By Staff Writer
The Iranian reime is unlikely to meet the strict conditions that the US has set for an improvement in relations between the two countries, according to a December 19 report to Congress, so a new nuclear deal appears out of the question.
The Congressional Research Service report, entitled Iran: Internal Politics and U.S. Policy and Options, explains that after Donald Trump pulled the US out of the 2015 nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), he had expressed a willingness to work with Iran’s rulers on a new nuclear deal that addressed all of their malign behaviour.
This includes its ballistic missile programme, regional meddling, support for terrorism, and human rights abuses, which were all left out of the 2015 agreement and were cited by Trump as his reasons for withdrawing on May 8 of this year.
After the US left the deal, it promised to reimpose all secondary sanctions against the Gulf country by November 4, including its lucrative oil industry. The purpose was to put “maximum pressure” on Iran to change its behaviour on these various issues.
Some feared that the fallout might turn into direct armed conflict in the region or all-out war between the two nations, but the US said that it would only react militarily if Iran provoked them. Still, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo announced the creation of an “Iran Action Group” on August 16 to coordinate all State Department activity on Iran.
The Iran Action Group released a report in September, entitled Outlaw Regime: A Chronicle of Iran’s Destructive Activities, which listed all of Iran’s threats to US interests, including abuses of the Iranian people’s human rights. Since then, Trump administration officials have increasingly highlighted systemic corruption and widespread human rights abuses in Iran, in order to amplify international support for sanctions and decrease whatever remaining support the mullahs have.
Some experts believe that, because Iran’s threat to the US is based on their ideology, the US’s underlying, but unstated, goal is regime change in Iran. This would likely involve taking advantages of the growing faction divides in the Regime (wrongly characterised in the West as a case of moderates vs. hardliners) and the nationwide protest movement that has plagued the mullahs for nearly a year now.
The US should support regime change in Iran as it’s the only way to deal with the issues they have raised and it is the true wish of the Iranian people.