Iran Says Oman ‘Epicenter’ Of Regional Talks
The Iranian foreign minister’s Oman visit reflects continuing regional diplomacy over the Iran nuclear agreement, trade, Yemen, and Arab relations with Israel.
The Iranian foreign minister’s Oman visit reflects continuing regional diplomacy over the Iran nuclear agreement, trade, Yemen, and Arab relations with Israel.
Hossein Amir-Abdollahian met Wednesday in Muscat with the Omani Sultan Haitham bin Tariq, calling Oman the “epicenter” of regional talks. With Yemen, Afghanistan, and Ukraine all on the agenda, the minister said these issues had to be addressed “at a faster pace.”
There is speculation, encouraged by phone calls between Amir-Abdollahian and his Omani counterpart December 22, that Muscat has a role in restoring the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Muscat’s mediation goes back to facilitating secret Iran-United States contacts before the 2015 deal. European Union spokesman Peter Stano December 26 explained Amir-Abdollahian’s meeting in Jordan December 20 with EU foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell’s as “moving talks about JCPOA revival forward.”
Omani mediators have also been in Sanaa trying to bridge gaps between the government of Rashid al-Alimi and the main opposition Ansar Allah, known as the Houthis, over extending the fragile eight-month ceasefire. Iran has given some support to Ansar Allah, while Saudi Arabia began in 2015 direct military involvement, mainly with its air force.
Reports said the Omanis left December 25 without resolving differences as to whether the government or Ansar Allah should pay fighters and state employees in the third of Yemen, including 80 percent of the population, under Ansar Allah’s control. At least 370,000 people have died in the eight-year conflict, which began with protests against then president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The United Nations says a child is dying every ten minutes from preventable causes.
Keen to see the JCPOA restored, Oman has distanced itself from any push towards ‘normalization’ with Israel through extending the 2020 US-brokered ‘Abrahamic accords,’ which were widely portrayed in the US as a move against Iran. After the critical reaction of Arab football fans to Israeli journalists in December’s World Cup, and with a new Israeli government including far-right parties committed to speeding up Jewish settlements in occupied land, Muscat is mulling legislation similar to laws passed in Iraq and Kuwait sanctioning trade with Israel.
“Anything related to Israel-Saudi relations outside of security matters…has largely left the Saudi media,” the Jerusalem Post noted Wednesday. “Oman never had any serious intention of joining [the Abrahamic accords].”
Expanding trade, ‘friends with all’
Iranian regional diplomacy is pushing both the need for dialogue and expanding trade. Both were discussed at the ‘Baghdad 2’ conference December 20-21, where an Iranian delegation led by Amir-Abdollahian met with leading officials and politicians from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Egypt, France, Iraq, Jordan, and the EU.
Critical reaction in Tehran was fairly muted to a joint statement issued after the December 9 Arab-China summit where Riyadh and Beijing agreed “joint cooperation to ensure the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.” Business Insider noted December 20 that many could see that “Beijing would rather balance its relationship with regional competitors,” pursuing “a friends-with-all approach” that both expands $87-billion bilateral trade with the Saudis and also pursues, despite US sanctions, the 2021 25-year cooperation agreement with Iran envisaging potentially $400-billion Chinese investment in exchange for stable, discounted oil supplies.
Oman faces greater difficulties in two gas projects with Iran, one to supply 10 billion cubic meters/year of Iranian gas over 15 years, and one as a conduit for a 1400km, $7-billion pipeline from Iran to India for 11.3bm3/year, for which New Delhi signed a memorandum-of-understanding with Russia’s Gazprom in 2019.
However, neither Iran nor Oman has the technology to lay deep-sea pipelines and the long-delayed project needs Western technology, which in turn needs the lifting of US sanctions.
The British foreign office tweeted Tuesday a clip of Cleverly listing British sanctions against Iran where he mentions judges, morality police, individuals and companies allegedly involved in supply military drones to Moscow, as well as “the IRGC in its entirety.”
Cleverly December 13 said in parliament, according to the official record: “We already sanction the IRGC in its entirety.” But questioned immediately before this on the government’s intentions by John Spellar, a parliament member, Cleverly suggested that any IRGC designation remained in its future plans: “The UK is committed to holding Iran to account, including with more than 300 sanctions—including the sanctioning of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in its entirety.”
The UK announced December 9 the sanctioning of ten Iranian officials connected to Iran’s judicial and prison systems. “There is growing frustration that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) the branch of the Iranian army accused of peddling terror abroad, has escaped sanctions that would see it proscribed,” claimed the right-wing Daily Telegraph newspaper the following day. Neither was the IRGC mentioned when the UK December 13 sanctioned Iranians purportedly involved in transferring drones to Russia.
The United States government in 2019 included the IRGC in its list of ‘foreign terrorist organizations,’ a move announced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as the US “continuing to build its maximum pressure campaign against the Iranian regime.” The Trump administration had the previous year launched ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions as it withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).
