Saudi role in US breaching of JCPOA

Alison Tahmizian

The Villain of the Piece in the current pressure tactics against Iran, is not just Donald Trump but also the notorious Heir Apparent of Saudi Arabia who is an avowed enemy of the Islamic Republic.

Stay with us for an article in this regard that appeared in ‘Asia Times’, by Beirut based Armenian journalist Alison Tahmizian Meuse, titled: “Saudi Role in US Breaching of JCPOA”.

When the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) was inked between Iran and its longtime Western rivals in July 2015, it was not simply a nuclear non-proliferation treaty – it was the invitation for Iran to retake its rightful seat at the table of nations.

Iran, a vast country with a history of empire, invention, culture and trade, would scale down its nuclear program in exchange for engagement, an investment in its educated 80-million-strong population.

It was not only a significant undertaking for the US administration of Barak Obama, part of a strategic vision of a regional and global adjustment but a sustained step by the Iranian government of President Hassan Rouhani.

In the months and years that followed, major Western corporations signaled that the future of West Asia would go through Tehran.

Major oil companies, car manufacturers, and airlines were at the ready. None more so than the French oil giant Total, which in July 2017 led a consortium in signing a US$4.8 billion deal to develop the South Pars gas field – the world’s largest.

Total called it “a major contract which would contribute to the development of relations between Europe and Iran.” It was slated to begin supplying the Iranian domestic market by 2021.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, however, sanctions were already brewing in the US where the change of government in the White House resumed the long time hostility of the Americans towards Iran.

In 1953, Washington had kneecapped Iran’s democracy with a CIA-orchestrated coup against the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. His chief offense in the eyes of the West was to nationalize Iran’s oil industry and to reject British and American subservience.

The result was the restoration to power of the fugitive Shah and his despotic rule that suppressed the aspirations of the Iranian masses for the next two-and-a-half decades during which the Americans – the de facto rulers – called Iran a pillar of US foreign policy in West Asia.

Those relations were ruptured with the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 when the Pahlavi regime was overthrown and the Islamic system of government established.

The US pursued a policy of hostility, and it took nearly three decades for a US leader to prioritize a total reset with Iran. That was Barak Obama.

Addressing the Muslim world from Cairo, Egypt, in June 2009, Obama admitted the role the US had played in the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government half a century before, and called for talks without preconditions.

As a two-term president, Obama would devote significant political capital to securing an accord with Iran – part of a strategic vision for a recalibrated future of the region and America’s relations with it. Secretary of state John Kerry spent hours negotiating with Iran’s top diplomat, Javad Zarif, with a clear air of respect for his counterpart.

When the JCPOA was signed in Geneva in 2015, Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic journal that it was time for Saudi Arabia to learn to “share the neighborhood” with Iran.

During his last meeting with King Salman ibn Abdul-Aziz in April 2016, Obama encouraged the Saudi ruler to engage in diplomacy with the Iranians rather than proxy wars and power struggles. The king’s son, Heir Apparent Mohamed bin Salman, known as MBS, could not contain his outrage later in the meeting, according to a top Obama adviser in the room.

The Iran deal, Obama’s detractors maintained, came at the expense of a decades-old alliance with the OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia. And despite a $38 billion aid package to the Israeli armed forces, the deal was viewed as an abandonment of Israel as well.

But by then, the Saudis had already identified a new political brand on the horizon: Donald Trump – and opened up their coffers for him.

In the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, perhaps no foreign-policy issue served as more of a foil for Trump against Obama than what he alleged the “bad deal” Obama had struck with Iran.

While the quixotic real-estate developer had argued against American meddling in the West Asia-North Africa region, breaking with Republican Party orthodoxy to condemn the George W Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, for him Iran was another story.

A meeting between President Trump and MBS in March 2017 was hailed as a “turning point” in Riyadh, whose leadership was finally back in lockstep with the White House over a common desire to stifle Iran’s regional and global ambitions.

With plans to invest $150 billion in natural-gas stakes around the world, the Saudi leadership was looking to sideline Iran and its vast reserves.

In turn, MBS was floating partial privatization of Saudi Aramco, nearly four decades after his predecessors had bought out Standard Oil, and presented himself as a friend to Israel who could act as an enforcer against the Palestinians. The Trump administration, with the president’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner in the lead, was convinced that an investment in the young MBS would pay off for the coming century.

Even as Total began breaking ground in southern Iran, Trump was setting the stage for an economic coup.

In May 2018, the United States announced its abandonment of the international nuclear pact. One year later, all previous sanctions had illegally snapped back, including the most fatal: the blacklisting of the Iranian petroleum sector.

Unable to secure a waiver from US sanctions, Total pulled out of Iran in August 2018, having spent only $40 million of a promised multibillion-dollar deal.

Two months later, Total inked a $9 billion contract with Aramco to build a petrochemicals plant in Saudi Arabia. The same week, reports emerged that Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi had been brutally murdered inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul – on the orders of MBS, of course.

As global outrage mounted over the killing, Total chief executive officer Patrick Pouyanné was boarding a plane for Riyadh to headline the Saudi Heir Apparent’s “Davos in the Desert” investment conference.

He was quoted by the Financial Times as saying: “Total has never been in favor of sanctions and isolation.”

For a company among many whose first choice was Iran, the statement can be taken with a heavy dose of irony.

James Dorsey, a senior fellow at Singapore’s Rajraratnam School and Middle East Institute, argues that the worst-case scenario for Saudi Arabia is an Iran acceptable to the West and unfettered by sanctions.

Enforcing a level playing field means: “Iran wins this hands down,” he says.

That is the deal Trump has breached.