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Eurasia
January 19, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 20
officials announced the imposition of fresh sanctions against 14 Iranian individuals, including the head of Iran’s judiciary, Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli-Larijani, and entities it accuses of rights abuses, censorship and support for weapons proliferators.
Despite all the noise Trump has made over the nuclear deal issue, Tehran remains defiant that it has met all its obligations agreed during tortuous negotiations to hammer out the JCPOA and is not at all interested in renegotiating the agreement. Whether there is any room for substantial compromise remains to be seen.
A big difficulty is that although the deal is only concerned with Iran’s nuclear development programme, Tehran sees both Trump and Israel as trying to leverage the nuclear agreement
issue to pressure the Iranians to reduce their involvement in power struggles in the Middle East. Regional arch-rival to Iran and US ally Saudi Arabia is bothered by the geopolitical influence the Islamic Republic has gained through military victories it has helped rebels and militias achieve in Yemen, Syria and Iraq and the standing it retains in Lebanon through its alliance with Shi'a political party and militant group Hezbollah.
The huge importance of the nuclear deal to the Islamic Republic—for two years it has relieved Iran of crippling sanctions that previously shut its central bank out of the world financial system and barred its oil industry from world markets – is shown by the latest economic forecasting by the World Bank. It this week cited the hardened
nuclear deal stance by the US to partly explain why it has reduced its expectation for finalised Iranian GDP growth in 2017 to 3.6% from 4.0%. If the accord entirely unravels, Iran's hopes for economic expansion in the years ahead would then take a much greater hit through impacts on trade, investment and available financing. That's a big worry for a country that has lately faced nationwide street protests largely blamed by most observers on growing economic hardship, particularly in the provinces.
"The deal is working; it is delivering on its
main goal, which means keeping the Iranian nuclear programme in check and under close surveillance," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said after meeting her Iranian, UK, French and German counterparts in Brussels on the eve of Trump's decision.
After the Brussels meeting, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson underlined how the deal is seen as successfully preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and challenged Washington to come up with a better alternative.
Referring to the JCPOA as a "considerable diplomatic accomplishment", Johnson said:
"I don't think that anybody has produced a better alternative to the JCPOA as a way of preventing the Iranians from going ahead with the acquisition of a military nuclear capability. It is incumbent
on those who oppose the JCPOA to come up with that better solution, because we have not seen it so far."