01/13/17 – Trita Parsi on the incoming Trump administration’s acceptance (or rejection) of the Iran nuclear deal – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Trita Parsi.
He is the director of NIAC.
It's niacouncil.org on the internet.
The National Iranian American Council, the pro-peace lobby on Iran issues in Washington, D.C.
Welcome back to the show, Trita.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, how are you?
I'm doing good.
Hey, listen, I'm sorry, I'm way behind and I don't even have a recent article of yours to refer to here.
I was just hoping that basically you could give us a quick update on the Iran deal.
We're coming into the Trump years.
He says it's the worst deal ever, this and that, which you know he ain't even read it or know a damn thing about it.
But I was hoping you could give us a real, you know, kind of thumbnail of what it means on the Iranian side in terms of their nuclear program and to what degree it's been implemented so far.
And then on our side, the sanctions.
And whether, you know, basically in other words, as Trump comes into power, how well is the deal working on both sides?
And you know, how bad of a decision might it be?
Obviously I'm biased here and so are you and it's okay for him to really scrap the thing as apparently his war cabinet would have him do and as he seems at least tempted to do.
So the deal actually is working quite well from the American perspective in the sense that the Iranians are nowhere near to a breakout capability compared to what they were before the deal.
They have scrapped so much of their program, shipped out so much and even more so of their low and rich uranium than they actually were originally obligated.
From the Iranian perspective, it is working so-so because they are striking some deals with some major companies, but they're not seeing sanctions relief working the way they had hoped.
And a lot of companies are still very hesitant, which mainly is because they're fearful of what Trump will do and they don't wanna be caught going into the Iranian market and then being thrown out of the Iranian market once again, if Trump chooses to go for new sanctions, et cetera.
What I think is a bit new, since we probably last spoke, is that many of Trump's nominees have come out and stated things such as they're not open to throwing out the deal, they're not thinking about scrapping it all together, they should try to make the most of it, implement it religiously.
You had General Mattis in the testimony yesterday saying that the United States needs to live up to its word, it's a signed agreement, we have to make the best of it.
Although he also said that he would never have signed it had he had the choice, but now when it's there, we have to live up to it.
Well, I would say that that's very welcomed and I think there's definitely people there who genuinely believe this.
I would also take General Mattis at his word when he says this.
I am also a bit worried that there is this different approach within the Trump team in which they have recognized that if they actually go out and just violate the deal and withdraw from it, it would be extremely costly for the United States because the US would be picking a fight with China, Russia and the EU, and it would be blamed for the crisis that would ensue.
So a smarter way is to instead start provoking the Iranians by doing provocative things on the outskirts of the deal in the hope that the Iranians will be so frustrated that they will start withdrawing from the deal and blame will fall on them for the ensuing crisis.
If that's the path you want to go, the first thing you want to do is to start speaking about how much you are going to honor the deal, how much you are going to respect it and implement it.
Because if your objective is to withdraw while making sure that the other side gets the blame, you need to start talking and acting like an angel before you start doing the provocative things.
If you are clearly saying, hey, I want to get rid of this deal, but I'm going to do it in such a way that the Iranians get blamed, then you'll probably end up getting the blame anyways, because it's so transparently clear that this whole thing was just an effort to shift blame.
All right, now real quick, because I want to get back in and ask you a little bit about Iranian politics too.
But for a skeptic listening, when you say, oh yeah, the Iranians, they're implementing the deal.
Can you explain a little bit about what that means in terms of their nuclear program and the additional protocol they've adopted and why should an American believe, we can't see what's going on in Iran?
How do you know what's going on in Iran?
Well, first of all, when it comes to ensuring that they're living up to their end of the bargain, that is then verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency that has cameras installed right now in Iran's nuclear program.
They see everything that is happening.
They're not waiting for permission to go and visit their declared facility.
They're inside of those declared facilities and they have instruments there that measure in real time, radiation and things of that sense and send it directly electronically to Vienna where they're headquartered.
So the degree of transparency in the Iranian program right now is beyond what we have in most nuclear programs around the world, including European countries that don't have any taint on their record within the IAEA.
So for people to just go out and say, we don't know what's going on over there, it's a little bit of a revealing of ignorance because they're just glossing over how the deal actually is working and the immense transparency measures that have been put into place.
All right, and now, so things are changing over there in Iran is Rafsanjani, who is a big, powerful former politician and supporter of the current president who has just died.
And then they keep saying that the supreme leader, Khamenei, has cancer.
Now, I don't know how fast or slow of a cancer it is or how well it's being treated to you.
And how much does this mean?
Because of course, at least, I guess the common kind of narrative as a Texan might understand it is that, yeah, we got so-called somewhat moderate forces in there now, but to the right of them are some pretty hardcore IRGC types who don't want any kind of rapprochement any more than the American hawks do.
Yeah, and that certainly is the case that you have a lot of people in the conservative side in Iran that are as terrified of the idea of losing the United States as an enemy as there are people in Washington that are terrified of the idea of losing Iran as an enemy.
