Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/27/22 Trita Parsi on Biden’s Last Chance to Save the JCPOA

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Scott was joined by Trita Parsi to discuss JCPOA negotiations on yesterday’s Antiwar Radio show. Parsi recently published a piece in Foreign Affairs arguing that the U.S. should return to the deal and that the current negotiations are the final chance to reach an agreement. He observes that even if we don’t care at all about the well-being of the Iranian people, staying out of the deal is costing American taxpayers and businesses. Scott and Parsi examine the common arguments against the deal and show how they all fall apart upon closer examination. They conclude that the real reason hawks oppose the JCPOA is that it takes away their favorite excuse for war in the middle east. Parsi argues that everyone who actually wants peace should support reentrance into the deal and institutionalized communication between Washington and Tehran. Discussed on the show: “Last Chance For America and Iran” (Foreign Affairs) Treacherous Alliance by Trita Parsi Trita Parsi is the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy. Parsi is the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Follow him on Twitter @tparsi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, August the 28th, 2022, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com, an editor of the new book, hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,700 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org at YouTube.com

slash Scott Horton's show and all your favorite podcatchers out there. And introducing today's guest, it's the great treat of Parsi, and I really mean that he is the founder and former director of the National Iranian American Council. He's the founder and vice president or something like that of the Quincy Institute for Responsive.

Statecraft, which is one of the most important foreign policy institutions in Washington, D.C., you know, overnight and still and is just doing absolutely great. And if I said it once, I said it a hundred times, he's the author of the most important book you can read about at least semi-recent history of America's policy in the Middle East. It's called treacherous alliance. And it's a birds-eye view, a strategist's view from the highest levels of America, Israel, and Iran with the poor Iraq. stuck in the middle, of course, in the history from 79 through, I don't know, W. Bush. And it's so good, treacherous alliance. It's absolutely indispensable. And I'm not selling it. I'm just telling you that's a fact. Welcome back to the show, Trita. How are you doing? Thank you so much, Scott. And thank you

for your kind of words. Very happy to have you here. And one important piece you have here. And maybe 50% of the reason why is because it's published in foreign affairs, the Journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, where it's usually only Hawks allowed. And yet they publish this for you. Last chance for America and Iran. A new nuclear deal won't survive without a broader reproschement. So, first of all, the JCPOA background real quick. Obama got us into it in 2015. Trump got us out of it in 2018.

Instead of getting us right back into it, Joe Biden has dragged his feet. It's going back and forth, back and forth. But if I'm up to date on my anti-war.com headlines here, where Dave DeCamp and the rest of the guys are doing such great work keeping up with this. It sounds like the Europeans have introduced a compromise and there became a little bit of a softening on either side. And it looks like there's a chance. Maybe they're going to sign this deal and the Israelis won't be able to stop it.

Am I even correct as to this moment here? I think you are. I think, first of all, I think you're also right that Biden could have just gone back in with an executive order when you first became president. He did that with the Muslim ban. He did that with the Paris Agreement, with the WHO. He could have and should have done it on this as well. And I think it actually came up to his own detriment that he didn't, because it meant that we had 16 more months

of the Iranian nuclear program growing, which means that the Iranian leverage also grew, meant that the Iranians learned more things about the nuclear fuel process, fuel cycle, that as a result is irreversible. So just from that step, standpoint, I think rather than actually gaining leverage, Biden's hands became a bit weaker. But fortunately, we are now in a situation in which it does seem somewhat likely that this

will go through. I'm optimistic. The ball is now in Iran's court. It's been there for the last three, four days. And they're going to have to give a response. The U.S. side wants it to be a straight yes, not a yes, but. In the earlier drafts, that the Europeans circulated, the Iranians came back with a yes-bots. 10 days later, the U.S. came back with a yes-spot. And if this keeps on going, we may have a bunch of yes-bots, but never an actual agreement. So the U.S. is hoping that the Iranians come back with a straight yes. There's also, frankly, an objective calendar constraint here that I think is weighing quite

heavily on the administration's shoulders, and that is that as we get too close to the midterm elections, this can become more problematic. And if it goes past the midterm elections, then we may be in a situation in which the next House and Senate may not agree with this. Because as you know, this has to go to Congress afterwards for a review. And as it stands right now, the chances are decent for the Senate not to sabotage this, but who knows what the Senate and the House is going to look like after the elections. And on top of that, something that you just mentioned, which is the longer this keeps on taking, particularly when they're now in this very sensitive stage, the more opportunities, either for the Israelis or the Saudis to do something

