Here is an computer-generated transcript, which I have manually tried to correct:
Ian Masters: Now, here’s Juan Cole. He’s a professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan, and he has an article at Informed Comment, “U.S.-Iran MOU is a Mere Agreement to keep Talking.”
Welcome to background briefing, Juan Cole.
Juan Cole: Thanks so much, Ian.
Ian Masters: Well, thanks for joining us. President Trump, Vice President Vance, and the Iranian Speaker, Ghalibaf, apparently signed electronically a deal. It wasn’t an MOU. That happens on Friday in Geneva. But do we know exactly what they signed? In other words, what they signed electronically is that going to be the same as what will be signed on Friday, or is there more work to be done?
Juan Cole: Oh, I think it’s probably the same as what will be signed in person on Friday, but all it is, is an agreement, in my view, to keep talking. I don’t think very many specifics have been agreed upon. And, in fact, given the erratic character of both governments, it might be very difficult to nail down details.
Ian Masters: Well, one of the details coming out of the White House is that the frozen funds are going to be released, and this $24 billion upfront, the Iranians want half of that on signing. But the total package is something like a $300 billion fund to rebuild Iran. So the idea that the U.S. is in on the idea of a fund to rebuild a country that you’ve just bombed. It’s pretty extraordinary, isn’t it?
Juan Cole: The U.S. is thinking about this more as a set of carrots than has a done deal. That is to say — and moreover, I think they’re not expecting these funds to come from the United States — so what they’re really doing is facilitating investment in Iran by Iran’s neighbors, which… is ironic because Iran bombed them. Assuming Iran’s good behavior from a U.S. and Gulf point of view, and Vice President J.D. Vance just told CBS news that Iran all along could have had access to $300 billion in investments if it had behaved itself. So, this is a behavior modification attempt.
Ian Masters: Well, I don’t think that’s going to go down well with the Iranian opposition, right? The people that shot down on the streets. It looks as if they’re being sold out, that this is all about consolidating this regime, and in effect, rewarding it.
Juan Cole: Not only is the opposition to the government in Iran, angry about this deal, but so are the hardliners in Iran, who, I think, are having to go along, because it appears that the clerical leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has signed off on this MOU, and so it’s very, very hard for the hard liners to go against him. But they are carping and very angry. And so this is a centrist deal. Ironically enough, the war by Israel, the United States, on Iran killed a lot of pragmatists and centrists like Ali Larijani, and appeared to promote hardliners into high office, especially in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. But the deal was negotiated by pragmatists, and it is a win for that faction inside Iran. Everybody else is upset.
Ian Masters: Well, that includes the Israelis. I mean, the Israeli opposition is upset. All of the ministers, in this right wing cabinet, are screaming, Netanyahu is silent, and a part of the deal is that Israel has to stop attacking Lebanon, and then basically saying, “No, we’re going to occupy Lebanon.” What’s missing from the deal, as far as we know, is there’s nothing to co curb Iran’s missile programs, nor its support for proxies. And the nuclear part of it is a little opaque. So… I… I’m trying to… Where is the good news? That oil is going to flow? Is that the good news?
Juan Cole: That certainly is good news if it happens. Even it is not guaranteed, but if the U.S. blockade is lifted, as President Trump announced it was, and if Iran allows shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — it says it still wants to collect what it calls administrative fees, the word toll is not being used anymore — but if that happens, it’s great good news for a lot of people. Because, as you know, in California, working families have been hard hit by high energy prices. It’s even worse in Asia, in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and so forth. So, that’s a piece of good news, if it happens. You know, the deal doesn’t include things that are not achievable. The United States and Israel lost the war. They just lost. They achieved none of their objectives. They bombed Iran 13,000 times,and came away with nothing to show for it. They didn’t cripple Iran’s ballistic missile launchers, even the ones that they already had. They didn’t cripple its vast, thousands-strong fleet of small Shahed drones that only cost $30,000 apiece – and 400 of them can be produced a week. So the structure of the government is still there. They killed the clerical Leader, but his son has taken over, and, presumably, with a set of grudges about his father and wife and baby daughter being killed. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps is, if anything, more powerful domestically than it had been before. So, this is a loss. You just have to accept that it’s a loss. And so why would you get anything in a negotiation with a country that you didn’t defeat?