And the death of Rafsanjani, I think ultimately for this specific aspect is problematic because the current supreme leader does have cancer, prostate cancer.
He is old.
He's about 76 right now.
And it is expected that he will be passing in the next couple of years.
And as a result, there will be a secession issue that will come up in the next couple of years.
And Rafsanjani was a very clever and effective player in the background for those issues in which he could have pushed things in favor of ensuring that the next supreme leader would be a more moderate and a more centrist figure than the current one.
Without Rafsanjani there, I think the task of ensuring that the next supreme leader is not as conservative, as anti-Western as the current one will be much, much more difficult.
All right.
And now, so it's an interesting situation in it where you have kind of the American Sunni aligned axis versus the Russia Shiite aligned axis.
Only there's all these weird contradictions and overlap where America backs the Shiite side in Iraq, for example.
And here Donald Trump and his team, they wanna get along with Russia.
Not so much, I don't think they've said at the expense of Saudi or their Sunni friends in the region or anything like that, but they still certainly all seem to be a bunch of Iran hawks.
But then as you say, they've been sending a lot of signals that they're not gonna pick a fight with them just yet, at least, over this thing.
But I just wonder if, do you think that they even see it this way?
There's a contradiction there between going ahead and wanting detente with Russia, but wanting to hawk it up with, not that Iran and Russia are allies really, but in the scheme of things they are.
They sure as hell are fighting on the same side in Syria and Russia certainly is sympathetic with Iran's goals in Iraq, for example.
Yeah, I mean, there's so much contradiction right now going on, not just in the region, but also very clearly within the Trump administration.
It is very, very difficult to be able to predict what is going to happen.
As you mentioned, there's a very strong anti-Iran sentiment within the Trump administration, while at the same time, certainly individuals who seem to be much more benign in their outlook on Russia, and that's gonna create contradictions, particularly when it comes to fighting ISIS.
With Mattis and Tillerson, I think you also have an added perspective of people who, for better or lack of better words, tend to view the region from the Saudi perspective.
For instance, the answer that Tillerson gave in regards to Saudi Arabia, I thought was quite charitable towards Saudi Arabia.
Mattis was not even asked a question about Saudi Arabia, which I thought was very strange, because the narrative he comes in with is that Iran is essentially the root of all evil in the region, the destabilizing force in the region, et cetera, et cetera.
To talk about stability in the region, to talk about the situation in the region without addressing Saudi Arabia and their spread of Salafism and Wahhabism, and the way that they have killed so many Americans, and that they're not just destabilizing the region, but the globe, because their terrorist networks are reaching all the way to the United States and Europe, that's quite shocking.
We're essentially going back to an era in which we will turn a complete blind eye to everything the Saudis are doing, and I don't see that in any way, shape, or form being in the United States' interest.
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Yeah, I'm actually looking right now at this new article at The Intercept about Tillerson's answers on Yemen, where here America's been helping Saudi bomb Yemen for almost two years straight now, just shy of two years straight, basically because the Shiite enemy, the Zaidi Houthi faction out of the north that has come down and taken over the capital city, and apparently the Trump administration plans on picking that subject up and running with it from here.
No contradiction, unfortunately.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, now, I'm sorry, because I'm skipping back to where I started, but I didn't really follow up the way I meant to, about the degree to which the Americans have lifted the sanctions and gone along with their end of the bargain.
Is it enough in Iran for their politicians to say, yeah, well, more or less the Americans are living up to their end of the deal, or are the Americans really not living up to their end of the deal, and they're making the Iranian politicians suffer for going along with this when they're doing their end and we're not, and their economy is still suffering?
Not that this was the cure-all for their economy, but it sure was hurting it back before, and if that hasn't really changed, I wonder just how much support they're gonna have over the long term to keep their end of it.
I think to a large extent, this is not just about living up to the deal or not, because what it really comes down to is that the A, existence of primary American sanctions that were not supposed to be lifted by the deal, nevertheless has an effect in which it makes it very difficult for the sanctions that are lifted to actually be effective.
So for instance, a European company now can go into the Iranian market, but any American person within that company is not allowed to have any interaction with the Iranians or any connection to those deals, because otherwise that person would be a violator of U.S. sanctions.
Now you can imagine how many European companies there are that are multinational all over the globe and not have a lot of American persons within their infrastructure.
So it makes it next to impossible for these companies to go into Iran without putting a lot of their employees at risk, and the cost of sealing them off from all of those other types of activities is so extensive, so a lot of them just decide not to go into the Iranian market, essentially meaning that they're still being sanctioned.
Beyond that, you have the political risk coming in with people being very worried, understandably, of what it is that Trump will be doing.
The cost of going in and then once again get kicked out of Iran is obviously very, very high.
So a lot of people are staying out of the Iranian market as a result of the fear of potential new sanctions coming in.
Those factors combined have led to a scenario in which the existing sanctions relief has ended up becoming much less effective than what it should have been.
But it's tricky because it's not as if the US is not living up to its end of the bargain.
