During the American presidential campaign, Joe Biden made a number of foreign policy promises. For me, a non-American who didn’t matter in the scheme of American politics, the three promises that stood out and that made me supportive of a Biden win, and indeed hopeful and elated when he did win, were: Biden’s promise to reverse Trump’s decision and re-enter the Iran nuclear deal; the promise to revive contacts with Cuba and end the embargo Trump had re-imposed; and, lastly, to re-enter the Paris Climate Accord.
Biden has made good on the last one, immediately signing an executive order giving effect to his promise. However, for me the first two were more important in that they have been the most egregious of American foreign policies, consigning the peoples of both Iran and Cuba to the most difficult conditions and to pose existential threats to both countries. Biden’s reluctance to honour his promises in this respect are puzzling and very disappointing. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria’s take on this is that Biden is playing to a domestic audience, in particular Republicans. Whatever his reasons, his snail pace or seeming hypocrisy are unacceptable.
To his enduring credit, former American president Barack Obama had bucked decades of American foreign policy by signing the Iran nuclear deal and ending the Cuban isolation.
When Trump came to power, he immediately reversed course on both policies. Before and during his campaign, Biden vehemently criticised Trump for these two decisions, among others, vowing to reverse them if and when he won. He hasn’t done that. Surprisingly, Biden’s new foreign and national security teams are essentially the same people who negotiated both policies under Obama. Particularly with respect to the Iran nuclear deal, they made a point of arguing that Trump’s so-called maximum pressure campaign of sanctions was not going to succeed because the deal they had negotiated was as good as it could get. Now that they are in power, however, they have hypocritically maintained the sanctions and are seeking to wring new concessions from Iran as a pre-condition to re-entering the deal. This is unacceptable and is a case of wanting to have their cake and eating it.
The world should call out Biden on his hypocrisy, and the other members of the Iran nuclear deal should support Iran’s position that the US is the one at fault for having pulled out and the starting point is them returning, and not the other way round as they are arguing. Clearly, at this point the only difference between Biden and Trump is that there is no imminent threat of war or missile strikes against Iran, but the suffering experienced by ordinary Iranians hasn’t changed. It would seem that, for the world, there may be no point in trusting American administrations, whether Democrat or Republican.
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