to sabotage it or something else happens that actually may not have anything to do with any of them deliberately pursuing it, but it can nevertheless create a problem. I mean, we saw the attempt at killing Salman Rushdie. I've seen no evidence that the Iranians are actively behind it, but the Iranians did have a fatwa on him, and that certainly has not made the situation easier. So you can imagine a lot of different things, black swans, that could show up, that could really kill this little momentum that exists right now. So the hope is that there will be a quick resolution to this. And if you follow what the Iranians have been saying in their media and their government officials, it's very clear. They are preparing their system and their

population for a renewal of the agreement. Well, that's good to know. And, you know, I don't know. It's just a fact. I'm not trying to praise the guy. It's descriptive, not normative, but the Ayatollah is a pretty patient, man. The fact that he is telling his president he wants them to get back into this thing, you know, after the, this is the last guy's humiliation. That he made this deal with the Americans and the Americans immediately turn around and broke it.

And now the hawk got elected present, and the Ayatoll is telling the hawk get back in the deal. It's pretty important to note there. And that's going to go to another point we're going to get to a little bit later in the conversation about the chances for a broader engagement with Iran. I think your point is important because I think there's very little appreciation for how the other side feels about this mindful of the fact that it was the U.S. that pulled out. If you remember the debate back in 2015 about the JCPA, the key thing people were asking themselves is, oh my God, what are we going to do if the Iranians cheat? And that's natural.

There's nothing wrong with that. But clearly we, as well as the Iranians, did not seem to have much of a realization of the tremendous risk that clearly existed, that the U.S. would do it. And now we're in a situation in which we're almost expecting the United States to cheat. if there is a change in government. In fact, we are expecting that the next American Republican president will pull out of this deal. Many of them, many of the candidates for presidency, from Mike Pence to Ted Cruz to Tom Cotton,

have all said they will pull out of this deal. So there is a new element in this round of negotiations that has not been fully addressed, but is very critical and is undeniable. And that is the new American unreliability. Yeah. Well, and just the absolute untenability of any of these hawks position. They want to get rid of this deal and replace it with what? An excuse for war?

In fact, so let's zoom out a little bit. We're talking about the JCPOA with Treat a Parsi here on anti-war radio this morning. And there's a big question about what is the JCPOA anyway? And something you and I have talked about for years. Was it even really necessary to have it since Iran has been a member of the nonproliferation treaty since I think 72? and they have never diverted their uranium to military purposes enriched to weapons grade or had a nuclear weapons program other than in the lies and propaganda spread mostly by the Israelis and their partisans in this country.

And so if the JCPOA just fell completely apart, they're still inside the NPT. They still have a safeguards agreement. And at least the way I look at it, treat it, is that in 2015, this was the right thing to do in the sense that Obama was trying to take it. all the heat and the pressure to have a war off the table under the fake threat that they were making nuclear bombs, which they weren't. And so he was saying, well, by adding another layer of inspections and restrictions, everyone will have to pipe down. That was essentially the purpose of the deal, and it succeeded in doing that. But the underlying truth never changed. The Ayatoll is

not making nukes. He knows that we'd carpet bomb him off the face of the earth, if not nuke him before he got one made if he tried. So instead he has this kind of latent deterrent and is trying to hold it at that. And so, and that goes to the Republicans' position, they want to get out of this deal so you can go back to pretending that he's making a bomb

so he can use that as an excuse to attack. Yeah, so look, whether they were engaged in bomb making or not, what the deal did, exactly as you said, is that it would provide a verification that they're not making a deal, which would then take away the overwhelming majority of pressure for war.

I mean, in fact, just take a look at American headlines post-JCPOA between 2015 and 2018, compare it to the headlines prior to the JCPOA. We were debating on a nightly basis on evening news. When should we bomb Iran? When will the war start? That all came to a complete end as a result of the JCPOA. So in that sense, I do think it is necessary.

And I think it's necessary now. as well, particularly with Republicans saying that they want to undo it, which signals clearly they want to move towards greater escalation. Having the deal there will make it more difficult for them and it would also make it very clear that there are many issues in the world that are either impossible to resolve diplomatically or extremely difficult. This one, the Ivani Nuclear Program, is not one of them. There is a diplomatic solution. It is working. It was working. And if we move towards war on this issue, it's solely because we wanted war, not because we needed to have war. All right. Now, again, it's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton talking with

Trita Parsi from the Quincy Institute, and he's got this great piece in foreign affairs. Last chance for America and Iran, a new nuclear deal won't survive without a broader reproachment. And so what you're saying is essentially Biden to Tehran, and let's just go ahead and hash this out like Nixon when he went and shook hands with Mao. put the past behind us kind of thing? Well, what I'm arguing for, the language of a broader rapprochement, I think, is actually what foreign affairs added in their sub-title to the piece. What I'm essentially arguing for in the piece is to say that this deal is going to be extremely

fragile. One, because of American unreliability, which means that there's not going to be any expectation on either side that this will last longer than two years. Two, because this deal is coming into a new geopolitical context that is really not working in its favor. The Iranians have kind of given up on the U.S. because of what happened last. They're looking more towards the east rather than the west. The Biden administration showed no interest and even trying to have some form of an opening with the Rouhani government. So you can just imagine how little their interest will be to do so with a much more hardline Raezy government.

