Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is continuing to blacklist Iranian entities in the lame-duck period after the election as Iran hawks urge President-elect Joe Biden to use President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign as “leverage” in expected talks with the regime.
“It’s a crazy idea to think that you’re going to get back into a deal that permitted a clean pathway for the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon by which they could terrorize the entire world,” Pompeo told conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt. “Going back to it would just be crazy.”
Thus, Pompeo almost seemed to warn Biden’s team against a mere restoration of the 2015 nuclear deal, although he has avoided contradicting Trump’s continuing challenge of the apparent results of the 2020 presidential elections. Yet, Pompeo also calls attention to the central issue of any impending negotiation with Iran: Will the next administration try to force Tehran to surrender its ability to enrich nuclear weapons material?
“Even if you went back to the [deal] and even if the Iranians were willing to return … this newly enriched uranium, you would not have solved these really fundamental questions of whether Iran is going to be permitted to violate long-term commitments it has made to the world community,” Special Representative for Iran Elliott Abrams told the Associated Press on Thursday while traveling in the United Arab Emirates. “All of this pressure should be brought to bear to get Iran to change its conduct.”
Those statements come just days after the Treasury Department blacklisted a supply chain network “that facilitated the procurement of sensitive goods, including U.S.-origin electronic components” for an Iranian company connected to the production of “military communication systems, avionics, information technology, electronic warfare, and missile launchers.” That designation is expected to be part of a “steady stream of sanctions through the end of the administration,” according to Fox News.
The tightening enforcement brings to mind past suggestions that Pompeo try to build a “sanctions wall” around Iran that constrains Biden’s options, although the nature of the sanctions process makes it difficult to manufacture such penalties for political reasons.
“There’s certainly diplomatic leeway in whether or not to designate, but designations don’t come out of thin air: They are based on hard fact and intelligence, and they can take weeks or months to process, so these likely were in the works long before the election,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin said. “Rather than complain, his team might thank Trump because they are building leverage which he can then cash in should he again want to strike a deal with Iran.”
Biden’s attitude toward the new sanctions may depend on his approach to the deal. The pact has been lionized by alumni of Barack Obama’s administration, but the passage of time and accumulation of controversies makes it difficult to restore the status quo.
“My guess is what we’re going to see is an early push around diplomacy and some efforts to try to get both sides back into greater compliance with their obligations under the nuclear deal, but not necessarily a full footed jump back into the JCPOA entirely,” the Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney, a senior Middle East expert, told reporters this week. “That will probably translate into something that looks like an interim nuclear deal.”
Iranian officials are expected to seek compensation for the economic harm inflicted by Trump’s withdrawal, a concession that would ensure aggressive Republican condemnation if Biden seemed poised to agree. Yet, Iran hawks argue that Biden should use the Trump-era sanctions to press for a deal that eliminates the regime’s capacity to enrich fissile material. The right to enrich was the key concession that Iran obtained under the previous pact, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern critics of the deal.
“This is a real sticking point: it’s very, very difficult to envision a deal that actually addresses people’s fears about proliferation, if Iran has the continued ability to enrich,” the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano said. “The first result of that would be, you’re likely to see it as the Arab countries fail on normalization, and, and then, they’re going to turn to China.”
Saudi Arabia has partnered with China to build “a facility for extracting uranium yellowcake from uranium ore,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. The alarm that information caused among Senate Democrats could influence the Biden administration’s approach to restoring and altering the Iran deal, regardless of their philosophical disagreements with the outgoing Trump team.
“An Iran deal that fails to mitigate enrichment is going to result in a proliferated Middle East, it’s going to destroy any hope of integrating the collective security and economic integration in the region,” Carafano said. “And it’s going to tip the balance of the region over to China.”
Or as Pompeo put it: “If you undermine the confidence that the Gulf states have that the United States will be a partner for peace in the Middle East, we are in for a very difficult, long time.”
