The plot to kill John Bolton was brazenly cinematic. This included pre-operational oversight, crypto transfer, and his over a year of cultivation.
According to the US Department of Justice, in October 2021, an Iranian man named Shahram Poursafi, who lives in Tehran, told someone he had previously met online that he was a former national security adviser. was tracked down and eventually killed. Pursafi, 45, who the Justice Department claimed had worked for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, instructed his contacts to speak in crypto and promised to pay $300,000 in cryptocurrency for the deeds. .
The person he hired to carry out the killing was, unfortunately for him, a classified source of his FBI information, dramatically reducing the chances of a successful mission. .
It is not surprising that Iran would attempt to carry out the assassination of a former civil servant in a foreign country. But the plot may tell us something important about future relations between Iran and the United States. not.
The key to understanding where the link lies is that the operation was "in January 2020 when Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF), This is likely to be retaliation for the death," a Justice Department memo said. Soleimani — revered in his home country and considered by many to be his second most powerful person in Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — announced then-Trump in January 2020 murdered on the orders of the president.
It was the culmination of a years-long campaign of hostility led by Assassin Trump. His decision to end his two-year brokered deal by seven nations to curtail Iran's nuclear program was just the beginning of that campaign. All parties involved in the agreement claimed to have achieved the primary objective of preventing Iran from producing nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, Trump has moved forward and dismantled his predecessor's most important foreign policy achievements.
With Trump leaving the White House and a new administration with new goals in place, Washington might have assumed that everyone had moved away from assassination and hostility. But the conspiracy against Bolton is just one of many signs Tehran doesn't have.
This dynamic gets to the heart of why relations between Iran and the United States remain strained and will continue for years to come.
At this very moment, U.S. and Iranian negotiators announced the “Final” proposal for a renegotiated nuclear deal to replace the 2015 deal. are considering. But the shadow of Trump's one-term presidency hangs over the proceedings. One of his main concerns is that Iran claims the Biden administration has provided assurances that future presidents cannot unilaterally withdraw from the deal, as President Trump did in 2018. is doing Experts say it's nearly impossible to provide such a guarantee.
Now back to the plan to kill Bolton. The United States reigns by her four-year increments, while Iran reigns by decades. The nature of America's political system requires that each president be able to decide whether to honor or discard the agreements of his predecessors, regardless of the outcome. In the case of the Iranian deal, this was serious and detrimental to global security. and a supporter of regime change in the country, Bolton said at a press conference in 2018. The answer was to the question of whether the United States' withdrawal from the nuclear deal was a "signal that the United States has entered into the deal and can exit if the political winds change." In his view, the previous deal was no longer included in US "strategic interests" and had to be scrapped.
Of course, strategic interest is subjective. It didn't matter that Biden was clearly against Trump's actions. Outside the US, the message was simple. The deal with the United States is that the validity period is short.
Iran does not see the election of a new government as a new dawn. Rather, it sees a superficial change in guards. That's why he hasn't stopped avenging his murder of Soleimani, and probably won't ever. I didn't receive it.
And even now, with the world powers on the verge of agreeing to a new nuclear deal, Iran is likely preparing for the possibility that its president-elect will tear it down again.
