All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey guys, on the line, I got Trita Parsi.
Man, have you ever read Treacherous Alliance?
You gotta read Treacherous Alliance.
Get the audio book.
I'm sure there's probably an audio book.
Listen to it while you're driving.
Man, it's such a good book.
And when you read my book, you'll be like, oh, he got that from Treacherous Alliance.
Yeah, exactly.
I sure did.
Also, he wrote a bunch of other stuff, too, and is the co-founder and something or other at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, executive vice president or something terrible.
Anyway, and he wrote this great thing, oh, Iran expert, former leader of the National Iranian American Council, of course, and Iran expert and Iran nuclear program and nuclear deal expert.
This one's called Revealed Biden Rejected Way Forward in Iran Deal Talks.
Welcome back to the show, Trita.
How are you doing?
Doing well.
Thank you so much for that kind introduction.
Yeah, absolutely.
Listen, man, I kind of thought they'd get back in the deal because it was such a stupid thing for Trump to get out of it.
And I know the Israelis are really against the thing, but Biden's men are pretty much Obama's men.
These are the guys who got the deal done, including his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken.
They played a role in getting this thing passed in the first place back in 2015.
And now they've deliberately dropped the ball.
Is that what you're telling me?
What I'm saying is that something happened in the talks that was very surprising to me and I needed to get it double confirmed before I agreed to write or when I myself decided that this is something that I should write about.
And that is that, you know, earlier on, the Iranian request was that the Biden administration needed to guarantee or put in some mechanisms that would ensure that the next American president doesn't do what Trump did and just leaves the deal with no cost to the U.S.
And that's an understandable request at the end of the day.
I mean, when we sign a deal, we expect Iranians to live up to it for 15, 20 years.
We don't expect to only be adhered to as long as Rouhani is president.
But then something apparently changed.
The U.S. was not willing to give that type of a guarantee.
So the Iranians changed their ask and said, well, just make sure that there's a legally binding commitment from the Biden administration to keep the deal and keep sanctions off of Iran, the sanctions that should be lifted for the U.S. to come back into the deal for the rest of Biden's own term.
And even that apparently was rejected.
And that is a bit shocking, because, I mean, how can we say that we want you to commit for 15 years to this deal, but we cannot even commit for the next three years when we are present when, you know, when Biden is president himself.
So it's it was a stunning revelation.
And I think it explains a lot as to why the Iranians have not agreed to meet with the U.S. or to go along with an agreement, because they need sanctions relief.
But sanctions relief only works if there's stability in the sanctions relief, meaning that companies have confidence that if they go into the Iranian market, they can stay there for three years, for five years.
They don't have to be chased out every three or four years whenever the U.S. has a new president.
If that guarantee cannot be provided, there is not no sanctions relief really offered to the Iranians.
So it actually undermines the the leverage value that sanctions have for the U.S. itself, because they all you know, this is only a credible leverage if we actually with credibility say we are now lifting the sanctions.
If we can't say that we can't do that, what's in it for the Iranians at this point?
They go back into the deal and they still don't get sanctions lifted.
Now, from your sources who told you about this, did they say that there was a reason for this because Biden was afraid of losing face or because they really didn't want back in the deal?
And this was a poison pill that they chose or what?
No, no one suggested to me that they think that the Biden administration doesn't want to get back into the deal.
What has been suggested to me is that the Biden administration wants to keep the sanctions threat alive and potentially even reimpose the very same sanctions we lift in order to get back into the deal, in order to extract more concessions from the Iranians for a longer and stronger deal, which is highly problematic because it's kind of sounds like what Trump tried to do.
But it's also problematic because essentially, if this is true, it would mean that the Biden administration is sacrificing what is necessary, which is the JCPOA, in order to achieve what is desirable, which is a longer JCPOA.
But you can't get the longer JCPOA if there is no JCPOA.
So I think they got the priorities backwards and they're negotiating the next deal without actually having first gone back into the existing deal.
Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck and to give to your friends too that say Libertarian Institute on them so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
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This is so cool.
The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out.
He's been working on this thing for years and I admit I haven't read it yet.
I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it.
It's called Why the Vietnam War, Nuclear Bombs and Nation Building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61.
And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in say 1964 through 1974.
How did we get there?
