Was the Iran Nuclear Deal an Honest Diplomatic Effort or a Diplomatic Ploy?
Tonight’s show explores when is foreign policy diplomacy not diplomacy and further explores if diplomacy can instead be a disingenuous attempt pointed more at seeking to deceive the US public into believing we are making a good faith diplomatic effort when in fact we are not but instead are seeking to appear diplomatic while deceitfully setting up a diplomatic trap in which agreement compliance by the country (Iran) is not possible?
The US sanctions close to 1/3 of the world’s population. Before we can get public support to sanction, before we can engage in the affairs of another nation by promoting civil strife or outright military support or a miltary attack, we must convince the average US citizen that our actions are just, that the country whose sovereignty we are compromising, has violated the “rules based international order.”
Tonight we will visit US sanctions against Iran over the last few decades or so and we will let you judge if our foreign policy motives have been driven by democratic interests or by something else. Joining us as our guest is Dr Muhammad Sahimi, nuclear engineering expert, professor inChemical Engineering at USC and US-Iranian relations expert, who is an Iranian born US citizen of the past 40 years and shares with us the historical context of US Iranian relations since the 1953 coup.
Dr Sahimi analysis includes and overview of the JCPOA, signed by the United States and Iran along with other participating nations (the UK, EU, Germany, Russia, China, and France) in 2015 and formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement offered Tehran billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for agreeing to curb its nuclear program.