So there's no interest on this side either. And I think there is, unfortunately, a simultaneous effort to try to use the Abraham Accords to further militarize it and create an anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East. You know, some have called it an Arab NATO. This is something that the Biden administration officials themselves strongly argued against when Trump was pursuing it, but they have now themselves gone back into pushing for it. And I'm very worried that if we end up miraculously having this deal being revived, but then we're going to simultaneously pour more weapons,

more sophisticated weapons into the hands of some of Iran's regional rivals, try to organize the region against Ivan. All we're going to do is to create incentives on the Ivanian side to not go along with the deal, cheat with the deal, or welcome its collapse in order for them to build a nuclear deterrence against what clearly is a threat from their perspective if the U.S. is organizing the region against Iran. We've already tried this for the last 40 years. It doesn't work. It ends up working badly for the U.S., for the region. But it seems to be one of those ideas that has so much support

in the military industrial complex amongst the Israelis that the administration wanted to give it another shot. Yeah. Well, and they are in a difficult position, not that you have to sympathize with them, but you can understand that they, the American Hawks, are the ones who gave Baghdad to Tehran's best friends. And they're the ones who made Damascus more dependent on Iran and Hezbollah for their support than ever before. And the same with the Houthis in Yemen, who were barely associated with Iran before we started bombing them. Now they have more influence than ever. Apparently there were some RGC guys there. so it's the Americans and their anti-Iranian policy for the last generation straight

that has empowered Iran at every turn in fact Trump described the generals briefing him ooh they took me into this room and there were screens everywhere and the generals they were so big and tough he goes they were like tom cruise but even tougher and they showed me on the maps that iran is taking over the middle east so we have to do all this stuff to contain them And it's sort of true that they keep opening up the Christmas presents that America keeps delivering to them. And how dare they? And then, but so if you are from Brookings or Heritage or AEI or Winnep or what have you, FD, they can't admit any of that at all. That can never be the basis of their discussion that, well, we've done a lot of favors for the Ayatollah lately and we're trying to reverse that.

So instead, what? They have to just pretend the Iranian juggernaut menace is attempting. to conquer the entire Middle East. And so what do you have to do about that? You better, you know, initiate the Abraham Accords and build a new Middle Eastern NATO and sell everybody even more weapons and all of these things based on the lie, if only because they can't admit their own responsibility for the situation. We got to get out of this.

And this is where I think beyond just war with Iran and Iran potentially building nuclear weapons, this JCPOA revival is so critical because the JCPOA, if pursued appropriately afterward, frankly, was an exit ticket for the United States out of the Middle East. If you take away this Iranian potential nuclear threat out of the picture, so much of the justification for the U.S. keeping 50,000 troops in the Middle East would go away. And that's, again, one of the key reasons why some of the countries in the region opposed the deal, why the Middle Street Industrial Complex opposed it, is because they realize that without those troops there's and without those arm sales, you know, they're going to be herding financially, so they don't want that.

But it's good for the United States to be able to get out of the Middle East, and it's really difficult to envision how that can happen without first neutralizing this issue. So now we have a second chance at it. And I'm worried that we're not going to use the next two years. to build on it, to address its lack of longevity, invest in order to make it more durable so that it doesn't have to collapse once more if the Republicans take the presidency in 2025 or in 2029. It's really critical because it's miraculous enough

that we managed to get revived once. It's just not going to get revived twice. This is the last chance in my view. Yeah, I think that's right. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors.

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and you'll see what I mean. Use promo code Horton and you'll save 25 bucks. And this show will get a little kickback too. That's Rickasali.com slash Ron Paul. Cassali is C-A-S-A-L-I. Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping too. Well, and it's probably true too that even as superfluous as I think this thing is, it's probably necessary to any further progress in relations with Iran just because of the way the thing is set up.

So let's talk about the concerns of the Hawks here because last time around, they had a really great public relations bit to harp on, which was I think there were some photographs, right, of a palette of cash money. And the idea was that this was

American tax money and like liquid, untraceable bills, being, you know, dropped off at IRGC headquarters over there. And, you know, it was dang near treason was the way they spun that. And the latest from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies is that Biden is giving Iran a quarter of a trillion dollars, $250 billion to join this deal. And, of course, all that money is going to go straight to terrorism. And these are powerful narratives, Trita.

