Javad Zarif’s Chutzpah

T he foreign minister of Iran has a message for President Joe Biden: If you lift all of your sanctions and shut up about Tehran’s support for terrorist groups and its development of ballistic-missile technology, we’ll let you back into the 2015 nuclear agreement . . . maybe.

Tehran’s cosmopolitan, English-speaking, sometimes openly anti-Semitic top diplomat Javad Zarif made this incredibly bold argument in a piece published by Foreign Affairs magazine last week. One wouldn’t be mistaken to think that he’s beginning the negotiations with a high asking price — and without much to justify it. Iran’s been battered by the Trump administration’s sanctions, so much so that its support for paramilitary groups across the Middle East seems to be constraining its ability to finance its response to the COVID crisis.

It’s not immediately clear whom the essay is intended to sway. If the target audience is U.S. officials, it’s hard to imagine these lofty demands playing a larger role than does the Biden administration’s already obvious intent to reenter the agreement. And amidst pressure from congressional Republicans, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Gulf, it’s just as difficult to believe that Zarif’s bluster alone would convince the new team to drop its inhibitions against doing exactly what the foreign minister demands — that is, reentering the agreement with absolutely no preconditions:

The incoming Biden administration can still salvage the nuclear agreement, but only if it can muster the genuine political will in Washington to demonstrate that the United States is ready to be a real partner in collective efforts. The administration should begin by unconditionally removing, with full effect, all sanctions imposed, reimposed, or relabeled since Trump took office. In turn, Iran would reverse all the remedial measures it has taken in the wake of Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal. The remaining signatories to the deal would then decide whether the United States should be allowed to reclaim the seat at the table that it abandoned in 2018. International agreements are not revolving doors, after all, and it is not an automatic right to return to a negotiated agreement — and enjoy its privileges — after one simply leaves on a whim.

Such an extreme display of chutzpah is no substitute for the truth, a concept evidently foreign to Zarif, who just earlier this month took to Twitter with unfounded allegations that Israeli agents were planning attacks against Americans.

In addition to staking out that ambitious negotiating position, Zarif spreads a number of falsehoods to prop up a dubiously reasoned guilt trip. These claims range from absurd talking points laundered by American foreign-policy research institutions to attempts at whitewashing Tehran’s record. It’s also worth pointing a few of them out.

Before making his case for an unconditional and immediate U.S. return to the Iran deal, Zarif argues that Washington’s regional military presence over the last two decades has “caused untold damage while achieving little.” Setting aside Tehran’s own role in supporting proxy groups and the Syrian government (Zarif certainly does), many Americans would likely agree that post–9/11 adventurism has been uniquely damaging. Indeed, this is the rhetorical strength of Zarif’s essay — he knows how to sell a message to the American policy elite.

But two of his claims here stand out as exceptionally dishonest. First, in describing the consequences of U.S. military involvement, Zarif notes that 37 million people have been displaced in the region. As I’ve written before, this number — a persistent figure that’s helped the Assad regime deflect blame for its mass atrocities during U.N. meetings — significantly inflates the true number of people that have been forced from their homes by U.S. military action. It’s a baseless number that’s bandied around by U.S.-based opponents of interventionist foreign-policy moves and America’s adversaries, a small but telling lie.

Zarif then goes on to condemn Donald Trump’s decision to order a drone strike on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Qasem Soleimani in 2020. He writes, “The murder removed a leading commander in the fight to push the so-called Islamic State (or ISIS) and other militant groups back from Iraq and Syria — and it added an unforgiveable crime to the already long register of U.S. transgressions against Iran.” These comments on Soleimani, whose paramilitary efforts in Iraq were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, also exploit a fervent U.S. political debate, this one over whether Trump should have ordered his killing.

After attacking Washington’s record in post–9/11 conflicts with the aid of these objectionable points, Zarif levels the allegation that “the sanctions that the Trump administration imposed and reimposed have made it nearly impossible for Iran to import even the items required to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.”

This is yet another attempt to use rifts in U.S. foreign-policy debates to promote his government’s agenda. Plenty of American commentators and analysts have also asserted that the Trump administration’s Iran sanctions regime have gravely hindered the Iranian government’s COVID response, contributing to a humanitarian catastrophe. But once again, this claim misses several key facts.

The previous administration built a waiver mechanism into its sanctions that exempted deliveries of certain humanitarian goods. Various critics, including the Biden campaign, contended that these exemptions were not wide enough in scope and that humanitarian organizations remained fearful of incurring penalties. A Biden campaign statement called on the Trump administration to widen the humanitarian exemptions and provide reassurance to aid groups that they would not be penalized for offering assistance.

But as the letter noted, the U.S. government offered humanitarian assistance to Iran in March and was rebuffed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who replied with the conspiracy theory that COVID began in the United States. The Trump administration was not the only entity to be pushed away: Later in the month, Iran’s ministry of health also rejected assistance offered by Doctors Without Borders after two planes filled with medical supplies had already landed in Tehran. The international aid group expressed its “incomprehension” in a press release.

Far from incomprehensible, though, Iran’s refusals fit a familiar pattern: Zarif and his colleagues want cash, not humanitarian assistance. Understood in this light, the falsehood-filled Foreign Affairs entreaties make that much more sense.

Given Biden’s previous calls for sanctions relief, and a new executive order directing his administration to review all sanctions on the books that may affect the global COVID response, Zarif might yet get at least some of what he wants.