The seesaw negotiations to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal are stalled again due to Tehran’s intransigence. If the further impasse could be an opportunity to review a wrong strategy from the start, the Russian aggression against Ukraine – a country that renounced its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for “security guarantees” also signed by Moscow with the Budapest Memorandum – substantially changes some assumptions. Indeed, according to some observers, the hawks of the regime of which Ebrahim Raisi is an expression are even more determined to equip the country with nuclear weapons and would leverage, in the debates within the regime, on the unreliability of international guarantees obtained in the past by countries which, like Ukraine, had such armaments.
Since 2015 there have been numerous critics of the original agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Jcpoa), for the numerous flaws in terms of enrichment levels, verification, elimination and prohibition of types of centrifuges, sanctions against past and future violations of the safeguards regime. This in fact made restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program only temporary, thus leaving open the possibility of reaching a break-out capability – the nuclear threshold – in the medium term. The JCPOA also ignored the ballistic missile program sanctioned by UN Security Council resolutions.
The repechage of the JCPOA would keep these and other distortions unchanged, risking to cancel the few positive steps recently taken by Western countries towards the regime. Of these, the most important was the US designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.
The measure, adopted in 2019 by the Trump administration, had long been hoped for. The IRGC played a central role in some of the most heinous terrorist attacks of the 1980s and 1990s, and continues to play an increasingly important role in supporting Iranian proxy groups in the Middle East.
The Iranian National Council of Resistance has long denounced and documented the danger of the Ayatollah regime through its main instrument of terrorist activity, the IRGC militia. An action, this, which should make us reflect seriously on the do ut des of a renunciation of sanctioning the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in order to resurrect a sweetened and worse Jcpoa than even its already unreliable original edition.
Among other things, legitimizing the IRGC would appear as a paradoxical encouragement to the Iranian missile program – nuclear-capable – developed under the control of the IRGC which has accelerated its test and expansion during the entire phase of the negotiations for the nuclear agreement.
During 2019, the Irgc created its own space program that increases the range of missiles to Europe and the United States. Its commanders recently boasted of the progress made by announcing the launch of a second surveillance satellite. A recent report by the National Council of Resistance of Iran highlighted how the inclusion of the IRGC on the American list of terrorist organizations has “hindered many of the foreign financial transactions linked to this organization”, which explains the condition set by the regime to cancel this measure. .
The Iranian regime rests on three pillars: internal repression; the regional domain; the nuclear program as an instrument of pressure on the West. In the absence of even one of these, the regime could sink all the more since it is precisely on the domestic front that the regime is experiencing its most critical hours. Since 2018, the Iranian people have continued to rebel against the disasters caused by the regime to the economy and public health, and against a system of power denounced as an “enemy of the people” in the slogans of the increasingly numerous and heated protests throughout the country. .
The IRGC militias are the protagonists of the bloodiest repression that caused at least 1,500 victims during the November 2019 riots. Despite this, the Iranian people and the “resistance” organizations have not bowed their heads, giving rise to further and increasingly widespread protests.
Never before has a shared Euro-Atlantic strategy proved necessary to ensure severe measures against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and therefore against the Iranian regime itself.
