Unreliable ally

As the World Socialist Web Site warned in a perspective published in April 2015 in response to the announcement that Iran and the great powers had reached the ‘framework’ for a nuclear accord: “In a broader historical sense, the deal is not worth the paper it is written on. If and when it is expedient, the US will shred the agreement, as has happened many times in the past. The Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi cut a deal in 2003 to give up its WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] programs only to find itself the target of a NATO-led war for regime-change in 2011. Amid its own economic decline, US imperialism will stop at nothing in its reckless drive for global domination at the expense of its major rivals.”

Changing what needs to be changed, there are striking and instructive parallels between imperialist diplomacy in the 1930s and today. In the run-up to World War II, all sorts of diplomatic agreements were signed, only to be shredded soon after, with the Nazi regime leading the wolf pack.

In this, Trump is only more brazen and thuggish than his White House predecessors.

His speech was a rant. The wars the US has waged, fomented, and aided and abetted in the greater Middle East over the course of the past quarter-century have blown up complex societies, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya, Syria and Yemen. Yet the billionaire, fascist-minded demagogue accused Iran of being “the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” whose ‘malign’ and ‘sinister’ activities have caused ‘havoc’ in the Middle East.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has subjected Iran’s nuclear program to the most intrusive inspection regime in history, all the other signatories of the Iran accord, US Defense Secretary James Mattis and other top members of the Trump administration all state categorically that Iran has fulfilled all its obligations under the Iran deal to the letter and has not had any nuclear-weapons program for at least a decade and a half. Yet Trump claimed Iran is on the cusp of threatening the US with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

As proof for these lies, he pointed to the April 30 show-and-tell presentation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which was panned by the European Union and all but the most right-wing Western media outlets as hype and lies. The New York Times, which is an expert at war propaganda, deception and forgery, felt professionally affronted that Washington was associating itself with so crude a performance, headlining its editorial response ‘Netanyahu’s Flimflam on Iran.’

Near the end of his speech Trump underscored – using language akin to that of a mafia don touting an “offer you can’t refuse” – that Washington has embarked on an escalating campaign of economic, diplomatic and military pressure aimed at reimposing on the Iranian people the type of neocolonial subjugation that prevailed under the savage US-backed dictatorship of the Shah.

First he sang a paean to the Shah, claiming that prior to the 1979 Revolution Iran “commanded the respect of the world.” Then he declared that Iran’s leaders will reject Washington’s demands for a ‘new’ US-dictated ‘deal,’ adding, “I’d probably say the same thing if I was in their position. But the fact is, they are going to want to make a new and lasting deal.”

Trump made a brief reference to North Korea in his statement, immediately after boasting that by blowing up the Iran deal he had demonstrated “The United States no longer makes empty threats.”

Whatever the immediate outcome of the planned talks between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jung-un, the US repudiation of the Iran deal makes clear that the Korean Peninsula ‘peace talks’ are a tactical maneuver aimed at facilitating US imperialist violence and banditry.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘Trump torpedoes Iran nuclear accord’.

Courtesy: wsws.org