“Seek Yahweh while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to Yahweh, and He will have compassion on him. Turn to our Elohim, for He will abundantly pardon.”
Isaiah 55: 6-7
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Sanctions on Russia and Iran: Yahweh May Be in the Process of Killing 2 Birds with 1 Stone
In an apparent message to Russia, the Iranian regime’s foreign minister on Monday underlined Tehran’s objection to permitting “any foreign factor” to derail talks currently underway in Vienna aimed at reviving the 2015 nuclear deal.
Meeting on Monday with representatives of the Iranian parliament, foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian stated that Iran “was standing fast on our red lines” and would “not allow any foreign factor to affect the realization of the country’s national interests in the Vienna talks for the removal of sanctions.”
Amir-Abdollahian’s comments followed a weekend of confusion over whether the Vienna talks would reach a much-anticipated agreement, after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov demanded, as the price of Russia’s support, guarantees that Moscow’s commercial and military relationship with Tehran would not be adversely impacted by western sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine.
“We requested that our US colleagues give us written guarantees at the minimum level of Secretary of State that the current sanctions process launched by the US will not in any way harm our right to free, fully-fledged trade and economic and investment cooperation and military-technical cooperation with Iran,” Lavrov said at a press conference on Saturday.
Iran’s ayatollahs and their operatives are like gorillas in the jungle. They use chest-thumping as a scare tactic.
While the Iran nuclear deal was being negotiated for the Obama administration by Secretary of State John Kerry, it was widely reported that Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, routinely screamed at Secretary Kerry during meetings and did other things that resembled chest-thumping. Zarif looked so foolish that Ayatollah Khamenei had to intervene and tell him to cool it.
It must have worked, though. The U.S. ended up signing a very bad deal with Iran. The deal was so bad that the Obama administration never sent it to the Senate for ratification. That meant the Iran nuclear deal was not binding on the U.S.
President Trump nixed the Iran nuclear deal, applied stiff sanctions on Iran, and sent the Iranians into a tizzy. The Iranians have been waiting and hoping to get the Obama deal back on track, because they know that it is the path to a nuclear Iran with international support.
Now, Iran’s current foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, wants to make clear to the Russians and others that they will “not allow any foreign factor to affect the realization of the country’s [Iran’s] national interests in the Vienna talks for the removal of sanctions.”
The Iran deal being negotiated in Vienna is supposed to remove the sanctions against Iran that were imposed by President Trump. Amir-Abdollahian wants the Russians to understand that the sanctions imposed on Russia by President Biden and European leaders following Russia’s unprovoked Ukraine invasion have nothing to do with the sanctions that President Trump imposed on Iran, even though Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that they are closely connected.
The sanctions imposed on Russia are just beginning to take effect, and they are painful. They will be a lot more painful going forward when all the sanctions kick in. They are so painful that President Putin called them “an act of war”.
Putin is right. The sanctions against Russia are an act of war, but unlike the Ukraine invasion, they were not imposed in an attempt to conquer Russia. Their purpose is to send the message to Vladimir Putin and his comrades that Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine is unacceptable. The West will not sit by and watch while Putin attempts to recreate the Soviet Empire.
The sanctions imposed on Iran by President Trump are painful, too. The Iranians want the sanctions removed while they continue to pursue nuclear weapons. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is an obstacle to those things coming about, and the Iranians are not happy about it.
Now, see “Biden Shatters Israel’s Delusions”:
The maximum pressure strategy was working effectively when Trump left office. Had it been retained by the Biden administration, Iran’s regime would likely have collapsed by this year, rendering its nuclear weapons program dead in the water. But rather than continue a policy that was working, President Joe Biden reinstated Barack Obama’s policy of facilitating Iran’s nuclear program and its regional aggression by agitating for a restoration of American and Iranian compliance with the 2015 deal.
Biden appointed Robert Malley, a former Obama administration nuclear negotiator who had developed strong ties with the Iranian regime during his tenure at the helm of the International Crisis Group, to serve as his envoy to renewed nuclear negotiations with Iran. Both before the talks were initiated in Vienna, and since the talks commenced, in the interests of convincing Iran to agree to a deal, Biden ended enforcement of the most significant sanctions Trump had placed on Iran’s nuclear operations. He delisted Iran’s Yemeni proxy, the Houthis, from the State Department’s formal list of foreign terrorist organizations. And Biden convinced U.S. allies to unfreeze Iranian funds held in their banks due to Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism, in the hopes of proving his benign intentions to the ayatollahs.
It’s more than a little curious that the Iran talks in Vienna that are aimed at removing all sanctions against Iran and allowing the ayatollahs to pursue nuclear weapons unhindered are being threatened by the sanctions imposed on Russia because of Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Yahweh may be in the process of killing 2 birds with 1 stone.
Yahweh works in mysterious ways.
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“I am the good shepherd. I know My sheep and My sheep know Me — just as the Father knows Me and I know the Father — and I lay down My life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also. They too will listen to My voice, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd. The reason My Father loves Me is that I lay down My life — only to take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from My Father.”
John 10: 14-18
