Artifacts | Tehran and a tale of the topsy turvy

Vanessa Moore

Like the oil wells this pariah Persian state is most dependent on, Iran’s population erupted in spontaneous celebrations last month following the signing of the long-awaited nuclear accord. With the US media reaction critical or ambivalent at best, most foreign coverage has more skewedly focused on the defiant Israeli reaction and Republican congress members threatening to vote the deal down. Strangely it’s almost been a side thought that the real beneficiaries of the landmark deal will actually be ordinary Iranians. The country has been suffering from the pain of sanctions that have flattened the economy and caused snowballing unemployment. And the new accord offers its population hope more than anything for the future.
In a weekend op-ed piece for the New York Times, Iranian author Hooman Majid most eloquently reinforced this point when he put it that “what Iranians were celebrating on the evening of July 14 was their version of the storming of the Bastille — a potential break with an order that included sanctions, isolation, vilification of their country, and, more importantly, their own 36 years of struggle for normalcy”.
What most young Iranians are more interested in now is an end to isolation, a re-joining of the world economy, job prospects and finally being able to travel. People see the return of foreign firms as a key outcome from the deal, and the country’s domestic oil and gas sector, carpet and pistachio producers are all anticipating a boost in exports as sanctions are lifted in the months ahead. A key question now though will be whether hardliners on both sides will accept the deal. Some in the Iranian parliament and the powerful Revolutionary Guards have criticised the agreement, but they are not expected to derail it. If anything, US hawks will be the ones to do so, leaving Obama with a massive loss of credibility, not to mention face.
And what about the international repercussions? In a geopolitical sense, the nuke pact goes to show that old Cold War thinking no longer cuts it. Evidence of the shift in dynamics can already be seen by Obama’s renormalisation of ties with communist Cuba. To great fanfare on Saturday, the US flag was re-hoisted over its newly reinstated embassy, proof that there are bigger fish to fry in the grand scheme of things. In an increasingly topsy-turvy global landscape, the threat Tehran’s ayatollahs once held likewise pales in comparison to the current regional challenge ISIS poses. In the great post-Cold War rejig, Iran is now a necessary ally in a Middle East threatened by 21st century jihad.
Iranian Vice-President Masumeh Ebtekar, speaking to the BBC’s Kim Ghattas during a weeklong assignment in Iran, told the broadcaster yesterday that her country hoped to regain the trust of neighbouring states and co-operate to counter extremist groups. “We hope to be able to restore that trust working with different regional states to be able to stand firm against extremism, against terrorism, against Da’esh which is a terrible phenomenon,” she added, using a pejorative term for IS based on the acronym of the group’s former name in Arabic.
Likewise, in an attempt aimed at stymying further Islamic State gains, the nuclear detente has additionally led to renewed diplomatic attempts to realise some sort of breakthrough in Syria. Last week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with members of the Syrian opposition, while his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif was in Damascus to discuss ways of ending the war with Assad. As a regional heavyweight, no solution is possible without the Islamic Republic’s say-so, and getting the Iranians to play nuclear ball now seems to be bearing additional diplomatic fruit.
Finally, and most paradoxically of all though, a rabble of brainwashed social-media savvy suicide bombers may have just prompted the biggest international rapprochement since the fall of the Berlin Wall. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes, and the jihadists in the desert are probably kicking themselves now as a result. #Epic fail as those on Twitter would say.