close
Thursday March 28, 2024

Threatening peace

By our correspondents
October 16, 2017

The Trump presidency is set to be the biggest US diplomatic disaster since the days of the cold war. After undoing the rather tense peace arrangement there was with North Korea, US President Donald Trump        on Friday ignored the protests of Russia and the UK and threatened the much-celebrated US-Iran nuclear deal. Trump has put the gauntlet in the hands of the US Congress and the country’s international allies to ‘fix serious flaws’ in the deal. Having already created a nuclear standoff in the Korean peninsula, Trump is now ready to add to the woes of the Middle East by creating a nuclear standoff with Iran. Refusing to re-certify the deal, Trump has now promised to cancel it if the changes are not to his liking. The announcement contradicted his own Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who had noted       on Thursday   that the US could negotiate a parallel deal with Iran to impose restrictions on ballistic missiles and permanent nuclear constraints. Additionally, Tillerson had also said that sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards would be impossible. The chaos at the centre of the Trump administration has remained on display as he has deliberately chosen to ignore China, Russia and three of his European allies to insist that the Iran-US deal be renegotiated.

The progress made during the Obama period is set to be lost – and only Trump can be blamed for that. Iran has kept its part of the bargain, allowing international access to its nuclear programme and scaling it down in exchange for re-integration into the international economy. In Trump’s discourse, Iran is the only country responsible for the chaos in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Not only is that not true, it is a dangerous narrative to peddle in a context where anti-Shia militias are a significant factor in the civil wars in these countries. The EU foreign policy chief has simply noted that ‘tearing up the deal’ was not within the powers of the US as it had been enshrined in a UN resolution. Again, the hubris that the Oval Office has given Trump is on display. Renegotiation is simply not on the cards. Chaos is the only possible outcome. International powers are becoming wary of the erratic behaviour of the American president. There is now fear that an already difficult situation in the Middle East with civil wars and the rise of Isis will become worse if Iran is in conflict with the US. Iranian warnings that they will see the US as an enemy on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria may be overstated but this is a serious concern. Arguably, Iran is the only country in the Middle East that has nothing to gain from supporting Salafist terrorist groups. The larger point is that Iran has been able to deal with bigger bullies than the current US president during the long cold war with the US. With Trump toeing a line that no one else is willing to walk, the only country that stands to lose is the US itself.