This remains the only example of Washington including part of a sovereign state’s armed forces as a ‘foreign terrorist organization,’ a category otherwise comprised of non-state groups. The US 2019 press release on the listing referred to the IRGC “in its entirety,” the same phrase used by Cleverly.
Critics of JCPOA have long argued for designating the IRGC, with Canada following the US in October. During talks aimed at restoring the 2015 agreement, which have foundered since late summer leaving Iran’s nuclear program expanding and ‘maximum pressure’ in place, there have been intermittent reports of Iran seeking to have the designation lifted.
‘Moving talks forward’
Peter Stano, the European Union foreign affairs spokesman, Monday defended the “diplomacy” and “engagement” seen in EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell meeting with Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Jordan December 20. Given the EU role coordinating multilateral nuclear talks in Vienna April 2021-March 2022 and subsequent bilateral Iran-US meetings, Stano said the meeting had been part of moving “talks about the revival of the JCPOA forward.”
In Tehran, Javad Karimi-Qudousi, a conservative member of the parliament’s national security commission, told the reformist newspaper Etemad that progress had been made on two issues stymying the talks – an enquiry by the International Atomic Energy Agency into Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear work and the status of foreign investment should the US again leave the agreement.
There has been ongoing speculation in Israel that failure to renew the JCPOA will lead to an Israeli attack. With Benjamin Netanyahu, a virulent JCPOA opponent due to form a new government including the Religious Zionism Party, Lieutenant-General Aviv Kohavi, the Israeli chief of staff, said Tuesday the “level of preparedness for an operation in Iran has dramatically improved.”
While he would “say no more than that,” Kohavi promised the armed forces would be “ready for the day when an order is given to act against the [Iranian] nuclear program.” Kohavi, who was Israeli Operations Director during the December 2008-January 2009 Gaza conflict when 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died, claimed Israel carried out at least one operation “against Iran” weekly somewhere across the Middle East.
Multiple pundits and politicians are questioning a one-sided foreign policy in favor of China and Russia and calling for balance and a resumption of the suspended nuclear talks with the West. They have also unleashed tough criticism against foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, saying that he is not capable of steering the country’s foreign relations.
The attacks began after he attended a regional summit in Jordan, where he met the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, expressing Tehran’s readiness to resume nuclear talks. No tangible results emerged from the trip.
Expediency Council member Mohammad Sadr, has harshly criticized Iran's dependency on Russia and China in an interview with the centrist Entekhab News, charging that the two countries are not Iran's strategic allies, but they solely follow their own interests. He further criticized the foreign minister and the President Ebrahim Raisi for failing to give a proper response to China putting its signature on a statement with the Gulf Cooperation Council states that questioned Iran's ownership of three Persian Gulf islands.
In the reality of the Islamic Republic, everyone knows that these decisions are made in the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, not at the foreign ministry or by the president.
Earlier last week, others including academic and foreign relations expert Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh also attacked Iran's ideological foreign policy and the performance of the Foreign Ministry, while former diplomat Ahmad Azizi called on Khamenei's office to take over the responsibilities of the Foreign Ministry.
Sadr also criticized Iran's policy regarding relations with Saudi Arabia, adding that Riyadh is waiting for US Republicans to win the presidency, before revealing its real intentions toward Iran. Sadr called for a realistic foreign policy that would prioritize the country's national interests. Iran, he said, should maintain relations with all countries except Israel, and seek to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, or JCPOA.
An expert on international relations Mehdi Motaharnia told Fararu website in Tehran that if Iran continues its current foreign policy of aligning with China and Russia and considering itself an enemy of the United States and Europe, it will have no third option soon vis-à-vis the EU-US-Israeli alliance and the new alliance between Arab countries and Israel. He warned that China and Russia have also let Tehran down.
Fararu observed that the biggest political upheaval of the country in the past 43 years has paralyzed the government and asked Motaharnia if there was a third way out for Iran.
Motaharnia responded that Iran's tilt towards the Russia and China has left nothing of its initial non-alignment policy. As a result, whatever is against the West finds legitimacy. This inevitably brings about an identity crisis for the political system.
He added that Tehran not only needs to redefine its relations with the West, but it also needs to reform its internal governance. Motaharnia said that this will determine international community's approach to Iran in coming months.
Meanwhile, as some of Iran's hardliners such as the editor of Kayhan newspaper have harshly attacked Amir Abdollahian's attempts to resume talks with the West, former diplomat Fereidouin Majles has said in an interview with moderate Roiuyda24 website that the approach of some of Raisi's supporters will lead to Iran's further isolation. Majlesi said ironically that while everybody wants to determine the fate of the JCPOA in his own way, let us shut down the Foreign Ministry and let the Tehran Municipality to regulate Iran's relations with the rest of the world. Majlesi charged that the Foreign Ministry's critics have no concern about Iran's interests.