Iran fallout may hit N. Korea
Trump’s withdrawal from nuclear pact could raise doubts on U.S. commitment
WASHINGTON – As President Trump announced Tuesday that he would no longer abide by the Iran nuclear deal, he sent a not-so-veiled message to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“Today’s action sends a critical message: The United States no longer makes empty threats. When I make promises, I keep them,”
Trump said.
Even as he spoke, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on his way to the Korean Peninsula to lay the groundwork for talks about North Korea’s nuclear program.
“Plans are being made; relationships are building. Hopefully, a deal will happen,” Trump said.
The same issues that caused Trump to pull out of the Iran agreement will be hurdles in North Korea talks — and in some cases, those hurdles will be higher. Unlike Iran, North Korea already has nuclear weapons.
“Ripping up the Iran deal will demonstrate to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that a deal with the United States can’t be counted on. And it will give Kim Jong Un less incentive to make important concessions,” said Robert Einhorn of the Brookings Institution and a State Department adviser on arms control during the Obama administration.
Einhorn said Trump’s position on the Iran deal could box him in on negotiations with North Korea. On sanctions relief, human rights and missile technology, Trump may be setting a standard on Iran that could be impossible to reach on a North Korea deal.
Trump has four major problems with the Iran deal, which was negotiated by President Obama and five other world powers and is known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
❚ The accord didn’t address Iran’s ballistic missile program.
❚ It didn’t stop Iran’s misbehavior in the Middle East.
❚ Provisions of the agreement expire after 10 to 15 years.
❚ It rewarded Iran by unfreezing assets frozen by years of U.S. sanctions.
Trump is moving quickly toward a historic summit with Kim in the coming weeks, bypassing the years of lower-level talks that preceded the Iran nuclear deal. “The location is picked — the time and the date, everything is picked,” Trump said.
An Obama-era law requires Trump to make a decision on Iran sanctions every 120 days. The last time he faced that deadline, Trump waived the sanctions. Tuesday, he signed a presidential memorandum to pull out of the agreement, which allows him to impose the sanctions.
Iran and North Korea “are not formally linked, but clearly they’re linked in many people’s minds. They’re two rogue regimes on different parts of the timeline toward developing a nuclear program,” said Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst on North Korea now at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Because North Korea is further along on that timeline — it’s suspected of having a nuclear stockpile of as many as 60 warheads — Iran and other potential nuclear states will watch to see what Kim can get away with.
“The Trump administration has set a very high bar for success and painted itself into a corner through its very
“The North Koreans already think that the U.S. political system is fickle. We change our policy every four to eight years.”
Bruce Klingner Heritage Foundation
strong opposition — to not just the (Iran deal) but other agreements with North Korea,” Klingner said.
An agreement in 1994 with North Korea, negotiated by the Clinton administration, slowed North Korea’s nuclear program for eight years. The agreement collapsed during the George W. Bush administration — in part because of North Korean provocations, but the United States didn’t live up to its promise to help North Korea develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
“One would think that the U.S. pulling out of the Iran deal would undermine North Korea’s perception that it could trust the U.S. to maintain any kind of agreement with it,” Klingner said.
“The North Koreans already think that the U.S. political system is fickle,” he said. “We change our policy every four to eight years.”
That cuts both ways. Just as Iran learned that an American president might not maintain an agreement his predecessor made, both countries may calculate that the next president might give them a better deal.