US WITHDRAWAL FROM THE IRAN NUCLEAR ACCORD AND ITS DANGEROUS CONSEQUENCES

Breaking deals

The US president’s unilateral decision this past month to abandon the Iran nuclear accord has suddenly made the world a much more dangerous place. President Donald Trump’s contention that this will somehow help keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons is counter-intuitive, since the whole purpose of the nuclear agreement—reached under the former administration of Barack Obama after two years of arduous negotiations among seven nations—was to put a stay on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and place it on the path to peaceful nuclear development, while avoiding a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, led by Iran’s three major rival powers there, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iraq.

The timing for the Iran nuclear deal offered the added advantage of providing a diplomatic space in which Iran could be gradually integrated back into the world concert of nations, after long years of isolation and hardship imposed by major Western nations led by the United States. The attendant sanctions and other restrictions implemented against the Iranian nation for the past several decades have done demonstrably little good. On the contrary, they have backed Iran into a corner, isolated it, branded it a rogue nation, placed it on the defensive, and encouraged it to back international terrorist movements as a means of helping it expand its military influence in the region, in what it sees as self-defense against Western-backed regimes in Israel, Saudi Arabia and neighboring Iraq.

Trump and Kim Jong Un, walking a tightrope

Iran’s ambition to acquire nuclear hardware was also part of that isolation, much in the same way that decades of diplomatic autism in North Korea have led that regime to develop its own nuclear armaments scheme as a means of forcing the world to sit up and take notice of it. Its clear willingness now to negotiate and seek closer ties with the United States, and indeed the world, is an unmistakable sign of that end goal—to be recognized and taken seriously on the world stage no matter how drastic the measures it must implement to reach that objective.

But the timing of the US withdrawal from the Iran deal is also overshadowing the on-again-off-again plans for talks between the Trump administration and the North Korean regime. In short, if Trump can simply and unilaterally pull out of a seriously negotiated nuclear agreement with Iran and six other countries, without even having to have that decision vetted by the US Congress, what could possibly make North Korea, or any other country for that matter, believe that any agreement reached with Washington, as long as Donald Trump is in charge at least, will be worth any more than the paper on which it is written.    

Better times, celebrating a new era with the signing

of the accord

Seen in this way, Trump’s flippant decision to pull out of the deal has also increased the isolation of the US itself. Although he has clearly expressed his personal disdain for the agreement ever since his electoral campaign—in which the mainstay of his platform was to pledge to undo anything and everything his predecessor had accomplished—his effective ditching of the accord was never subjected to talks with US allies or with other signatories, which included Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia, with the European Union and the United Nations also lending their backing to the accord.

Trump affixes his giant signature to the order to break the pact

This action, then, has also substantially weakened US ties with its allies in Europe and has given China and Russia reason to distrust the US even more than they already did, while tacitly encouraging them to take their own unconsulted and unilateral actions to one-up the United States and its Western allies on the world stage. They were already doing this before—Russia through military action to strengthen its position in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and China by building island fortresses in the areas that it claims as its sphere of influence and that it aspires to place off-limits to the West—but not being able to trust Washington to keep its word on international agreements that it has signed promises to embolden them to be even more aggressive. And in places like the Korean Peninsula where neither of these world powers wants to see North and South Korea united under Western oversight, it could well encourage them to forge an alliance against the West, as they did once before during the Cold War years.

Mutual hardliners: Trump and the Iranian clerics

Meanwhile, Trump’s abandonment of the Iran nuclear agreement also signifies that, unless the rest of the signers of the accord can work together to keep Iran from going rogue again, it is not unlikely that Iran will soon return to its search for nuclear military capability. This is especially true since the agreement was reached within a climate of a more liberal and moderate Iran, while US withdrawal from the pact provides ammunition to conservative clerics who point to Trump’s action as a reminder that Washington can’t be trusted and that Iranian moderates are weak negotiators. 

Any return to the Persian nation’s path to military nuclear capability could very well trigger a decision by the US to use military force to halt Iran’s progress in this field, or it might prompt Washington to back military action by Iran’s bitter enemies and US allies Saudi Arabia and Israel so as to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions. At best, such action would surely spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East in the perceived interest of maintaining the balance of power in one of the world’s most troubled regions.

Furthermore, the failure of the Trump administration to uphold the pact, and thus return Iran to the concert of nations, also promises to further destabilize the Middle East region. And considering the chaotic state of areas like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Gaza and, particularly, Syria—areas of the world that have long served as proxy war grounds for the major international powers—the entire region could soon easily be converted into a staging ground for a possible third world war.

In short, by means of his unilateral decision to dump the Iran nuclear agreement, Donald Trump has single-handedly placed the world on the brink of a more dangerous era, and has set back Middle East peace efforts to square one. Hopefully, cooler heads than his will prevail and mitigate the damage he has done.