Front Burner: Should the U.S. leave Iran nuclear pact?
Yes: Agreement meets goal of blocking paths to bomb No: Trump’s middle way creates room to improve
Last Friday, President Trump announced that he would refuse to certify the Iran nuclear deal — a deal that has successfully prevented Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. This reckless decision was the equivalent of rolling a grenade into a room and walking away.
The president decided not to certify in spite of agreement from the U.S. intelligence community, the International Atomic Energy Agency and our allies that Iran is complying. Rather, the president says the deal is fatally flawed and not in the national security interests of the United States — but offers no good reasons why.
Even the president’s own national security team, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have stated that they believe Iran is complying and that the deal is in the national security interests of the United States. Now his national security team, Congress, and our allies will be left to scrambling to prevent the collapse of the deal — something that potentially could put America back on the path to military conflict with Iran.
Congress will now have 60 days to decide whether to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, a move that would immediately collapse the deal. While congressional Iran hawks and many in the White House itself are reluctant to take that step, the president has asked Congress to “fix” the deal in ways that would place the U.S. in violation of the deal by making unilateral changes to the terms of a multilateral agreement. Worse, the president threatened to ultimately pull out of the deal if Congress does not do his job for him.
With the future of the deal now uncertain, and given the substantial risks involved with blowing it up, it’s important to keep three things in mind:
The Iran nuclear deal is working and it is
making America safer. The deal blocks all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb: Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium has been reduced by 98 percent and its plutonium bomb factory has been destroyed. And despite misleading claims of some critics, the deal permanently bans Iran from pursuing any weapons-related activities even after some of the restraints on Iran’s program “sunset” in the later years of the agreement. Iran also faces unprecedented international monitoring, giving the world extensive insight into Iran’s nuclear activities — insight that we would not have without the deal. Further, the IAEA can access any site in Iran — including military sites — where it has credible reason to believe Iran may be pursuing illicit activities. If the U.S. believes Iran is indeed pursuing nuclear weapons-related activities at any point, nothing prevents us from taking appropriate action.
The president’s decision leaves the United States — not
Iran — isolated. Our European allies have all stated their opposition to the president’s decision. Practically, it will make it harder for the U.S. to marshal the international community to address all of Iran’s bad behavior when its focus will be on preventing a nuclear crisis by ensuring the United States abides by the terms of the deal. The decision also strengthens the argument of hardliners in Iran who have long argued against the merits of diplomacy with the United States. Perhaps most importantly, it leaves the impression around the world that America’s word no longer means anything under President Trump — undermining any future diplomacy, especially with North Korea.
The United States can contain Iran while still upholding
the deal. Critics of the deal believe it is fatally flawed because it does not cover all of Iran’s nefarious activities — including its ballistic missile program and support for terrorism. Yet there is nothing that prevents the president from working with allies to address those activities above and beyond the deal. Instead, the Trump national security team will now be attempting two things at once — addressing a self-inflicted nuclear crisis by preventing a collapse of the deal while also pushing back on Iranian activities more broadly.
President Trump’s decision is an extremely bad gamble. It will set off a chain of events that would prove hard for even a highly functioning national security team to manage — all because the president appears obsessed with undoing the achievements of his predecessor. Now, Congress must not make the situation worse by taking action that would unravel the deal and more.
In his policy speech last Friday, President Trump did not scrap the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, as some prominent conservative thinkers had suggested he should. Nor did he simply leave the deal intact, as proponents of the agreement had previously counseled. Instead, the president charted a middle way intended to give America greater leverage over Iran’s nuclear program and processes.
To start, it’s necessary to understand that formally “certifying” the agreement — which the president has now declined to do — isn’t actually part of the deal formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. Rather, it is a separate condition imposed by the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, a piece of legislation cobbled together by Congress in an effort to gain oversight over the Obama administration’s maddeningly opaque negotiating process with the Iranians.
That requirement forces the administration, every 90 days, to certify that Iran is still compliant with the terms of the JCPOA, that it isn’t working on nuclear weapons, that it hasn’t breached the accord in any material way, and that the continued waiver of nuclear-related sanctions remains in America’s national security interests.
Whatever one thinks of the agreement itself, Trump’s decision to “decertify” rested on solid foundations. This is because, among many other flaws, the United States and its allies do not have full oversight over the totality of Iran’s nuclear program. There are sites where nuclear work is being conducted that the Iranian regime simply won’t allow international inspectors to see. As a result, it’s impossible for the international community to assess definitively that Iran is in full compliance with the deal and isn’t moving ahead with nuclear weapons work — something that the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, has itself admitted. So what comes next? For the moment, at least, the president has signaled that the United States will stop short of walking away from the agreement entirely. But he has made clear that a significant renegotiation of the deal’s terms is a condition of America’s continued participation in it. There’s at least a chance that this might be possible.
First, while many European leaders have taken a dim view of Trump’s more skeptical approach to the JCPOA, at least some have indicated that they’re open to revisiting — and tightening — its provisions in order to maintain the integrity of the pact. French President Emmanuel Macron, for instance, recently suggested that the 2015 agreement could be bolstered through “future consultations” that create longer-term curbs on Iranian capabilities. And as European officials become increasingly convinced that fixing the JCPOA is the only way to salvage it, this sort of thinking is liable to be more and more widespread.
Iran, too, is interested in preserving the deal, albeit for its own reasons. The terms of the JCPOA, as currently constructed, are extremely favorable to the Islamic Republic, and have helped set the Iranian economy on a path of sustained recovery. As such, Iran’s leaders have every incentive to make further concessions in order to keep new sanctions at bay. Indeed, in recent days, Iranian officials have quietly signaled that they might, in fact, be willing to reopen negotiations with the West over their country’s ballistic missile arsenal — a key source of concern for Washington because of its potential use as a delivery system for nuclear weapons.
Finally, the new, more comprehensive Iran policy outlined by Trump last week can also help restart the conversation over Iran’s nuclear capabilities and obligations. The centerpiece of this approach is a blacklisting of Iran’s most important strategic actor: the regime’s clerical army, known as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Doing so, the president has made clear, is necessary to roll back Iran’s malign activities in the region. But, given the IRGC’s massive role in Iran’s economy, it can also create valuable political and economic leverage that might help bring the Iranians back to the nuclear negotiating table.
Will all this be enough to fix an agreement than many — including the president himself — consider fatally flawed? It may not be. But the Trump administration should be given credit for trying to more completely address the contemporary threat posed by Iran. That process starts with a sober look at the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, and an exploration of how to fix its flaws and mitigate its consequences.
Even the president’s own national security team believes Iran is complying with the deal. The president’s decision to decertify rested on solid foundations.