Israel will be annihilated. We never said we will do it.”
It was, Zarif said, Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who took ownership of that threat, saying,
“I was the only one against
the JCPOA.” Netanyahu “managed to destroy the JCPOA. What is the problem? The
problem is we decided not to fold. That is our only crime. We had a revolution
against a government that was supported by the United States, imposed on our
country by the United States, [that] tortured our people with the help of the
United States, and never received a single human rights condemnation, and now
people are worried why they say ‘Death to America?’ We say death to these
policies, because they have brought nothing but this farce. What did they bring
to us? If somebody came to the United States, removed your president, imposed a
dictator who killed your people, wouldn’t you say death to that country?”
Zarif inevitably had to evoke
Mike Pompeo: “Today the secretary of state of the United States says publicly:
‘If Iran wants to eat, it has to obey the United States.’ This is a war crime.
Starvation is a crime against humanity. It’s a newspeak headline. If Iran wants
its people to eat, it has to follow what he said. He says, ‘Death to the entire
Iranian people.’”
By then the atmosphere across
the huge round table was electric. One could hear a pin drop – or, rather, the
mini sonic booms coming from high up in the shallow
dome via the system devised by star architect Norman Foster, heating
the high-performance glass to melt the snow.
Zarif went all in: “What did
we do the United States? What did we do to Israel? Did we make their people
starve? Who is making our people starve? Just tell me. Who is violating the
nuclear agreement? Because they did not like Obama? Is that a reason to destroy
the world, just because you don’t like a president?”
Iran’s only crime, he said,
“is that we decided to be our own boss. And that crime – we are proud of it.
And we will continue to be. Because we have seven millennia of civilization. We
had an empire that ruled the world, and the life of that empire was probably
seven times the entire life of the United States. So – with all due respect to
the United States empire; I owe my education to the United States – we don’t
believe that the United States is an empire that will last. The age of empires
is long gone. The age of hegemony is long gone. We now have to live in a world
without hegemony – regional hegemony or global hegemony.”
Pepe Escobar, a veteran
Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow
him on Facebook.
