The new realities post-Iran deal

Regardless of opinions about whether a deal is good or bad, the lift in sanctions that would accompany any deal opens up Iranian oil to the marketplace and changes the economic dynamics in the world as well as the region.

The critics are correct that the agreement to limit Teheran’s nuclear programme is, from a US point of view, a deeply disappointing outcome.

In June, China’s imports of Iranian oil rose 26 per cent while there was a concomitant decline in its imports of Saudi oil.

And perhaps the most egregious aspect of this all, deeply buried in Annex III, Article 10 of the JCPOA, is a clause saying that world powers and Iran will foster “cooperation through training and workshops to strengthen Iran’s ability to protect against, and respond to, nuclear security threats, including sabotage, as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems”. Israel will find it easier to come to terms with the agreement because, in the ultimate analysis, it ensures Israel’s nuclear supremacy in the region for a quarter century.

This is the best deal available, and the only alternative to taking it, with all its faults, is to walk away from any deal at all.

New Delhi has envisioned this project for years, but sanctions on Iran had put plans on hold.

Americans must now be asking themselves why that goal is being abandoned so they now face so stark a choice between two such bad alternatives. Moreover, Israel has been quick to criticise the US president for engaging with Iran, possibly out of fear that the US might decide to align itself more closely with Iran, a contingency that is anathema to the Israelis and Saudis alike.

But where were the Chinese initiatives to prevent such a situation from happening?

The objectives it set itself a decade ago were simply unrealistic. More sanctions do not cost American lives.

But there has never been a viable military option to do more than disrupt and delay Iran’s path to the bomb. Who knows the magnitude of misery this will cause?

During these final months of negotiations, the US Congress voted itself 60 days to consider and approve or reject US participation in this deal.

On the contrary, it is something of a negotiating triumph.

Matt Smith, the Commodity Research Director at Clipper Data, suggests that Iran has as much as forty million barrels of oil in storage that could be released in the short term, but that it will take time to build up capacity.

This month, a long awaited agreement between Iranian officials and Western diplomats was made.

By the morning of July 14, we had arrived back in the States and had awakened to the news out of Vienna, triumphantly relayed by Secretary of State John Kerry, that the nuclear negotiations with Iran had finally concluded.

The country whose strategic circumstances are least affected is the one making the most noise.

This capitulation occurred precisely at a time when the West and the broader Middle East are facing off against the Islamic State – a terrorist force which, when stripped of its social media allure, is ultimately a Sunni-branded spin-off of the extremist Shi’a Islamism that has ruled in Iran since 1979. If they did all that to us, Joe wouldn’t have said “I am Canadian” he would have said “Death to America”. Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi described it as “a catalyst for regional stability”.

“My problem with the administration is Iran as the regional hegemon”.

“Lloyd’s have supported (Iranian businesses) in the past – some of them will be itching to get back in”, Mistry said.