Is the JCPOA better or Trump?
Is the JCPOA better or Trump? These days, with the rare opportunity to stroll through the clean air of the city of Vienna, every time I pass by the Coburg Hotel, which is usually the venue for JCPOA negotiations that have been ongoing for twenty years without any specific result, I first thank the honorable organizers of this program for choosing this city for the summer negotiations in August and September. A city unparalleled in terms of clean air, cleanliness, tranquility, art, and music.
A city of thousands of cafes and restaurants that are always full, as if people don’t have kitchens of their own. A flat city ideal for using bicycles and scooters, meaning simple and electric scooters, and they are indeed used. A sprawling city that only from one side has heights overlooking the cityscape, covered with vineyards, each allowed to offer its products in its own restaurant, a place for local art-loving people and foreign tourists to stroll. Perhaps Goethe wrote his West-Eastern Divan in praise of Hafez in the pleasant atmosphere of these very hills.
A city with the highest amount of green space in the world, a city without smoke, traffic, or honking, devoid of street-brawling excitement. A city where people don’t retreat to corners to use their mobile phones and don’t anxiously look around. A city where it seems the number of stone and bronze statues from street corners and squares to the walls and doors of buildings, churches, imperial palaces, and museums, standing in rows on rooftops, outnumbers its real people.
A city where people flood its wide pedestrian streets in the early evening, and there’s no sign of traffic. A city that if the morality police were to reach it, even with an army, it would be overwhelmed by a million intensely problematic subjects, making it appreciate the modest safety of Tehran.
A city where the not-so-blue Danube and its branches meander through it. A city with a metro and tram lines that, with long and beautiful carriages, handle the main transportation tasks of this vast and delightful garden city, without noise or pollution. A city where artists’ stalls are set up in corners and parks and squares.
Opera houses, halls, and theaters have their place. From all these observations, I thought perhaps this is why the ball is being passed between JCPOA teams without motivation to end it, dragging on for so long. Honestly, with these advantages, twenty years is nothing; even if it takes thirty more years, it wouldn’t be surprising. Across from the Marriott Hotel, the best restaurants await.
I only regret why the municipality didn’t send a representative to this marathon conference to report that the city’s tranquility is not only due to expensive gasoline. Gasoline is expensive, no doubt, but the metro and especially the tram are widespread everywhere. You haven’t succeeded in completing the underground metro stations; why don’t you start surface tram lines to transport millions of people along current highways and streets? I have no hope for the JCPOA; build a tram.
Fereydoun Majlesi, source: Etemad Newspaper