DUBAI: Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, has criticized former Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s arguments in a recent essay published in Foreign Affairs, saying it overlooked Tehran’s continued aggression against its regional neighbors.
“Reading M. Javad Zarif’s article in Foreign Affairs ignores one of the core flaws in Iran’s strategy: aggression against its Gulf Arab neighbors. Thousands of missiles & drones targeting infrastructure, civilians, even mediators, is not strength; it is hubris & strategic failure. The Arab world has seen this before: destruction peddled as victory,” Gargash posted on X.
“Such narratives no longer hold.”
Gargash has been criticizing Iran’s attacks on Gulf states commenting earlier that Tehran has “deceived its neighbors about its intentions before the war and revealed premeditated aggression despite their sincere efforts to avoid it,” making any political solution must include clear guarantees against future attacks as well as reparations for targeting civilian and vital facilities.
Iran’s former top diplomat Zarif suggested that Iran should now “use its upper hand” to make a ceasefire deal in a proposal published Friday in Foreign Affairs.
Zarif, the former foreign minister who helped reach the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, wrote that Tehran “should offer to place limits on its nuclear program and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for an end to all sanctions — a deal Washington wouldn’t take before but might accept now.”
Zarif suggested Iran could enrich uranium below 3.67 percent, the level set by the 2015 nuclear deal US President Donald Trump pulled America out of in 2018.
However, Trump has maintained Iran must have no enrichment.
Inclusion of China, Russia in any deal
Zarif also suggested the inclusion of China and Russia in any deal to do a single uranium enrichment site for all of the region, where Iran “would transfer all its enriched material and equipment to that space.”
That is a proposal suggested in previous rounds of talks.
Zarif also suggests Washington and Tehran could “explore dispatching diplomats to serve in their respective interest sections, restoring consular services and removing travel restrictions on each other’s citizens.”
The US and Iran have not had diplomatic relations since 1980, when President Jimmy Carter severed ties over the hostage crisis.
The US has presented Iran with a 15-point plan for a ceasefire that includes reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but no signs of progress were apparent in the diplomatic effort, with Iran regularly noting the US has attacked the nation the last two times it was in negotiations with the Trump administration, including to start this war.
While Zarif has no official position now in Iran’s theocracy, he helped get reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian elected. He also would not have been able to publish such a piece without at least running the positions past senior members of the country’s theocracy.
It is not clear how Trump would respond to such a pitch, particularly as Zarif referred to the envoys Trump sent previously to negotiate with Iran — close friend Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner — as “completely illiterate on both geopolitics and nuclear technicalities.”
• with AP
