Senior Analyst: West Empty-Handed to Further Pressure Iran

Political Analyst Seyed Mohammad Marandi said that the US postures to exert more pressure on Iran are not effective as they have no more leverages in the region to use as a winning card in talks.

“The most important reason for the emptiness of the West’s threat is their continued maximum pressure policy, specially by the US, and continuation of this policy also shows that maximum pressure against the Islamic Republic of Iran has failed,” Marandi said in an interview with the Persian-language Jam-e Jam newspaper.

He added that the performance of the current administration in the US is the same as that of the previous government of Trump as they speak of nothing but sanctions, noting that declaration of new threats by the US is also a kind of theatrical move because the cases announced as new sanctions are the same as the previous ones aimed at pressuring the Iranian people.

“So the West’s hands are not full to pressure Iran, because power in the region is shifting. The Americans’ friends were defeated in the region, and the Israelis are not in a good position after the Gaza war, and the Saudis have been trapped in the Yemeni quagmire,” Marandi said.

“The Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria were not in a good position and we saw that their forces have practically fled Afghanistan. On the other hand, the US has faced Russia and China at the global level. In the current situation, China, as the Americans have admitted, has shown that it is ahead of the US in the military and technology fields,” he underlined.

Envoys from Iran and the G4+1 (Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia) are expected to hold the seventh round of discussions on removal of the US sanctions against Iran in Vienna on November 29. The negotiations were paused in June, when Iran held its presidential election. Since then, the new Iranian administration has been reviewing the details of the six rounds of discussions held under the previous administration.

The nuclear deal was unilaterally abandoned by the US in 2018 despite Iran’s full compliance with its nuclear undertakings, as repeatedly certified by the UN nuclear agency. The US then unleashed a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, which practically deprived the country of all of the deal’s economic benefits.

Iran fully honored its nuclear obligations for an entire year, after which it decided to ramp up its nuclear work as a legal “remedial measure” against the US violation of the deal and the abject failure on the part of the other signatories, the E3 in particular, to safeguard its benefits.

The US administration of Joe Biden has said it is willing to compensate for former President Donald Trump’s mistake and rejoin the deal, but it has shown an overriding propensity for maintaining some of the sanctions as a tool of pressure. Tehran insists that all sanctions should first be removed in a verifiable manner before it reverses its remedial measures.