TEHRAN (Iran News) – The people who are ruling the United States “will not lift Iran sanctions anytime soon” because “they have no compassion, no global vision for peace,” an American author and political commentator has said.
“They are imperialists and death merchants and the profiteers of destruction,” John Steppling told Press TV in an interview on Thursday. Steppling is based in Norway.
He made the remarks after Congressional Republicans on Wednesday introduced legislation containing the “largest package” of sanctions against Iran to prevent the Joe Biden administration from potentially removing the sanctions that Washington re-imposed against Tehran when it left a landmark nuclear agreement in 2018.
The legislation, dubbed the Maximum Pressure Act and unveiled, has been described by the Congressional Republicans as the largest package of Iran sanctions in history, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The bill, spearheaded by the Republican Study Committee, seeks to force the Biden administration to submit any revamped nuclear deal with Iran to Congress for review before it is approved.
When asked why the Biden administration is following the Trump administration’s foreign policy on Iran, Steppling said, “One has to take a wider and longer view of these questions. Iran has been signatory, willingly, to the non-proliferation treaty. Israel has something like 200 nuclear warheads and is signatory to no international treaties. All observer groups, the IAEA, and even US intelligence knows that Iran dismantled anything that could be used to build nuclear weapons. So, this is all sort of theatre at this point.”
The analyst called the sanctions against Iran “a dog and pony show by Washington for domestic and to some degree European consumption.”
Besides expanding sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile program, the Republican legislation would mandate that Congress approve any agreement the Biden administration might agree to during talks in Austrian capital, Vienna. It would also limit the US president’s ability to unilaterally ease sanctions via executive order.
It would also codify into law former Republican President Donald Trump’s foreign secretary Mike Pompeo’s 12 tough conditions for any new deal with Iran that were presented while he was in office, and included a total halt to Iran’s nuclear program.
Steppling said that such bills “are also theater.”
“One has to remember the US tore up the JCPOA, which honestly hardly matters. The real issue is why, say, the KSA gets a free pass despite murdering a journalist outside their own borders?” he asked.
Blinken is ‘a longtime interventionist’
The commentator said that Pompeo was awful but, “the new administration is likely to end up with the same policies, but do it with a more cultured facade.”
He said that new US Foreign Secretary Antony “Blinken is not the bloated fanatical ideologue that Pompeo was, but he is still a longtime interventionist and DC insider.”
Steppling went on to point out that the US “could remove sanctions tomorrow. None of this bogus legislation has any real meaning, actually.”
US will ‘create limited theatres of conflict’
When asked how he thinks other parties to the Iran nuclear deal might react to the introduction of the US legislation, Steppling said, “This is a crucial question. And to answer it we have to remember what is going on with the Great Reset (Klaus Schwab and the world economic forum) and with Covid lockdowns and these new restrictions and vaccination passports and all the rest.”
“Its already estimated that over 200 thousand children have died in South Asia from the interruptions to supply chains, the lack of access to healthcare, and on top of that there are something like 60 million lost jobs in the US and that number is mirrored in the EU. There is a massive crisis of capitalism. And the US knows no other response than war. Aggression against, oh, Russia maybe. They don’t want actual war and for all I know China and Russia are somewhat complicit, but they will create limited theatres of conflict (like in Syria for example),” he explained.
“Defense spending is the biggest industry in the world. Everyone in the EU is linked to US defense spending and base building. But the Reset and the politicizing of the Corona virus to further monopolize retail and transfer wealth to the top 1% is causing massive disruptions in everyday life,” he added.
‘The West is a sick culture’
Steppling said, “There are spikes in suicide and youth self-harm, as well as domestic abuse and drug taking. The West is a sick culture, the US a sick society.”
“The lockdowns are medically useless, and there is growing evidence for this. So who is profiting? Well, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Big Pharma, and in the US, under new secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, the defense industry. Massive new deals with Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamics are in the works. Biden has long standing ties to defense. So the US is happy with the status quo,” he noted.
“I don’t see them lifting sanctions anytime soon. Why would they? They have no compassion, no global vision for peace. They are imperialists and death merchants and the profiteers of destruction. And the propaganda machine in the US runs on xenophobia and racism. In demonizing the third world, the global south, and in particular Islam,” the analyst concluded.
