Trump and Iran: selective amnesia as history
Trump with troops at the 14th July Parade. (image created in Shutterstock)
There would not now be a war between Israel and Iran without President Trump. It has been evident for two decades that there were only two ways of stopping Iran going nuclear: either diplomacy or war. On 14 July 2015 the USA, France, China, Russia, Germany, and the EU/UK agreed a Joint Plan of Action (known as the JPCOA), a nuclear deal to limit and monitor Iran’s stockpile and enrichment of uranium in exchange for significant sanctions relief. It had taken years of hard diplomacy to achieve this goal. In March 2018, the IAEA (international Atomic Energy Agency) stated it could verify that Iran had been implementing its JPCOA commitments, notably to keep uranium enrichment below 3.67%. Diplomacy had prevailed.
On 8 May 2018, Trump announced the USA’s withdrawal from the agreement. Negotiators had carefully ring-fenced the nuclear deal from problems of Iran’s missile development, and its support for Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Syrian regime, but Trump re-introduced these issues as an excuse for sabotaging the JPCOA. Heavy pressure from Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, seems to have been influential. A week before, Netanyahu had delivered an inflammatory speech in the White House citing documents — allegedly found in a Tehran warehouse, but pertaining to the period before 2003 — purporting to show Iran was lying about its claim that its nuclear intentions were peaceful. It took Sir Simon Gass, former British ambassador to Iran and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) 2019-2023, speaking on the BBC Today programme of 14 June, to point out Trump’s role in creating the conditions for war.
Until the USA reneged on the JCPOA agreement in 2018, enraging and, strengthening the hardliners in Tehran, demoralizing the Iranian public, and humiliating President Hourani, Iran’s preparations for making a nuclear weapon had been in abeyance. From the perspective of ordinary Iranians, you do not necessarily think possession of a nuclear deterrent is perversely irrational. Some, of course, are opposed to it. A number of states with a military presence near or around Iran’s borders have nuclear weapons: Russia, the USA and UK, Pakistan and Israel. Iran/Persia has in the past suffered greatly from foreign interventions and invasion. The JCPOA took a lot of selling to Shi’a hardliners. To allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thorough monitoring access to Iran’s nuclear facilities was a big ask. Despite the regime, in my experience, Iranian national pride is widely shared inside the country. You do not have to be a fanatical Revolutionary Guard commander to believe in national sovereignty and maintaining national security. These are basic principles in and derived from the UN Charter.
Not surprisingly, with American sanctions restored and in response to the assassination on 20 November 2020 of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the “father” of Iran’s nuclear programme, the Iranian Parliament in reaction passed legislation enabling installation of new centrifuges for uranium enrichment to 20 per cent. After the Israeli attack on the Natanz nuclear facility in 2021, the hardline President Ebrahim Raisi (2021-2024) declared that Iran would increase uranium enrichment to 60 per cent. To justify its present war, Israel claims Iran is now able to assemble several atomic bombs and “weaponise” them. That is questionable. Remember Sadam’s “weapons of mass destruction”? Iran pulled out of talks with the USA in Muscat on 15 June in Oman. Not surprisingly, Trump does not refer back to his historically damaging 2018 decision. Indeed, with his customary inconsistency, he has described the current Israeli attacks on Iran as “excellent”.
Meanwhile Netanyahu is moving on from talk of Iran’s existential threat to Israel to regime change in Iran. However despicable the human rights record of Iran’s rulers, the velayat-al-faqih (guardianship of the – Shi’a – jurist) where the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, supported by the Revolutionary Guards is a de facto dictator despite parliamentary trappings, interventions sponsoring regime change in Iraq and Libya are a dire warning against pursuing the same goal in Iran.
The current Iran war raises fundamental questions about Trump and the emerging world: the use of naked power, of impunity and disinformation, the distortion of the past. In Stalin’s famously cynical words: “It is always difficult to predict the past.” In Orwell’s words: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” A control largely managed through social media, what computer scientist calls Kate Starbird “participatory disinformation” (Sage Journals 2023). We now recognise this rewriting of history as a tool of populist authoritarianism. In Trump this manifests itself in his belief in an imaginary past and insistence on history as an exercise in narrating America’s greatness.
Are we watching the calculated political manipulation of history? Cognitive decline? Wishful thinking? Probably an element of all of these. While driving with young children on the back seat I asked: “Did you see the stoat crossing the road?” A wonderful, fast, elongated, wiggling form, tail flowing out behind. Back came the answer: “Yes, and it had a rabbit in its mouth.” It didn’t. This kind of thing is common in 3-4 year-old children who have yet to distinguish in their minds between what is true and what they would like to be true.
And this is reminiscent of Trump’s assertion that the US 2020 elections were rigged and that the crowds at his first inauguration were bigger than those at Obama’s, while pictures clearly showed they weren’t. The Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful country in the world appears to seek instant satisfaction, revert to childish fancies, needing real soldiers and tanks on parade instead of childhood toy ones, storybook versions of American history.
In a world of information dominated by the news-cycle, everything is “Now Now”. On his Truth Social platform, sometimes touching on “what might come next”, Trump inhabits this world, frequently sets its agenda. Asking how we arrived at any situation, and perhaps how we might change it, often seems an afterthought, even on radio, TV and print media. For he who controls the present controls the past — even in democracies.
We need a developed historical consciousness to deal effectively with the present. We also need creative imagination, integrity and a concern for the truth to create a safe and better future. Trump lacks all these attributes. He is a clear and present danger both nationally and internationally. At this critical moment in history, have we begun to take on board the magnitude of this misfortune?
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