JCPOA: A Diversionary Tactic to Evade Regime Change
Amir Taheri – Independent in Persian, Every day that passes, a page from the calendar is torn away, bringing us closer to what Mohammad Javad Zarif, the strategic vice president of the Islamic Republic, refers to as “the day of reckoning.” He warns that on that day of reckoning, the Khomeini-led regime and the entirety of Iran will face an existential threat. To prevent this threat, the Islamic Republic must set aside its propagandistic stances and quickly open the door to negotiations with the “Great Satan.”
This “day of reckoning” is October 25, 2025, the day when the relevance of the JCPOA, implicitly presented in UN Security Council Resolution 2231, comes to an end. At that point, what is known as the “snapback” mechanism will automatically activate, making all the sanctions imposed by the Security Council against the Islamic Republic permanent. Zarif and his team also warn that this “day of reckoning” might subject Iran to Chapter VII of the UN Charter, giving the green light for military action against the Islamic Republic.
What the “strategic deputy” and his “New York kids” group don’t say is that they themselves are responsible for dragging the country into this predicament. With the start of the reform era under Mohammad Khatami, this group concluded that without the support of America and its Western allies, they would not be able to maintain the power they had coincidentally gained for a long time. Without Western support, it would have been impossible for them to sideline their anti-Western, pro-Russia and China rivals, let alone marginalize broader opponents in the struggle for power within Iran.
Both clerics, Khatami and Rouhani, during their visits to the West, presented this misjudgment as the true picture of Iran’s realities. Their aim was to depict the existing system in Iran as an inevitable, albeit bitter, reality and claim that only their faction could gradually reduce this bitterness, hoping for a day when we would reach sweetness.
This tactic necessitated avoiding any discussion, let alone negotiation, about the nature of the regime. This meant finding a diversionary issue. If one cannot talk about the regime’s nature or its practical record, then what could be negotiated?
The answer that the two clerics probably inspired by Jack Straw, Britain’s Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair, found was Iran’s nuclear program. This program had occasionally been in the spotlight since years ago but had never been presented as a life-or-death issue between Iran and the world.
Iran’s nuclear program began in 1959 and by 1976 had reached its stride. That year, Iran had prepared three fundamental elements for such a program: a policy with peaceful objectives, a highly skilled human force in technical and scientific knowledge, and the framework for an industrial infrastructure. At the same time, Iran, as one of the first 11 countries to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), had the right to benefit from the latest nuclear technology methods and means and, in return, to fulfill all its commitments to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
With Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini coming to power, Iran’s nuclear program was halted for nearly a decade. The active return of this program, like many other actions of a confused and whimsical regime, was not within a clear overarching policy framework. However, one can say that what is called Iran’s nuclear program never went beyond the limits set by the NPT. Four directors-general of the IAEA, from Swedish to Japanese, Egyptian, and Argentine, never wanted or could frame numerous suspicions about Tehran’s intentions into specific charges to present to the Security Council. Over the past 20 years, Iran’s nuclear program has been under the widest inspections by the IAEA, and if we take the experience of other countries like West Germany, South Africa, or Argentina as a benchmark, Iran should have received clearance from the IAEA years ago.
So why didn’t it? In my view, because both the leaders of the Islamic Republic and the so-called great powers have benefited from this diversionary issue. The leaders of the Islamic Republic, as mentioned, find the nuclear issue useful to prevent other issues from being raised. Western powers, including the United States, know that if other issues are raised, they would have no choice but to accept regime change in Iran as the best solution for Middle Eastern problems—a solution each of them fears in some form.
However, it’s easy to see that the world’s problem with the Islamic Republic isn’t the nuclear issue, yet they’ve reduced it to uranium enrichment. Since uranium enrichment is not only not illegal but also a right of all UN member countries, they’ve further reduced it to the degree of enrichment! In the next step, the issue of enrichment degree has faded, and the focus has been on the stockpile of enriched uranium. Meanwhile, the propaganda that the Islamic Republic has built or is on the verge of building a bomb has been the subject of thousands of reports, articles, and books, even though building a nuclear bomb is not illegal, provided a country leaves the NPT.
