https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17979/iran-in-the-cold
The argument [to bring Iran “in from the cold”] is that the Islamic Republic is behaving badly because, “excluded” from the outside world, it feels like a threatened lone wolf and thus obliged to adopt an aggressive posture.
The most persistent peddlers of that bill of goods have been US President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry. It is their efforts that President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken seem determined to resume.
But how true is the “exclusion” theory with regard to the Islamic Republic?
The answer is: not at all.
Far from trying to “exclude” the Islamic Republic almost every country, first among them the United States, have often gone out of their way to include and accommodate Tehran’s new rulers. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s seizure of power was instantly accepted by all members of the United Nations.
The US was even in a hurry to curry favor with Tehran’s new rulers.
The Carter administration quickly named Lloyd Cutler, the presidential legal advisor, as the ambassador-designate to Tehran and ordered the shipment of arms to Iran to be resumed. What happened was “self-exclusion” as a Khomeinist gang, with a nod and a wink from the Ayatollah, raided the US Embassy in Tehran and took its diplomats hostage.
“By the mid-1970s, Iran had a well-educated and motivated corps of nuclear scientists who, backed by substantial financial resources from the government, undertook research into all aspects of the new technology, including its military applications.” — Ardeshir Zahedi, former Foreign Minister of Iran, Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2004.
As the Biden administration prepares for the revival, in some form at least, of the controversial “nuclear deal” with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the usual suspects in Washington are peddling an old theme: Bringing Iran in from the cold!
The argument is that the Islamic Republic is behaving badly because, “excluded” from the outside world, it feels like a threatened lone wolf and thus obliged to adopt an aggressive posture.