In this respect, Iran shares the same status as Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Russia, and China – in other words it is one of a select group of countries that do not kowtow to the diktat of ‘Rome’. For strip away the obfuscation, the dissembling words proffered by the usual parade of well fed and handsomely remunerated Western ideologues, and the only reason, the single reason that Iran is being depicted as a “terrorist state” in which human rights are non-existent, is because under its current government it refuses to bow to Washington or its vassals in western Europe and the region itself.
As such, until Iran, along with its other dissenting counterparts, makes a decisive break with neoliberalism, which by necessity also means breaking with the dollar as the international reserve currency, it will always be vulnerable to global economic downturns and shocks, such as occurred back in 2008. More crucially, it will be vulnerable to the machinations of dollar diplomacy, whether delivered via Washington directly, or indirectly via the IMF or World Bank. Ultimately, there can be no independence from the ‘Rome’ until there is independence from its currency.
Compounding Iran’s economic problems has been the sanctions regime imposed on it by Western governments, led of course by Washington. The much-heralded P5+1 nuclear deal, reached in 2015 between Tehran and member states of the UN Security Council plus Germany, is considered to have been the landmark achievement of Obama’s foreign policy, trading the lifting of economic sanctions in return for the guarantee that Iran’s nuclear development program would remain non-military in its objectives.
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But lest we lapse into any romantic illusions when it comes to Obama’s tenure in the White House, we are obliged to recall that prior to the agreement the Obama administration had done its utmost to derail Iran’s nuclear program by nefarious means. US author and historian, Perry Anderson, reveals how the Obama administration “launched a massive joint US-Israeli assault on Iranian computer networks to cripple the development of its nuclear programme. A blatant violation of what passes for international law, the projection of the Stuxnet virus was personally supervised by Obama.”
However in Donald Trump we are dealing with probably the most capricious US president in history, whose animus towards the Islamic Republic — to the manifest delight of both the Saudis and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu — is all-consuming. Trump has made known his opposition to the P5+1 deal, and at his behest, the US Treasury reintroduced sanctions against Iran, which came on stream in July.
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The reasoning for the new tranche of sanctions has been given as “Iran’s malign activities across the Middle East which undermine regional stability, security, and prosperity. Iran continues to support terrorist groups such as Hizballah (sic), Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad that threaten Israel and stability in the Middle East. Iran has maintained its steadfast support for the Assad regime, despite Assad’s atrocities against his own people.”
The day that Trump’s otherworldly UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, blatantly abused the Security Council, scheduling a debate on events in Iran during which she took the opportunity to unleash a barrage of condemnation against the country’s government, irony died. Fortunately, Russia’s UN ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, was on hand to deliver a righteous slapdown. “If your logic is to be followed,” he told Haley, “Security Council meetings should have been called after the well-known events in Ferguson, Missouri, or when violence was used against Occupy Wall Street demonstrations on Manhattan.”