And so what do you got to say here? I have to say, first off to start off, it's just. unbelievable that we still have to talk about whatever FD says. They seem to be able to be wrong on absolutely everything year after year after year and we still have to deal with the narratives that they're putting out. It tells us something about the lack of accountability for Hawks in Washington and how the media does not, what it should be doing in scrutinizing and challenging what they've said. Every time they go on TV or if they give interviews to print media, there should be a statement by the journalists saying, well, what they said about

the JCPA proved to be false, what they said about what would happen, once the U.S. exits the JCPA also proved to be false. Doesn't mean that what they're saying now is necessarily false, but the listeners and the readers should be provided that context. And if that was done in a systematic way, I would suspect that after a while they wouldn't be quoted at all, because why would you constantly want to quote someone who's wrong? But going back to your specific question, they were completely lying about that last time around.

The money that was released from banks was Iran's own money that was unfrozen as part of the deal as part of the Iranians shipping out 98% of their low in vitreanium. The money that was paid to the Iranians through the Swiss was part of an arms deal that the Iranians had paid for back in the last year. of the Shah being in power, they were never given the military equipment that they paid for, understandably, because in between, the revolution had happened, but the Iranians also never got their money back, so they went to the international court. And that court was about to make a decision, and the United States decided to, instead of waiting for that court order, try to settle

the matter directly with Iranians, which they did. And as a result, the United States paid back Iran's own money to devons. Now they're saying that we're going to give them trillions of dollars. This is complete nonsense. What's going to happen is that if we lift sanctions, the Iranian economy is no longer going to be in this chokehold. And the Iranians, if they manage to get their act straight, are going to be able to have an economy that grows once more. That is their growth that is based on their trade. It is not us giving them money. FD seems to think that everything in the world is owned by the United States. And if some country actually manages to grow its economy,

it's because we gave it to them. It's a fundamentally imperialist outlook that they seem to be having. Yeah. It's just like they say, how can we pay for this tax cuts? Like, well, wait, how can we pay for your spending? They just turn the words around on you, you know? So we're going to allow Iran to make money selling their natural resources. that we have been forbidding them from doing because our world empire is powerful enough to keep

Iranian oil off the markets. So now we're going to stop doing that. And you're to interpret that as a direct welfare payment from American taxpayers to Iran somehow, or the equivalent of such, which is just, yeah, it's a lie. This is all it is. Yeah. But that's a pretty big number, $250 billion. Yeah, that they'll make selling oil maybe. You know what I mean? You know, what we should be focusing on is how much do these policies that FD has been pursuing and pushing for cost the United States? And if we take it, set aside the cost of the Iranians further expanding their nuclear program or the Iranians of the U.S. ending up having tensions, attacks on U.S. bases, et cetera,

that the Iranians may have had something to do with, et cetera. Let's sit that aside. Let's just look at the financial cost of the sanctions themselves. We did a study back in 2014 and then we updated in 2017, looking at how much money the US has lost by imposing these sanctions on Iran. And the numbers were staggered. I mean, between 1997 and 2010,

we're talking about 13 years, the US lost roughly up to about $273 billion and lost income opportunity, which translated to roughly 100,000 jobs. jobs a year. When we did that study, we sent it to the Obama White House, and I remember getting an email back from one of staffers at the NSC, and he said that this was stunning. And I emailed back trying to find out, okay, it's stunning because it is much less than what you guys have calculated or much more. How is it stunning? He said, oh, no, we had no calculation on this at all.

It was stunning because it's the first time they actually saw a number on how much the policy of sanctions was costing the U.S. tax payers. We don't even calculate. We don't even bother to try and make an assessment of how much these sanctions policies cost. That's how bad it is. And, you know, speaking of Nixon and Mao, there's essentially no way to calculate the benefit to mankind from the opening up of those relations and the building up of trade

between the two. And this was the point, Trita, I'm sure you remember this. Dick Cheney in 1997 at the Kato. Institute in Washington and also in a speech or two speeches in Australia. He denounced Bill Clinton's sanctions on Iran. He was the CEO of Halliburton at the time. He said, I'm trying to do business with these people. You know what? God didn't see fit to put oil only under the ground of perfect democracies, see our relationship with all of the Gulf monarchies, for example. And he says, and you know what, if we do business with the Iranians, that might be a better way of like working things out and

