TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) – On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump declared that his country is pulling out of the Iran deal, saying Washington will not only reinstate the anti-Iran sanctions lifted as part of the deal, but will also “be instituting the highest level of economic” sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
Under the deal, reached under Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, Iran undertook to put limits on its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of nuclear-related sanctions imposed against Tehran.
While talking to CNN on Wednesday, former US President Jimmy Carter said that this “may be the worst mistake Trump has made so far.”
“When a president signs an agreement, it should be binding on all his successors, unless the situation changes dramatically and it hasn’t changed,” he added.
He also said that abandoning the nuclear agreement with Iran, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), could complicate the ongoing negotiations with North Korea.
‘Dems and GOP in lockstep in demonizing Iran’
“It’s interesting to hear Jimmy Carter come out and comment on Trump’s latest foreign policy blunder,” said Welch, a political commentator in Boston, Massachusetts, told Press TV on Thursday.
“There’s something about ex presidents acting out some version of All Dogs Go to Heaven—once they are able to get beyond the office they can start making sense and start criticizing the dumpster fire, that is US imperial hegemony,” he stated.
“But you have to remember that it was Carter who issued the famous line of saying ‘the Shah was an island of stability in the Middle East,’ just a few months before the Islamic revolution. Carter likes to give the impression of being on the other side when in actual fact Democrats and Republicans have always been in lockstep in demonizing Iran, not only specifically Iran but on all aspects of foreign policy, all throughout the Cold War, all throughout the history of US foreign policy,” he added.
“And so to now attack Trump as if there’s something unique is bit disingenuous. Of course it is a horrible thing. It’s stupid. It is unbelievably stupid. But Democrats have been, Hillary Clinton has been against the Iran deal. The entire US Congress is like one enormous hawk-fest. So there’s very little room for peace to break out anywhere in the world if the US has anything to say about it,” the analyst continued.
‘US is violating Iran nuclear agreement’
“But the idea of a broken treaty…first of all it’s not pulling out or ending an agreement, it’s simply a violation. The US is violating an agreement. Guess what! Ask the indigenous population. The US road to hell is littered with broken treaties,” Welch said.
“This is a constant theme in US political history and in the foreign policy of the empire.
There is no one who deserves respect from the United States according to US exceptionalism. No one gets sovereignty. No one gets to do what they want. And this is just the latest incidence of that,” he stated.
“The interesting thing from my perspective is that it’s stupid in terms of its own goals.
It is forcing Iran into closer relations with Russia, and China which is alternatively what is driving the demise of the US empire,” the commentator noted.
‘The empire is in huge crisis right now’
“And it’s making it clear to the world that the US cannot be trusted. The empire is in huge crisis right now. Capitalism itself, I would suggest, is in late stage crisis. And the empire’s henchmen are rifling through a whole series of bad options. And this is probably the worst option among them,” he added.
“How do you come down from owning the world to be just being another player? There are two ways to do it. You can take the world down with you, crash and burn, send your attack dog Israel to go attack Syria, make up a flimsy pretext that Iran fired first, you know all that stuff. Or you can sit on the table and rearrange the pieces as equals.
The US refuses to do that and won’t do that. Under Trump, or under any other administration, it is just not going to happen,” he said.
“So what we are seeing is the rest of the world is trying to arrange a soft landing, be it in Korea or in Syria, or with trade war with China – something to make the US kind of take notice. But as you can see the whole world is kind of going on with its own business in the mean time,” he pointed out.
“Europe is kind of saying this is crazy. We have to look out for ourselves now. And Trump has accelerated all of these tendencies. But the tendencies have been there for decades. A lot of people feel despite the chaos that might ensue in the short run, in the long run will breathe a sigh of relief that the US empire is being defanged,” the writer concluded.
Source: Presstv