{"id":113337,"date":"2021-04-09T01:46:19","date_gmt":"2021-04-09T01:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=183995"},"modified":"2021-04-09T01:46:19","modified_gmt":"2021-04-09T01:46:19","slug":"limitations-of-jcpoa-negotiation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/04\/09\/limitations-of-jcpoa-negotiation\/","title":{"rendered":"Limitations of JCPOA Negotiation"},"content":{"rendered":"
On April 1 \u2014 appropriate date, perhaps, for a saga of unending western foolishness and villainy \u2014 the EU announced that officials from Iran, Russia, China, the UK, France, and Germany would be meeting virtually to discuss a possible return of the USA to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Later announcements indicated that representatives of both the USA and Iran would meet with European partners in Vienna in the first week of April, although possibly from different rooms to separate US and Iranian representatives. Talks began on August 6.<\/p>\n
A State Department spokesman welcomed the move, indicating the Biden administration\u2019s preparedness to return to the 2015 deal tortuously negotiated over several years between Iran, the US Obama administration and European powers, and that former President Donald Trump later unilaterally abrogated in May 2018. A pretense by the USA and Europe that resumption of JCPOA requires arduous negotiation camouflages the reality that it has always been obvious that removal of US sanctions on Iran would automatically prompt its immediate return to the JCPOA framework.<\/p>\n
The use of the potential <\/em>(but not the actuality) of nuclear weapons in the form of weapons development capability<\/em> has arguably been an instrument of Iranian foreign diplomacy from the days of the Shah, first as a defense against nuclearization of regional neighbors and, since the Islamic revolution in 1979 \u2014 and in the guise of varying percentages of uranium enrichment and the construction of centrifuges (many unused) \u2014 against US and European opposition to Iranian independence from Washington.<\/p>\n The 2015 deal itself was the outcome of a long-standing, bullying, propaganda campaign by the USA, Israel, and Europe (UK, France, and Germany) to smear Iran\u2019s peaceful nuclear energy program (including the slight enrichment of uranium for scientific and medical purposes, far below the 90%+ required for nuclear weaponry) as a meaningful threat of nuclear war. Yet Iran, a signatory in 1968 of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), had over several decades conceded detailed scrutiny of its energy program (perfectly legitimate, under the NPT) to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Israel, on the other hand, in possession of one hundred or more nuclear warheads, never signed the NPT.<\/p>\n