Iran and the art of the deal
The benefits are hard to see, other than political posturing that looks heroic to Trump voters.
America first, America always, America alone. Much of President Donald Trump’s bellicose appeal to voters on the campaign trail in 2016 was based on his public image as a pre-eminent deal maker.
It was in the title of the book that created the legend: The Art of the Deal. The reality may not have supported the myth but in that campaign even more than others, image obscured reality. And it was in terms of ‘‘a bad deal’’ that Trump railed against the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Barack Obama signed up to in 2015.
This week, Trump called the JCPOA ‘‘a great embarrassment to me as a citizen’’ and ‘‘a horrible, one-sided deal’’ as he announced that the United States is withdrawing from it.
The deal had lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iran’s denuclearisation, following arduous negotiations between Iran, the European Union and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which includes the US. By pulling the US from the plan, Trump has not completely destroyed it but he has put its future at risk while dramatically increasing the chances of chaos in the Middle East.
Trump’s withdrawal may have been driven in part by a petty need to undo that which his predecessor did, and most agree that the Iran deal was Obama’s greatest foreign policy achievement. It was also an agreement that was working as it was supposed to. Obama described it as a model for what diplomacy can accomplish as he noted the irony of the US cancelling an agreement that achieved the same outcome it is now trying to pursue with North Korea.
The agreement successfully curtailed Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Since the deal was done, Iran has destroyed the core of a reactor that could have produced weapons-grade plutonium, removed twothirds of the centrifuges that enrich uranium and eliminated 97 per cent of its stockpile of enriched uranium, the raw material necessary for the manufacture of a bomb. In other words, Iran was keeping up its end of the bargain and the inspections programme was working. Trump’s own secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said as much just last month.
What happens now? The reintroduction of sanctions will not just hurt the people of Iran, but US companies such as Boeing which loses a US$20 billion (NZ$28.8b) contract with Iranian airlines. Countries that trade with Iran may also be punished by the US, including New Zealand, which exported $120 million of goods to Iran in 2017.
The benefits are hard to see, other than political posturing that looks heroic to Trump voters. As many commentators have noted, the US has not produced a plan B. But the downsides of this typically reckless act are immediately clear. Trump’s hawkish rhetoric about Iran as ‘‘the leading state sponsor of terror’’ and his warning that ‘‘the US no longer makes empty threats’’ makes the Middle East less stable. He threatens ‘‘severe consequences’’ if Iran restarts its nuclear programme and calls instead for regime change.
However, Iran and the European powers will be desperate to keep the deal alive in some form. We may soon see that it is not Iran that is isolated from the world – it is the United States.