Most interestingly, numerous reports from the security services of major powers emphasize that the Islamic Republic has not yet decided on the necessity of building nuclear weapons. The latest report from the U.S. intelligence community, released under the title “National Intelligence Estimate” (NIE), for the tenth time stresses that Iran is trying to reach the threshold for producing nuclear weapons but has not yet done so and has not secured any guarantees in this regard.
The world’s problem with the Islamic Republic is not the nuclear issue. Currently, nine countries, including four members of the illegal 1+5 group, possess nuclear weapons. Enriching uranium is also not an issue, as 18 countries currently do this without sounding any alarm bells. Reaching the “threshold” is not inherently problematic either. Currently, eight countries are at the threshold without building nuclear weapons.
Whenever the IAEA has an issue with a member country, it is resolved within a specific timeframe under Security Council oversight. But for Iran, no such timeframe has been proposed. Consequently, what is called the “Iranian nuclear threat” can be an excuse indefinitely or at least until the end of the whimsical regime to quarantine Iran.
Has the Islamic Republic, without having nuclear weapons, been a law-abiding system and a disciplined member of the global community? This system, without nuclear weapons, has the most lethal war in the Middle East in four centuries in its record. It has been involved in hundreds of terrorist operations in over 30 countries. Hostage-taking, kidnapping, arms and money smuggling, training and arming various kinds of terrorists in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe also make up long chapters in its history.
Ali Khamenei, the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, on the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, says, “If it weren’t for our revolution, there would be no Hamas today and no October 7 attack.” Professor Sadegh Zibakalam, an activist of the reformist faction, confirms that if he could go back to 1979, he would do the same things he did then, including smuggling weapons for guerrilla operations.
Some observers opposing the whimsical regime say that the JCPOA could be beneficial because it places the entire Islamic Republic under the guardianship of the 1+5 group—in reality, the United States—through control of foreign exchange earnings, foreign trade, and access to global capital markets. This guardianship allows the Islamic Republic to continue its existence while the “reformist” faction sidelines its radical opponents. At the same time, major powers benefit because a neutered Islamic Republic agrees not to cross certain red lines.
Based on these general considerations, Iran has no choice but to accept a neo-colonial solution that allows the whimsical regime to continue its nefarious existence by suppressing the Iranian people and fattening its supportive mafias.
The “New York kids” portray opponents of JCPOA revival as opponents of any negotiation with the U.S. and other major powers, but this is nothing but a lie. Iran’s return to the international family is impossible without normalizing relations with all countries. This normalization requires negotiations—negotiations on tangible issues within a specific timeframe and based on an international legal framework, while the JCPOA introduces a kind of legal apartheid. Germany, South Africa, and Argentina, which had disagreements with the IAEA over enrichment, managed to resolve the issue within the agency’s legal framework and under Security Council supervision within a defined period.
This is while Iran’s nuclear issue has reached its 25th year. If the Islamic Republic were supposed to build nuclear weapons, couldn’t it have done so in a quarter-century? Even if it had, what would be the result other than weakening its own security? Nuclear powers cannot attack a non-nuclear state with nuclear weapons. Thus, non-nuclear Iran is at least insured in this regard. But as soon as Iran has nuclear weapons, other nuclear powers would have their hands free to attack with the same weapons. Which nuclear power might do such a thing? Answer: Powers whose nuclear arsenals are dozens or perhaps hundreds of times larger than what the Islamic Republic might build.
Those who do not want to face the reality of the Islamic Republic issue—i.e., the necessity of regime change—are now trying to revive the “corpse” of the JCPOA before October 25 next year. They are looking for two solutions: a deal with the new U.S. government where Tehran would declare it would halt its entire nuclear program for a year in exchange for extending the deadline of Resolution 2231 for a year. This so-called “retreat” would allow the new U.S. government to declare a diplomatic victory, and afterward, based on the whimsical regime’s policy of “from one pillar to another, God is merciful.”
It is not surprising that the leaders of the Islamic Republic, including the “great supreme leader,” say they are ready to negotiate but only about the JCPOA.
February 8, 2025 | 3:20 pm