It's just that the issue turned out to be much more complex than people envisioned with the existing and continuing primary sanctions.
And then you had this other unforeseen development with Trump becoming the nominee and then the president-elect, which is also causing companies to feel that the political risk remains high, if not even higher than it was before.
So in other words, even though we're living up to the letter of the thing, the Iranian president and his foreign minister who negotiated this deal, they look like fools.
They're under a lot of criticism inside of Iran.
A lot of people don't feel that the sanctions relief has come through.
Yes, there's some oil companies that have signed deals, et cetera.
But for the general population to feel that this is really working out the way they had hoped for would necessitate that they, as small business owners, would be able to have trade agreements with European companies, perhaps even with American companies.
And they're not seeing that because the mid-sized companies are not doing a lot of this.
They're staying out.
Very little investments have gone into Iran.
So they're not seeing the fruit of the supposed sanctions relief.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's, I mean, I'm not really optimistic or hopeful or I'm not sure which is the right word, but there is a huge possibility here, of course, of Trump being able to do what no Democrat could do.
And that would be go to Tehran and shake hands with the Ayatollah like Nixon went to China and shook hands with Mao Zedong and just say, you know what?
Business is business.
The old days are the old days.
Let's get along now.
And he's just the kind of flipper flopper around kind of a guy to do it.
And he's, you know, known as a right-wing Republican.
He's really more of a Bill Clinton Democrat, but he's known as this right-wing Republican reputation kind of thing.
So I think that means he could go and shake hands with Kim Jong-un.
And I think he could go and shake hands with the Ayatollah Khamenei and he could go to Venezuela or whoever, supposedly, whatever other pseudo enemies you could come up with.
And he could go and make peace deals with all these people.
He could bring his CEO, Secretary of State with him and just say, hey, everybody, let's do business and let bygones be bygones.
And then who's gonna criticize him?
The Democrats are just gonna flail around saying, oh, he's an agent of Putin for the rest of their lives or something.
I mean, he could do that.
He could really do all that in his first 100 days treated.
That's the situation we're in.
And he's rogue enough to maybe want to, but I'm not saying I trust him or believe that he would or that he even has the insight to see that that's the advantageous position that he's in to really turn all the old order upside down in that kind of a way.
Yeah, and look, I don't know if he's gonna make those trips and try and go shake people's hands, but he does have the opportunity to actually open up the floodgates of trade.
And Iran is going to be very important if he looks at it from that perspective, because there's not a lot of markets that the U.S. has not been able to get into as big as that one, as the Iranian one.
And we just published a report on how much U.S. sanctions have cost the U.S. economy.
And it's really high.
And we're talking about since 1995, approximately $290 billion, just about $100 billion in the last two and a half, three years, with a loss of about 90,000 job opportunities per year that trade would have supported.
Trump went to Indiana over that company and saved approximately 700 to 1,000 jobs according to his own narrative.
We're talking about 90,000 jobs.
We're talking about potentially 100,000 jobs if the Boeing deal remains intact, according to Boeing itself, their own calculation.
So if you wanna create jobs and wanna boost the economy, the Iranian market is gonna be tremendously important.
But because of the contradiction in the Trump administration and the very, very strong ideological view that some people have, it's not gonna be easy for Trump to go in that direction without creating a tremendous amount of tensions with some of his closest advisors.
Yeah, hey, you know what you need to do at your events and functions and papers and whatever?
Lead off with all those great quotes from Dick Cheney in 1998 when he committed the high treason of criticizing American policy while standing on foreign soil.
He was in Australia.
And he gave a speech denouncing the Bill Clinton administration in no uncertain terms for the sanctions against Iran.
Yeah, I remember.
And he was the CEO of Halliburton at the time, and he said, let's do some business.
So your right flank is covered, Trita.
Go ahead and knock the hell out of him, buddy.
No, we're throwing out these numbers all the time.
We're the only ones in this town who have made any calculations on what the actual cost of sanctions is to the US.
In all of the sanctions conversations you hear, you never ever hear what is the cost of this policy, which is absolutely stunning, mindful of the fact of how popular sanctions are on Capitol Hill.
There's no conversation about what the cost of those policies are.
Yep.
Well, and yeah, this is a point that Ron Paul used to always make.
They would say, oh, you're isolationists.
You're an isolationist.
He would say, I don't think we should have any sanctions on anyone or any tariffs on anyone.
I'm an isolationist.
I'm pretty sure you guys are the isolationists picking a fight with whoever won't go along with whatever your whims are at any given time.
Give me a break, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
All right, listen, hey, you do great work.
Thank you very much for your time on the show.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Always good talking to you.
All right, y'all.
That is Trita Parsi.
He's at niacouncil.org, niacouncil.org.
That's the National Iranian American Council, and as he says, lots of original research there.
I should find that study about the sanctions and run it on antiwar.com, don't you think?niacouncil.org.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, y'all, for listening to me.scotthorton.org, libertarianinstitute.org, slash scotthortonshow.
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