Eyeing Iran as Weapons Market, Russia shoots down as "Ridiculous" Trump's
demand for Arms Embargo on Tehran
JUAN COLE
06/09/2020
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) - The Neoconservative wing of the Trump
administration, which is dying to drag the United States into a war with
Iran, suffered an embarrassing setback on Monday when its latest flimsy
scheme crashed and burned.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington's scheme
"ridiculous and irresponsible," according to AP
While the US was prostrate from the pandemic and roiled by protests over
police brutality toward African-Americans in particular and people in
general, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his Special Representative for
Iran and Senior Policy Advisor, Brian Hook, had what seemed to them a stroke
of genius.
They worried that the Iran deal of 2015 provided for an end to the
international arms embargo against Iran on October 18, 2020, assuming Iran
kept its part of the bargain.
Iran was in compliance with its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA) even after May of 2018 when the Trump administration
abruptly and for no obvious reason breached the treaty. (The JCPOA was
signed among Iran and the UN Security Council permanent members plus
Germany, not just with the US.)
Trump and Pompeo wanted to invoke a provision of the JCPOA that reimposed
international, UN Security Council sanctions if Iran did not fulfill all its
obligations. This "snapback" clause would maintain the international arms
embargo on Iran past the 2020 expiration date.
As noted above, Lavrov poured cold water all over the US approach, AP says,
writing to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres:
"We are proceeding on the basis that the United Nations should not become
hostage to the political situation in the United States, which has decided
to withdraw from the plan. There are no valid grounds for raising in the
Security Council the issue of an arms embargo against Iran."
Russia is in line to sell billions of rubles worth of fighter jets and other
weapons to Iran, according to Anton Mardasov at Al-Monitor.
Some observers have suggested that one reason Russian president Vladimir
Putin intervened in Syria from 2015 was to make the country's killing fields
a demonstration project for the Russian arms industry. The proven success of
Su-30 fighters in rolling back the largely fundamentalist insurgency in that
country has made them attractive in the arms markets. Russian anti-aircraft
systems are also in demand, including from US allies like Turkey.
So, Moscow is not going to let Trump and Pompeo interfere in this golden
money-making opportunity.
In return for mothballing 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program,
Iran had expected an end to both the UN Security Council sanctions and US
sanctions. That did not happen, however, because the Republicans in Congress
insisted on continuing to turn the screws on Iran, and when Trump won the
White House, he reinforced this hard line. This matters because the United
States imposes its own economic and financial sanctions on Iran through the
Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) of the Treasury Department. But it
also imposes third party sanctions on other countries and their firms if
they deal with Iran. No European corporation wants to risk being fined
billions or losing access to the US market over a minor little player like
Iran.
Iran's population is 83 million, similar to that of Germany, but its annual
nominal gross domestic product is only $460 bn. or so, similar to that of
Austria (pop. 8.8 million) and smaller than that of Poland. The US GDP is on
the order of $21 trillion.
So Iran gave up everything, all the deterrence that having an active
civilian nuclear research program brought, in return for worse than nothing.
I say worse than nothing because the Trump administration actually not only
increased the sanctions on Iran and made the rest of the world go along, but
actually went so far as to forbid trade with Iran entirely, preventing Iran
from selling its petroleum. Iran exported 80,000 barrels a day in April
according to Reuters, which if true means that Iran is no longer an oil
country (in 2018 it was exporting 2.5 million barrels a day).
Iran is, in short, being economically strangled by Trump in the same way
that a Minneapolis policeman stands accused of strangling George Floyd.
There is no international legal justification for Trump's financial and
trade blockade on Iran. In fact, it contravenes the wishes of the UN
Security Council and is contrary to a treaty that the US signed. There isn't
even any Congressional act justifying it. It is just the fiat of an erratic
and malevolent former game show host. It is wrong to punish the civilian
population for what are essentially war aims.
Iran's government has replied to this blockade by engaging in civilian
nuclear enrichment activities forbidden by the JCPOA. Its violations are
relatively minor so far. There is no evidence at all that Iran has a
military, bomb-oriented enrichment program. But it isn't cooperating on its
civilian program as it used to before May, 2018, when Trump destroyed the
treaty that required that cooperation.
It is grotesque that Trump should toss the Iran deal in the trash can, try
to strangle the Iranian public in its crib, provoke an Iranian government
backlash, and then use the backlash to argue that the whole world now has to
reimpose sanctions on Iran. The end game of this extreme policy is likely
war with Iran, whether Trump wants it or not. Trump is unaware of how things
can spiral out of control when you put a whole country in a vise this way.
The European Union, Russia and China, all of which want to do business with
Iran, are trying to find ways around the Treasury Department threats.
Treasury only has jurisdiction over trade in dollars or money transfers
through US-dominated banking exchanges. Iran has in the past managed to
evade those sanctions by bilateral soft-currency exchanges, e.g. in Indian
rupees and Iranian riyals (shortly to be renamed and revalued as tomans).
This locks the two parties into buying from one another and is more or less
a form of barter. Europe has set up an Instex exchange in euros and has
given its officers diplomatic passports to prevent the US from arresting
them. China does renminbi trade with Iran via its own banks, and when it has
needed and wanted to import Iranian petroleum, hasn't seemed to pay the
slightest attention to US sanctions threats.
