Policy analyst Michael Johns says the Iran nuclear deal is “one of the worst deals” in world history and believes there would be no security benefit for the United States nor any improvement in human rights conditions for the Iranian people if the Biden administration rejoins the deal.
“The Iran Deal, as President Trump correctly describes, is one of the worst deals ever concocted in the history of global foreign affairs,” said Johns on The Foreign Desk with Lisa Daftari podcast.
The Iran deal fails to hold Iran accountable because of specified provisions that allow for advanced notice prior to U.N. inspections as well as the preclusion of Iran’s military sites from inspection, locations that “logically, nuclear weapons development would occur.”
Johns emphasized how the deal freed up billions of dollars for the Iranian regime’s use and questioned how those engaged in the deal could believe that Iran would use this financial windfall to benefit its people, considering the regime’s long history of human rights abuses.
“How is it possible that you would think that that regime is ever going to take any of the benefits that it derives from trade relations with Western democracies and utilize it for the benefit of their people? Of course they’re not going to do that, and they never have,” said Johns.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is run by “a totalitarian regime that will do just about anything to its own people,” and if the U.S. decides to rejoin the deal, all this would do is give “a green light to big companies to trade with Iran,” failing to give the U.S. any additional protection and providing funding to the world’s leading terrorist sponsor.
Iran’s allies consist of “a hybrid of the worst tyrannies in the world,” and it is not difficult to understand that there is a direct “correlation between affording a regime with such malevolent intent with resources like that with the fact that they’re going to go do bad things with it,” says Johns.
Johns also expressed concern about Biden’s recent decision to repeal Trump’s restrictions on travel from 13 countries, specifying that Trump’s travel limitations were not targeting Muslims and also did not constitute a full-scale ban but rather “[addressed] suspensions or [footnoted] kinds of provisions that [were] required” to obtain visas.
“If [Biden] feels that we can bring people in from Mogadishu, Somalia who have literally no record at all to provide when they go to get a visa…where’s the question mark to him? What sort of safety guarantees can he give the American people in the absence of Trump’s thoughtful travel ban that the repeal of that is not dangerous from the standpoint of terrorism or any one of the series of problems that can emerge,” says Johns.
