Back to the future, as Iran sets the agenda

WASHINGTON – When Benjamin Netanyahu visits Donald Trump’s White House, he will bring with him an agenda of three items: Iran, Iran and Iran.

He finally sees an opportunity to, in his words, figure out “how to deal with this bad deal” brokered between Tehran and international powers, which is meant to govern its nuclear work for more than a decade.

He believes Trump is a genuine skeptic of Iran and the nuclear accord, as the president-elect is surrounding himself with hard-liners who have fought with the Obama administration over its Iran policy for years.

But now that he has an amenable ally in the White House, what will Netanyahu actually present as an alternative to the nuclear deal? What options are available for Israel and the US one full year into implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action?

Israel wants to keep the short-term benefits of this deal – a delay in the growth of Iran’s nuclear program – as it simultaneously finds a way to prevent Iran from reaching its ultimate end goal as promised by the deal: legitimization of an industrial-scale nuclear infrastructure.

Israel believes that Iran has found, through this deal, a way to gain all of the strategic benefits of building a bomb without the costs of building one –

stopping just short of construction and instead amassing all of the materials necessary so they can combine them in short order. In other words, Israel believes this deal set Iran up to become a nuclear-threshold state.

US President Barack Obama believed this was impossible to prevent – preventing weaponization itself was his priority – but, with the new American leadership, Netanyahu hopes to restore his version of an acceptable end state. He has several options. Iran’s nuclear program and the deal legitimizing it, to its government, is about regime security and regional power projection. But there are ways of limiting Iran’s malign activities, practically bolstered by its nuclear-threshold status, while the JCPOA remains in place.

Western powers are allowed to continue sanctioning Iran’s non-nuclear activities, such as its support for terrorist organizations, its ballistic missile development and its human rights violations, without resorting to old sanctions. Expect to see a slew of sanctions bills out of Congress with similar contours in the coming year.

Secondly, there may be opportunities to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions during the course of Trump’s term. The JCPOA allows any party to the deal to reintroduce sanctions “in whole or in part.” But doing so may come with serious consequences that Israel finds disadvantageous.

If the Trump administration reimposes sanctions hastily over a small noncompliance event, Iran will likely see political cause to bring its nuclear program roaring back. And, it may be hard to put back together the sort of political coalition necessary to sanction Iran as there was before the deal was signed – a coalition that Israel appreciated for its scope and impact.

If the deal were to be forced into the ground or collapse, Iran has promised to fast-track its nuclear work. The world then would have to respond to what would fast become a crisis, and conversation on the use of force would resurface.

Netanyahu may not mind this scenario, as his primary goal throughout Obama’s presidency – it is understood by his generals – was to have the US do the job of crippling Iran’s program through force on the world’s behalf. The truth is that Israel could not do the job alone, and Obama administration officials knew that.

Netanyahu likely sees Trump as a different animal who is either more likely to use force against Iran or, in the least, more likely to be feared if and when he threatens it.

The Israeli government believes that, in all of his unpredictability, Trump may subscribe to Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of foreign policy: Make autocratic and communist powers willing to challenge the US believe that Washington is crazy enough to respond with massive force. It was, after all, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 that compelled Iran’s leadership to halt its nuclear work unilaterally – the only time it did so.

So, we’re going “back to the future” on Iran, where policy discussion is likely to revert to familiar rhetoric on the use of sanctions and the threat of force, while nuclear scientists track how close Iran is to reaching a critical threshold state. Netanyahu will ask Trump in their first meeting to sanction Iran for non-nuclear activities and to respond to each and every violation proportionately, while maintaining the deal in the short term, buying time until its problematic sunset years.

Any attempt to renegotiate or redefine terms of those sunset years will be a great test of the ingenuity of the new American administration. •