Why is this all Harry Truman's fault?
Find out in Why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson, available now.
Yeah, well, I mean, I get it, but, you know, they want to, they want to, you know, retain sanctions as an option.
But if they know that that means that they can't get back in the deal, they have a plan B for our, you know, going forward without the JCPOA here, or they're just going to keep trying to pretend to sort of negotiate it for the next three years or what?
So you know, there's increasing talk about plan B and it's a mysterious one.
All we can, you know, probably presume is that the plan B will be much more pressure centric, you know, threats of war, more sanctions, et cetera.
I have absolutely no confidence whatsoever that that will work, not just because it didn't work in the past, but also because if the problem in the deal right now in the negotiations is that there's no credibility in the sanctions lifting promise, that doesn't get resolved by us imposing more sanctions that we also cannot credibly promise we will lift.
It will only, you know, put us back on the same path that Trump did put us on, which is towards a military confrontation.
I think that would be an absolute disaster.
I am perplexed why this is happening.
But there's still time to fix it.
There's definitely time to fix it.
I'm sure the Iranians have to come clean on some things.
I mean, the refusal from the Iranian side to talk directly to the U.S. side is creating space for more suspicion.
Perhaps there are some reasonable motivations behind many of these decisions, but it's difficult to discern them, but it's difficult also for the United States to convey them to the Iranians if the Iranians are not meeting with the U.S. side.
Well, I mean, Trita, the good news, as we've talked about for many years here, is that Iran has been a member of the nonproliferation treaty since 1968 or 72.
And they don't have a nuclear weapons program and they never have had one.
It's disputed whether they ever did any research into nuclear weapons.
And Gareth Porter debunked even that, this whatever supposedly existed up until 2003.
And that was one, Israeli lies and two, misunderstandings of DIA intercepts.
That turned out to, you know, that's all that was based on.
So anyway, they're not making nukes and they've got a safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
So if this whole thing falls apart permanently, then what does that mean?
It means literally in terms of safeguarding their nuclear program, it means we lose an additional protocol to the safeguards agreement that expands inspections a little bit.
I mean, do you think that there's any real threat that the Ayatollah is going to quit the NPT?
Because I think anything less than that and we don't really have a problem.
I mean, this whole thing was a tempest in a teapot anyway.
And Obama wasn't really taking the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapons program off the table.
He was taking the threat of war over false accusations of an Iranian nuclear weapons program off the table.
Is all that happened with this stupid deal back in 2015 anyway?
So maybe it'll be okay.
I gotta tell you, I find it likely, or at least you cannot think that it's unlikely, that if this doesn't get resolved, there's more sanctions, there's more threats of war that the Iranians actually will walk out of it.
Because at that point, the NPT is not offering them anything.
I mean, remember, the JCPOA was very critical because from the Iranian perspective, in the sense that they wanted to have a normalized nuclear program.
In order to do so, they needed to go through the 15 years of the JCPOA and restore confidence in their program in the international community.
If there is no JCPOA and there's no way for them to actually, a path for them to be able to have a normalized nuclear program, at that point, I'm not so sure, and if the sanctions are increasing anyways, I'm not so sure that the tilt in the debate in Iran will continue to be in favor of staying in the JCPOA.
So I do think it's extremely risky.
That's why I think it's absolutely essential that the Biden administration gets the priorities right and gets back into the JCPOA before there's any dialogue about additional deals add-on deal, whatever it may be.
Right.
Well, I don't know, it sure seems like sabotage.
I wonder if, well, I don't know, do you think that it's, you know, agents of Israel inside the American government who are helping to screw this thing up?
I think, I wouldn't say agents of Israel in the government, but I would say that the pressure from Israel and the UAE has been extremely intense.
And I think it's kind of funny that the Israeli pressure seems to have reduced somewhat, at least what is public, which may actually be because they are no longer worried that there will be a restoration of the JCPOA.
Yeah.
Sounds like they've already been assured.
Reasonable conclusion anyway.
All right.
Listen, I know you're short on time here, but thank you so much for coming on the show.
Everybody.
Thank you for having me.
Appreciate it.
Everyone, please go take a look at this great piece.
It's at ResponsibleStatecraft.org revealed Biden rejected way forward in Iran deal talks.