improving their society anyway, in the same way it absolutely has helped to improve China over the last 30 years. Yeah, and I remember when he was chosen as VP, there was expectations that because of his old background, he would be moving towards putting an end to some of these sanctions, allowing U.S. investments in Iran's oil industry, etc. I remember there was quite a lot of panic in some quarters in Washington who they didn't want to see any opening, wanted to see a continuation of the conflict. they were of course very wrong

and anyone who was hopeful about Dick Cheney was perhaps even more wrong. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, that's one of the benefits that you get that I'll never have a living in Washington DC treaty that you're privy to things like that. People were afraid that Dick Cheney was going to be too much of a dove because of his commitment to capitalism

but instead all that happened was they were filling his pockets with toy soldiers to go and play with at no expense to himself or his investors. And then look at what he did. Turn the whole Middle East upside down. All right. So anyway, bottom line here. Anthony Blinken is the Secretary of State. That's a real problem. And Joe Biden's our present. But, you know, what realistically can be done here, say, by our listeners to help get involved in this in any way to try to move the needle on this narrative and help to get this thing through? Well, first of all, if there is an agreement, there's going to be another one of these big, silly fights in Washington. And people should be weighing in. They should be weighing in with their members of Congress and telling them, what they think about this, and particularly if they are in favor of avoiding a war with Iran

and getting this deal to stick, they should call, and they should particularly call the Republican members of Congress, because it's become an issue in which it's become too easy for many of the Republicans to just oppose this along party lines without taking into consideration anything of what the consequences of this would be. But after, I think again, I'm hoping that the Iranians recognize that it was a big mistake on their end that they did not engage directly with Trump in 2017 before he pulled out of the agreement. Some of them have themselves admitted to me that they think that if they had, perhaps Trump would not have pulled out.

And I think what's important is to make sure that a dialogue between the United States and Iran is institutionalized so that the political costs for the next American administration and the next Iranian government will be much lower after 2025. Again, it's not a guarantee that will prevent in the second American exit, but it can't help evade it. Secondly, we're right now seeing a very fascinating, very fascinating regional diplomacy taking place in the Middle East. I mean, the Turks just normalized with Israel.

They made up with MBS. The Iranians and the Saudis have had a very constructive dialogue. and has been somewhat fruitful. At least one important thing that seems to have come out of it is help with the truce in Yemen. The Egyptians and the Iranians, the Emirates and the Iranians have normalized. The Kuwaitis just sent an ambassador. Much of this, in my view, is taking place

because these countries have realized that the U.S. is going to be, if not leaving the region, it's nevertheless stopped feeling that it has the will to fight for the region. And as a result, diplomacy is now their best option. It was a different thing when they felt they could hide behind American firepower. When they can't, they actually need to make nice with their neighbors. The United States should support this process. It should support increasing trade between Iran and the Arab states.

Support the effort by themselves to make sure that they resolve their tensions. Because then you may actually have actually have a regional resistance. against an American second exit in 2025. If we have the opposite situation of what we had in 2015 or 2017, when Israel, Saudi Arabia, Emirates, and perhaps a few others were pushing Trump to leave the agreement, imagine if we have a situation in which some of these states, not necessarily the Israelis, but I think the Emirates are already there. The Saudis may end up being there.

If they're actually actively pushing the United States not to do a disastrous thing, a second time in a row by pulling out of the agreement. That could also help make sure that the likelihood of this deal dying afterwards is less. But the most, absolutely most important thing is to actually enlarge the deal and make sure that we lift American primary sanctions. Allow American companies to go into the Iranian market. If you actually have a domestic constituency in the United States, a business constituency that has an interest in keeping this deal alive,

That is most likely the most powerful way of making sure that American reliability actually can be restoring. If I could just say one quick thing on this. What would the Iranians buy if sanctions were lifted? Boeing products. They would be buying some of that stuff. They would be buying some high-tech stuff. But a lot of what they would be buying would be actually agricultural. They would be buying a lot of corn, for instance.

Where is the corn in the United States grown? it's grown almost exclusively in red districts. So you could actually have a lot of Republicans members of Congress start realizing that the sustainability of that field guarantees trade and jobs for their districts. That's going to be a much more powerful thing than any clause or agreement that is currently put into the revived JCP. All right, you guys, that is the great treat of Parsi

at the Quincy Institute. and here he is writing in foreign affairs. Last chance, and by the way, it's paywall free this article. Last chance for America and Iran. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much for having. All right, you guys, and that has been Anti-War Radio for this morning. Thanks very much for listening.

I'm Scott Horton. The website is Scott Horton.org. The latest book is hotter than the sun, and I'm here every Sunday morning from 9 to 9.30 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Thank you.