Ian Masters: Well, Juan, I’m just astounded at the stupidity of Trunk and the White House, and the extent to which so many people in this country don’t understand what an idiot, amateur, fool this man is. You’ve got this whole propaganda network led by Fox, you know, and I’m sure he’s going to do well out of this deal. I don’t think people are going to hold him to account in the way that you’ve just pointed out what a catastrophe it’s been, and what a loss it is for both Israel and the United States. I’m not sure that that’s necessarily going to be the people who are going to be relieved. The gas prices will go down. He will go back up in the polls. I mean, from day one, why did they not understand, for example, going back to the hostage crisis that brought about the Iranian Revolution, where American diplomats were held for 440 days? Of course, Iran, this revolutionary government, operates on the basis of taking hostages, and that’s what they did in ’79, and that’s what they did in taking over the Straitsof Hormuz.. And these idiots did not even predict that as a possibility. They thought it’d be all over in 100 hours.
Juan Cole: Yeah, they assumed that they could decapitate the government. They seem to have been working from a Venezuela model, where you have a strong man at the top, and you could just remove him. And then everything would change, the people who remained would be docile — as happened in Venezuela so far. But the Iranian government is not — in my view, it’s inaccurate to call it a regime. It’s a very complicated beast. It has, you know, an elected Parliament, and I think the members of Parliament genuinely represent their districts. So, it has an elected president, and at some points in modern Iranian history the elected president has been extremely popular, and has carried out policy. And then it has this clerical core, and then it has both a conventional army and an unconventional paramilitary, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. So, the idea that you could decapitate this kind of setup, for anybody who knew Iran, was always ridiculous. And that was what they were told by the Israel lobbies, by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (so called), which is a proxy for Netanyahu’s thinking on Iran.
And so, you know, Trump is gullible, and he was sold a bill of goods. But as you say, his experience in life — he was born into an extremely wealthy family. He inherited a lot of money. He was in the New York real estate scene. His experience in life is, oh, you make a mistake, you move on. His casinos went bankrupt. He arranged loans, he came back out of it. He did more deals. So that’s the way he deals with life. So, he makes the mistake in Iran, he thinks that, well, you make a different deal. It doesn’t matter to him. And so whether… whether he will be unscathed politically by this misadventure, is still an open question. Ian a third of the refinery capacity in the Gulf was destroyed in this war, or damaged. And it can be repaired, but it will take months, 17 percent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas capability was destroyed, and estimates are three to five years to repair it. Qatar supplies a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas. So, the underlying inflationary effects of this war are going to be with us. The petroleum is not going to be entirely restored to pre-war prices. I think the estimates are that it’ll stay around $100 a barrel the rest of this year. And so, you know, the consumers in the United States are going to suffer.
Moreover, when they cut off the natural gas, liquefied natural gas exports, and some petrochemicals, as we have talked about before, they made fertilizer, extremely expensive, or even hard to get. So, 4 million acres that ordinarily would have been planted with corn this spring in the United States were not planted. And that’s phenomenon we see all around the world. So, food inflation is going to be tremendous. Of course, some of it may not hit till next winter. But I think that it’s an open question as to whether consumers, having been put through this ringer by Trump and who will continue to suffer into the fall, will forgive him in the midterms.
Ian Masters: And in terms of the Gulf, it looks as if these allies are now thinking, What the hell have we done? We bought all this American equipment, we bribed the Trump family with crypto money, and free 747 jets, et cetera. And look what we got out of it. We got a pounding, and the American defense shield didn’t work. Are they going to start diversifying their pipelines? For example, there are pipelines that UAE have taken across to the Indian Ocean, avoiding the Strait of Hormuz, and Oman could do the same thing. As for the LNG that you mentioned, a third of which is from Qatar, could they start putting pipelines from Kuwait across Iraq, through Syria, into the Mediterranean? There is a pipeline from northern Iraq, through to Ceyhan in Turkey, but in other words, are they going to figure ways around not being so vulnerable to the Iranians dominance of a stray of humans?
