Any new deal must restrict Iran
With the EU now privately warning Iran that it will likely be forced to withdraw from the nuclear agreement in November, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, to give its formal name, will soon be well and truly dead. This should be seen as an opportunity to start afresh by both the US and EU and they should create a new agreement that will benefit not just Iran but the whole region by restricting Tehran’s meddling and support for terrorist organizations. The Middle East has always been a place of geopolitical shifting sands. Regional players rise and fall, external empires come and go, and dreams of stability have always proven ephemeral. But Iran has always been a center of power in the region. It used to be a given that Iran would hold sway over peoples, militant groups and governments aligned with Shiite Islam.
But what is happening now is going well beyond that. Iraq — a region that has often in its history been a natural cultural and political extension into the Arab lands for a succession of Persian empires — used to be ruled by the highly antagonistic Saddam Hussein. But the US intervened to remove Hussein and, in his stead, elevated a Shiite-led government. However, a decade later, the government in Baghdad has effectively become a client state of Tehran.
The US supported the Sunniled opposition in the Syrian civil war against the Shiite Alawite government of Bashar Assad — except it has not been sufficiently committed to the conflict to see its resolution to a favorable ending when it could have done. And the US has now moved aside for Russia and Iran to crush the opposition to Assad and enforce his rule. Then there is the matter of Afghanistan. The conflict there is the longest and most expensive in US history. That war was started against the Taliban — a natural enemy of Iran for its hard-line ideology and intransigent anti-Shiite attitudes. But now there is a twist in the story of the Afghan war. It is beginning to emerge that Iran has allied itself with the Taliban and is supporting its efforts to drive the US out of Afghanistan. War makes for strange bedfellows. Either way, Tehran is finding itself in a much better position in Afghanistan than it could have ever hoped.
The irony, of course, is that, in the nebulous thinking of the George W. Bush-era neocons, the Afghan and Iraqi wars were supposed to contain Iran and cement American influence over the region and its critical oil supplies. Instead they have done the exact opposite: They have guaranteed Iranian influence from the Mediterranean
Sea to the Khyber Pass. And, in a stunning turn of events, that influence is beginning to transcend sectarian lines. Is it any wonder that America’s allies in the region are becoming more assertive and aggressive in the face of a rising Iran?
The region does not need any more conflict, but any new agreement with Iran must restrict its meddling in the region and support for terrorist groups that are themselves a principal cause for creating the conflict we wish to avoid.