We’ve all seen those satirical ‘adaptations’ of the bunker scenes in Downfall doing the rounds on the internet – the words of Gordon Brown or some failing football manager captioned beneath a raving Hitler.
A couple of years ago, I was sent another example of the genre by an opponent of the 2015 nuclear deal. In this video, a man who appears to be an Iranian nuclear negotiator, albeit a toothless one, is seen laughing himself to tears as he explains to Iranian TV viewers: “I’ve had tougher negotiations over a falafel sandwich.”
In fact, the man is a Spanish comedian Juan Joya Borja, known as El Risitas (‘The Giggler’). And in the footage Borja is telling an extended Spanish joke in about what happened when he went to the beach. It has been variously captioned to parody Brexit negotiations and Mexican wall building, as well as iPhone malfunctions.
Doubtless, many of the Americans who watched the ‘Iranian’ version couldn’t tell Juan Joya Borja wasn’t speaking Farsi and that he does not look Iranian. People who would be outraged by jokes about haggling Jews found this one hilarious, despite it involving nasty ethnic stereotypes about Persian carpet-traders.
The nuclear deal is a subject ripe for this sort of treatment, though. A decade and more of serious ingenuity has been devoted to either preventing or wrecking it. It barely seems to matter that since it was signed in October 2015, International Atomic Energy Agency monitors have reported ten times that Iran is complying with its conditions. Separately, German regional authorities noted a marked decline (30 compared with 141 in 2016) in Iranian front companies attempting to acquire dual use technologies since the deal was signed – one of the matters Chancellor Merkel doubtless brought to Trump’s attention on her brief visit to the States.
Regardless of this progress, there has been massive anti-Iranian lobbying activity in Washington DC by PR firms hired by the Emiratis and Saudis for tens of millions of dollars, with virtually no Iranian pushback, as well as the unedifying spectacle of the US administration hiring a private Israeli intelligence company to allegedly smear the wives of two of the Obama officials who helped negotiate the deal. The same company had been hired to attack Harvey Weinstein’s accusers.
But, then, President Obama’s attempt to break with four decades of mistrust between the US and Iran was always going to be controversial. It was part of a wider strategic rebalancing, away from the Middle East and towards Asia-Pacific, which Trump has continued, even though he has rechristened the region ‘Indo-Pacific’ to make the containment of China more explicit than Obama did.
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