شارل الياس الشرتوني: الولايات المتحدة وإيران وفك عقدة غورديان
The US, Iran and the Untying of Gordian Knots Charles Elias Chartouni/September 27//2021 The Iranian Islamic regime maintains its ambiguity and nurtures the illusion of outmaneuvering the US and renewing the nuclear accord at minimal cost, whereby the sanctions are removed unilaterally, while it perpetuates its duplicity, shadowy engagements, heightened repression of the vast opposition movement inside Iran, and destabilization strategy throughout the Larger Middle East (LMA). It operates as if the US is desperately yearning for an understanding that saves its image after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. The actual course of negotiations purports an imminent crash and the further complication of the strategic, geopolitical and domestic political equation in both countries, and their consecutive fallouts on the Middle Eastern scenery. The non existent bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill overlaps with the fractures of the Democratic Party platform, and their immediate impact on the elections of 2022, and the extreme divisiveness which characterize this volatile issue throughout the EU, the Gulf countries, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
The Biden administration has no leeway and cannot precipitate the conclusion of a new self defeating treaty. It’s not about speed in this negotiation, it’s about relevance and consequential results that can help stabilize the region and preempt the region’s destructive militarization of geopolitical and inter-Islamic strategic, ideological and political differences. The tightening of sanctions matched with a dissuasive military coalition should draw the line and contain the arrogance and delusions of a warmongering totalitarianism.The outsized projection of power which has instrumentalized the first nuclear accord doesn’t seem to recede, and plans on doubling down and destroying whatever is left of the waning geopolitical order in the Middle East. The stringency of the containment strategy should blend with a conflict resolution strategy devised jointly with regional and international partners on a shifting scale of priorities, to tackle the widening strategic voids and the structural inability of the fragile and failed States to rebuild Statehood matrices, sustainable economies, address multi-ethnic quandaries, and preempt their deleterious reverberations on Western security and overall geopolitical equilibriums.
There is no possibility to address the enduring strategic and security imponderables short of a comprehensive blueprint to deal with the unraveling of the ideological, institutional and geopolitical underpinnings of the centennial interstate political order that relayed the implosion of the Ottoman Empire, its Islamic cosmogony and the idiosyncrasies of its imperial governance. The enduring difficulties of territorial Statehood in the Arab geopolitical realm, the clashing grammars of politics (Muslim vs Modern notions of governance and Statehood), and the new configurations of strategic and geopolitical conflicts, seem to recapitulate the normative differences which characterized the first modernity and its unresolved dilemmas, reinterpreted and re-enacted in a new landscape. Any working political deal should be predicated on multiple premisses if it were to tackle the normative gaps of a disintegrating world and its conflict-ridden politics. The fragmented approach is not only methodologically flawed but fails to address the real problems which put at stake peace, negotiated conflict resolution, and governance reform, in a region overtaken by religious totalitarianism, Islamist nihilism and pulverized normative metrics.
=================== Gordian Knot: The free encyclopedia The Gordian Knot is a legend of Phrygian Gordium associated with Alexander the Great. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem (untying an impossibly tangled knot) solved easily by finding an approach to the problem that renders the perceived constraints of the problem moot (“cutting the Gordian knot”): Turn him to any cause of policy,The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose, Familiar as his garter — Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1. 45–47
