American and other Western elites complain ad nauseam, decrying the Iranians’ intransigent, devious, aggressive, and unreliable behavior. They claim Iran will not make or keep an agreement. Never forget, however, that Iran is more than five millennia old with a long history of diplomacy. The Iranians may be difficult, but one of the barriers to an agreement could be the Iranians’ wariness of the United States’ long pattern of broken agreements.

In 1945 the U.S. signed the United Nations charter declaring the importance of protecting the sovereignty of states. Iran was also a signatory of that charter.

But eight years later, in 1953, the CIA and British Intelligence organized Operation Ajax, which overthrew the constitutionally elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and empowered Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the son of the first Pahlavi shah who was deposed in 1941 by the British and Soviets. The CIA’s actions were in complete violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter. U.S. agencies also armed and trained the Iranian secret police, the Savak, to suppress any opposition, often using the tired old excuse that dissenters were Soviet-inspired or -supported.

In 1979 the Iranian people, fed up with the oppression, overthrew the shah in favor of a theocracy. The aftermath was terrible, but it is hard to understand what happened because most of what we know about Iran is filtered through the anti-Iranian American press. Many of the horror stories reported were probably exaggerated or not true.

In 1980, a year after the Shah was ousted, Iraq started the Iran–Iraq War with the support of U.S. intelligence and other agencies. Millions were killed or wounded in a brutal conflict that lasted until 1988. American support for the Iraqis was not even diminished by their deployment of chemical weapons against the Iranians, despite later ostensibly righteous anger over chemical weapon use by Saddam and Assad.

An important note: The U.S. signed the Hague Convention of 1899 prohibiting use of poisonous gas, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning the use of poison weapons. The U.S. again signed the 1972 and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Conventions, which prohibited the development, production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons. U.S. elites unashamedly ignored those inconvenient treaties in their support of the Iran–Iraq War. Nor did Article 2 of the UN Charter matter.

After the overthrow of the Israel-friendly shah in 1979, the U.S. confiscated the foreign assets of the Iranian government, sanctioned their oil exports, sanctioned Western business investment in the country, and engaged in a long string of aggressive and destructive covert actions designed to topple the Iranian government. Again, all in flagrant disregard of the UN Charter. Neoconservatives and other Washington elites believed that for a good cause, such technicalities didn’t matter.

In 2003, the top cleric and supreme leader of Iran declared a fatwa against the building and possession of nuclear weapons. This fatwa is still in effect, but the Iran hawks claim that the regime might in the future renege on the fatwa, so it should be disregarded. This sounds like projection coming from a group that regularly ignores its own treaty and constitutional obligations.

That same year, after the U.S. military invaded Iraq and wrecked that country, the Bush administration made a deal with Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, to abandon many of his weapons with the promise of friendship. Nevertheless, after an appropriate pause, the neocons turned up a slander and defamation campaign against Gaddafi. At the same time, U.S. agencies were involved in the “revolution” that led to the 2011 bombing campaign against the Gaddafi military. This allegedly humanitarian “kinetic military action” led to the collapse of Gaddafi’s government and Gaddafi's brutal murder in the street. So much for making a friendship deal with the U.S. The lesson to Iran and others is, Never make a deal with the U.S. leadership to disarm. If you do, you will become vulnerable to “kinetic military actions” in the name of peace. The former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bragged and laughed about Gaddafi's murder: “We came, we saw, he died.” No wonder so many people around the world don’t like us.

In 2015, the Obama administration entered into a treaty to prohibit Iran from building nuclear weapons called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Iran agreed to open their nuclear sites to intrusive inspections and strict controls, and the U.S. and other Western countries agreed to lift sanctions and return illegally confiscated Iranian assets. The U.S. did not fully live up to the returning of the confiscated assets and reneged on other aspects of the agreement until 2018, when the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the agreement because it was insufficiently strict. The sanctions were reimposed on Iran. (As they say in New York, “Such a deal!”)

By contrast, Israel has been developing a nuclear arsenal since the late 1950s, and has refused to join or comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty that took effect in 1970. The U.S. and Iran, along with 41 other countries, were signatories of the first round of that treaty. The U.S. and Israel have complained for years about suspected Iranian violations, but U.S. intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IEAE), which participated in extensive inspections as enforcement of the JCPOA, have consistently reported that Iran is not making nuclear weapons. On the other hand, the U.S. has for decades enabled the Israeli nuclear arsenal, which both the U.S. and Israel have consistently refused to acknowledge. From an Iranian point of view, how is this honest or consistent? (It also demonstrates American unwillingness to comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty—yet another example of the U.S. disregarding a treaty.)

There is another, more sinister aspect to U.S. policy. The Bush II administration tore up his predecessor’s Agreed Framework deal and put other pressure on the North Koreans to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty so the U.S. could use that withdrawal as a casus belli to attack North Korea. But at the time, the U.S. was bogged down by the Iraq War, and the North Koreans took advantage of the distraction. Flipping the script, they built nukes and rendered the attack scenario unappealing. The interventionists have desperately looked for “violations” to justify an attack on Iran. If they keep up their aggression and threats long enough to avoid brokering an honest agreement, the Iranians might, out of fear, end their long-standing policy against nuclear weapons and flip the script, too. 

The cavalier attitude the U.S. takes toward treaties is of a piece with a broader pattern of blatant disregard for human rights and the rule of law, as illustrated by the American use of “Black Sites” to imprison and torture suspected terrorists outside of the U.S. The most notable were operated in Afghanistan, Poland, and Thailand. American leaders reasoned that torturing and jailing suspects without any due process was not illegal if the acts were performed overseas and by foreigners hired by the U.S. government rather than American citizens. The reasoning was no different than paying a hit man to torture or kill someone and claiming innocence; it doesn’t wash in the U.S. legal system. The rest of the world is aware of this hypocrisy by the chief proponent of the “rules-based order.” The Iranians are personally familiar with American support for torture from decades under the shah’s U.S.- and Israeli-trained and -supported Savak.

The disruptive behavior extends to the treatment of American clients. The U.S. provides apparently unlimited aid to Israel, which has for decades regularly threatened and pursued illegal military and intelligence missions to destabilize and topple governments in the region, Iran especially. Many high-level government officials have been assassinated in more acts that violate the UN Charter. The Iranians and much of the world no doubt see these illegal and hostile actions of the Israeli government as an extension of U.S. foreign policy. Many leading U.S. officials regularly threaten to destroy Iran while claiming solidarity with Israel, also in violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter.

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It is important to note that, in the Iranian view, the campaign painting Iran as a cruel and repressive society is being perpetrated by a nation that has wrecked many of Iran’s neighbors and slaughtered their citizens in the Global War on Terror against Sunni terrorists who were supported and financed by the U.S. and their friends. (For an overview of the years of U.S. complicity in supporting jihadis, see Scott Horton’s book Enough Already.) The world watches with horror as the American-backed Israelis, with blatant disregard for international laws, have for decades brutalized the Palestinians by stealing their land, bulldozing their houses and farms, starving, killing, jailing, torturing, and chasing them into concentration camps. Supporting this behavior is strictly forbidden by the Leahy Law, so U.S. government leadership has to go through quite a dance to subvert that law in order to send the Israelis weapons and money.

The Iranian regime may be repressive, undemocratic, and cruel to some of their people; one can nevertheless understand why it might be hesitant about making an agreement to disarm to please American elites with a long history of ignoring their own laws, treaties, and agreements, and of abusing various nations and peoples around the world.

American citizens have been desensitized and propagandized into complacency, and most have no concept of the magnitude of terrible acts done in their name. Much of the rest of the world, especially the Iranians, see it clearly.