Juan Cole: I think that you’re right that they will try to diversify their export routes by pipeline, and that can be done. I think what it does is reduce the dangers of having to pay Iranians, essentially, protection money, to go out through the Strait. By the way, the Iranians are claiming enough ocean so that UAE’s Fujaira Port would still be included.
But that kind of thing doesn’t protect them militarily. Were another war to break out — and it’s entirely possible, it should be remembered, that another war will break out, both because these negotiations are unlikely to end satisfactorily to all parties, and because the Israelis, under Prime Minister Netanyow, and likely even his opponents, are determined to have another war with Iran. They believe they haven’t finished the job. They don’t seem to realize that they can’t. that they’ve been defeated, that this is a meal that they cannot digest.
And so [should that happen], those pipelines that you’re talking about are just as vulnerable to being bombed as the ships in the Gulf. In fact, what would be more vulnerable than a gas pipeline? A Shahed drone would take it out. And we saw during the Iraq War, that that pipeline you were talking about in the north of Iraq to Turkey and the Mediterranean, was very frequently out of commission because of sabotage.
I think this is a world historical change. I don’t think the world can ever again depend on energy from the Gulf. It’s always going to be intermittent, and that’s ironic, because the proponents of fossil fuels always said that they are reliable, and that renewable energy is intermittent. But the opposite seems to be increasingly the case. California’s grid is now largely clean energy, and it’s showing great stability because of batteries.
And so, one of the things that you see is this vast rush in Asia, in particular, away from petroleum, to electric vehicles and electrification of transport. Ian, 67 percent of new vehicle purchases in China, in the last month, have been EVs.
Ian Masters: Right, but we can’t get cheap EVs here, and Trump has turned these idiots in the Big Three, the CEOs, and now, they are going back to pick-up trucks and gas guzzlers. I mean, it’s just insane what’s happening over here, compared to what the Chinese and others around the world see as the writing on the wall, which is, you’ve got to get off oil and get into wind and solar. So, you know, how do you get to the point in this country where you actually have the ability, like the Chinese consumers do, to have cheap EVs?
Photo Iran solidarity gathering by sina drakhshani on Unsplash
Juan Cole: It will be slower in the United States, because the Republican Party, and much of the Democratic Party, is the back pocket of Big Oil, but it will happen here, too. It can’t be stopped. If petroleum remains unreliable, and you see these big price spikes, people will migrate to lower cost transportation.
Ian Masters: If they can find it, Juan.
Juan Cole: Yeah, well, they will. They’ll find a way. You know, they’ll put pressure on their politicians to change the laws. This is, I’m talking about over the next 10 to 20 years. I’m not saying this is going to happen today. But over time, the United States will also electrify its transportation. It just will be behind everybody else.
And this is very dangerous. One of the engines for American industrial mastery in the world was the auto industry, and it still is a very important industry in the United States. If it becomes a dinosaur — and remember, most showrooms in the world are not in the United States, they have to sell Fords and GM cars abroad — if everybody goes electric and they don’t, then they’ll be like the horse and buggy in the age of the Ford automobile. They’ll just decline into insignificance. And if we, as a country, lose our manufacturing base, we become a third world country. There’s real danger of this being an inflection point for the decline of the United States. And the decline could significantly be driven by our failure to do the research and development to stay at the forefront of clean energy technology.
Ian Masters: Well, historians will judge Donald Trump as the man who destroyed America. So I thank you for joining us. I appreciate it.
Juan Cole: Thanks so much, Ian. All the best.
Ian Masters: And again, I’ve been speaking with Juan Cole, who is a professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. He’s also the author of the blog Informed Comment at juancole.com, and the author of Engaging the Muslim World, Muhammad Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires, and most recently Gaza yet Stands, and he has an article at Informed Comment, “ U.S.- Iran, MOU is mere Agreement to Keep Talking.”
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