“President-elect Joe Biden has promised to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal,” writes Tom O’Connor at Newsweek. “But a return is set to face challenges on both sides as they attempt to rebuild trust in a radically different environment than five years ago.”

Those challenges? “For one, Iranian officials see no room for renegotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” notes O’Connor (JCPOA is the formal name of the “Iran nuclear deal”).

For another, Biden has conditioned his promise on Iran first returning to its own duties under the deal, commitments it abandoned after the US president Donald Trump abrogated the agreement and pressured US allies to start ignoring their obligations too.

Even assuming fault on both sides for the deal’s collapse — and that’s a false assumption — Biden’s current approach is a recipe for  beginning his presidency with failure to deliver on a major campaign promise.

There’s a big foreign policy win available here, if Biden is willing to claim it. And in doing so he would enjoy the support not only of the law, but of more than 90% of the US Senate.

In support of Trump’s supposed withdrawal from the deal, critics cite a 2015 State Department letter asserting that “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document.”

Which is true.

But it’s also true that on July 28, 1945, the US Senate ratified the United Nations Charter by a vote of 89 to 2.

And that the United Nations Security Council codified the “nuclear deal” as Resolution 2231 on July 20, 2015.

As a duly ratified treaty, per Article VI of the US Constitution, the UN Charter is part of “the Supreme Law of the Land.”

Per that treaty, UN Security Council Resolutions are binding on all UN member states.

QED, the JCPOA is US law and will remain so until and unless the Security Council repeals Resolution 2231, or the United States withdraws from the United Nations.

On his first day in office — preferably in his inauguration speech — Biden should announce that the United States will immediately resume meeting its obligations under the JCPOA. No pre-conditions. No negotiations. No dodges. It’s the law, and the Biden administration will abide by it, full stop.

He should also announce that if Iran’s government doesn’t do likewise within 90 days, the US will invoke the deal’s dispute resolution process, which includes a “snap back” clause potentially leading to the re-imposition of sanctions.

The JCPOA isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law. Biden should follow it, celebrate a win, then work toward even bigger wins such as mutual diplomatic recognition, free trade, and peace between the US and Iran after four decades of de facto war.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

A few weeks before the 2020 election, I visited a local gun shop. It was a madhouse. Weapons flew off the shelves as fast as customers could get their wallets out. Ammunition was in short supply too. Why? Well, on the front door, a flyer warned that, if elected, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would act quickly push to “gun control” legislation through Congress.

“Panic buying” before a big election, just in case, is the norm. That means booming business for gun dealers, but there’s just not much reason for gun owners or would-be gun owners to worry. Other than some ineffectual tinkering around the edges for propaganda purposes, “gun control” just ain’t gonna happen in America.

Not because the right to self-defense (and the corollary right to possess the means of self-defense) is an unalienable and non-negotiable human right, though it is.

Nor because the US Constitution clearly and unambiguously forbids government infringement on the right to keep and bear arms, though it does.

While I love the philosophical and constitutional arguments on the subject, it’s the facts on the ground that really settle the question.

As of 2018, the global Small Arms Survey estimated the number of firearms in civilian hands in the US at 393 million. If evenly distributed, that would be 1.2 guns for each man, woman and child in the country.

They’re not evenly distributed, of course. Per the Pew Research Center, “only” about 30% of Americans own a gun. Call it 110 million.

Here’s how any real public discussion of “gun control” in America is going to go:

Government: Give us your guns.

Gun Owners: No.

Government: No, really,  give us your guns. We passed a law!

Gun owners: Come try to take them and see what happens.

Government: Well, when you put it THAT way …

More than 100 million Americans own nearly 400 million guns, and have no intention of surrendering those guns. Furthermore, Americans can build relatively sophisticated weapons with relatively inexpensive machine tools and/or 3D printers, and very basic firearms with items found in most homes.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t have to like those facts. They’re facts  whether Joe Biden and Kamala Harris like them or not.

And if they decide to get pushy about it? As few as 1% of those gun owners could, and almost certainly would, make the Civil War look like a day at the children’s petting zoo.

Yes, politicians will make impassioned speeches to roust votes and campaign donations out of the ignorant and fearful. They might even get some token legislation passed for gun owners to ignore and for politicians to ignore gun owners ignoring.

But they know any attempt to impose real “gun control” would be political, and possibly literal, suicide.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

A celebrity who unleashed a frenzy of media attention with an unexpected attainment of a term in political office, despite being famed more for an outlandish personal style and uninhibited public statements than governmental experience, garnered insufficient ballots to win the 2020 US presidential election.

The slightly over 1,500 votes on the Green Party of Alaska line for former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura may seem a mere footnote to the failed re-election bid of Donald Trump, whose level of support for Ventura’s rerun was much less than the “one hundred percent” promised at WrestleMania in 2004. Yet the success of referendum initiatives for drug decriminalization, two decades after Ventura’s endorsement of such measures was viewed as no less outrageous than his feathered boas, hints that he may have had more to offer than a coincidental foreshadowing of the paths from performance to politics of Trump or Ventura’s movie costar Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In his 1999 book I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up, Ventura argued against drug prohibition not only on pragmatic grounds that it would be ineffective and counterproductive, but that “the government has no business telling us what we can and can’t use for pain relief and in matters of our own health.” Despite bragging to Reason magazine that year about how “I’ve taken the libertarian exam and scored perfect on it,” his record in office was less consistent, and he failed to sustain an alliance with libertarians.

However, Ventura was right to note that “we’ve gotten into the bad habit of looking to the government to solve every personal and social crisis that comes along” and that “there are a lot of good causes out there, but they can’t possibly all be served by government.”

Ventura’s proposed remedies, such as legislatures spending one year in four pruning old laws rather than passing new ones, may not have been the most practical ways to achieve that ideal. But such a healthy skepticism of the status quo could boost efforts to rebuild voluntary civil society and mutual aid. And despite his Green Party of Alaska nod being unsought, and at odds with the national party’s backing of longtime Green New Dealer Howie Hawkins, it should inspire the Greens to return to their own roots in proclaimed key values of grassroots democracy and decentralization.

In the 1987 movie The Running Man, Ventura portrayed “America’s own Captain Freedom” as a foe of Schwarzenegger’s freedom fighter. Its tagline predicted that 2019 would be a time when “America’s finest men don’t run for President.” Ironically, the finest ideas of the man who played Captain Freedom in the movies might help the USA of the 2020s escape from the ideological confines of previous decades.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “OPINION: No Body for president? Pay Mind” by Joel Schlosberg, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 11/10/20
• “No Body for President?” by Joel Schlosberg, Creston, Iowa News Advertiser, 11/11/20
• “No Body for President? Pay Mind” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, 11/12/20
• “No Body for President? Pay Mind.” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, 11/12/20
• “No Body for President? Pay Mind.” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 11/21/20