Dysfunctional, divided – that’s Iran and Trump
Iran has ‘‘begun its march . . . towards nuclear weaponry’’, said Israel’s Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, and that is technically correct. Only one year and 60 days after United States President Donald Trump tore up the treaty that guaranteed Iran won’t make nuclear weapons, Iran has taken a tiny step towards reviving its nuclear programme.
Just a baby step. This week Tehran announced that it would start enriching uranium fuel to more than 3.67 per cent, the limit set by the treaty it signed in 2015. Until last week, it was fully obeying all the terms of the treaty, as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia and China, the other signatories to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, all confirmed.
The US has used its power to force most of the other countries that signed the treaty to stop trading with Iran, too, even though they knew Iran was meeting all its obligations. Unfortunately, it’s not Germany or France that trades with Iran – it’s German and French companies, which will not be allowed to buy or sell in the US if they trade with Iran.
The European governments have no legal power to force their companies to trade with Iran, and they have not offered to compensate companies that do so and as a result lose American contracts. They all acknowledge that Iran is in the right and Trump is in the wrong, but they lack the courage to act accordingly.
So Iran has been hung out to dry. Its foreign trade has collapsed, including the oil sales that kept the economy afloat. Inflation has quadrupled, its currency has lost 60 per cent of its value, household incomes have fallen sharply, and the economy is predicted to shrink by 6 per cent this year. It’s what
Trump calls ‘‘maximum pressure’’, and ordinary Iranians are hurting.
Iran’s response, after more than a year of this, was to become just a little bit non-compliant with the plan of action. Its clearly stated policy, however, is to ratchet up the scale of the breach a bit more every 60 days, applying pressure back in a quite different mode.
You can only subdivide the move back to a full civil nuclear programme into so many steps, however, and even at 60 days per step, Iran will probably be there by this time next year.
This doesn’t mean it will be making nuclear weapons next year. Iran had a full civil nuclear programme for several decades before the plan of action was signed, and it didn’t get nuclear weapons then. But without the treaty, the ‘‘breakout time’’ to Iran’s first nuclear weapon, if Tehran decided to go for broke, would drop from one year to only a couple of months.
This is what the plan of action was really about. Iran always swore that it would not make nuclear weapons – Ayatollah Khomeini even called them ‘‘un-Islamic’’ – but a lot of other governments hated or at least mistrusted the Iranian regime. Before the 2015 deal, there was constant talk in the US and Israel about the need to make a ‘‘pre-emptive attack’’ on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The plan of action kicked the can down the road for 15 years. Iran dismantled various nuclear facilities, and agreed to intrusive inspections so that if it ever did decide to cheat, everybody else would have a year or more to respond.
Nobody loved the deal, but everybody agreed that it was the best one available, and made the future a lot safer.
So why did Trump trash it? His obsession with destroying Barack Obama’s political legacy undoubtedly provided the initial impetus, but he also probably believed that putting ‘‘maximum pressure’’ on Iran would make it crumble. Another triumph for the great statesman.
The hawks in the White House, such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, probably do know that Iran is too proud to crumble, but they don’t care, because they actually want a war.
Trump is trapped between them and his promise not to lead the US into another Middle East war – which is why we have crazy episodes like the air strikes on Iran he allegedly cancelled last month, 10 minutes before they were due to hit.
No wonder Sir Kim Darroch, British ambassador to the US, said in a confidential dispatch leaked to the press this week that Trump’s White House is ‘‘uniquely dysfunctional’’ and ‘‘divided’’.
The hawks in the White House . . . probably do know that Iran is too proud to crumble, but they don’t care, because they actually want a war.