Iran is now a country in decay

If 2020 is generally accepted to be a global annus horribilis, then it is perhaps fitting that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ability to do mischief has seemingly just received a hefty boost. On Sunday morning, the UN lifted its 13-year long arms embargo on the Iranian armed forces. Iran is now (technically at least) free to buy and sells arms in the international marketplace. 

It seems an odd time to be easing up on Iran. At the end of last year, just before coronavirus set in, the regime was making an excellent fist of massacring its own people. It machine-gunned them from rooftops, it beat them in the streets, and then hauled away the corpses so they couldn’t be examined. Now it can buy weapons and technology to do all these things even more fastidiously.

The truth is that the embargo was lifted because that was one of the terms of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), between Iran and the P5+1 (the five Security Council powers and Germany) together with the European Union.