The latest polls in Democratic Party has shown that Biden is likely to become the party’s primary candidate to run for 2020 presidential elections against Donald Trump.
Many US analysts have predicted that Biden will beat his fellow Democrat candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and will enter the final 2020 presidential race.
Meanwhile, some western media discuss whether Biden will go back on US nuclear agreement with Iran, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
According to AL Monitor, Ben Fishman, a former adviser to Obama on Middle East policy says “As he [Biden] puts together his campaign staff, Biden is expected to draw from a pool of experts that participated in years of negotiations with Iran. That should leave him well-positioned to defend specifics of the deal while also addressing lingering bipartisan concerns about Iran’s role in the region.
“His first-hand knowledge of the details will allow him to articulate a policy not just on the nuclear elements of Iran, but the regional destabilization elements that Iran is still pursuing actively — including in Iraq.”
Biden’s strategy, then, will be demanding more concessions from Iran for superficially reentering the nuclear deal. This idea was also proposed before by Ilan Goldenberg, the senior advisor to John Kerry, former US Secretary of State.
It is clear what Democrats mean by “demanding more concessions”; they seek to constrain Iran’s missile program and power in the region, in exchange for reviving the “dead” and “distorted” JCPOA with putting even more restrictions on Iran in comparison to when Barack Obama was in office.
This game devised by Joe Biden and John Kerry for Iran will become even more complicated when they start to request other international players to enter the game.
If Biden wins the 2020 presidential election, he will definitely try to drag the European troika into this game of “redefining the JCPOA based on US benefits”, the same as what Trump did in 2017 before he finally thwarted the deal.
However, the Democrats’ game is different from that of Trump’s, as Democrats are trying to forge general consensus to “restrain powerful Iran”.
It is also worth noting that Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal only became possible due to the set of legal and political conditions that democrats installed in the first place! In fact, before leaving the nuclear deal altogether, Trump used these conditions as “triggers” which allowed him to justify himself in abandoning the deal.
Moreover, it was Democrats who set a precedent so as the US president should “waive the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions” every 120 days. They were Democrats who put the fate of the Iran nuclear deal in the hands of every incumbent president. So, it can be concluded that, apart from the Trump administration, Democrats should also be widely blamed for the shutdown of Iran nuclear deal.
MNA/TT