The Iran nuclear deal violated the bumper sticker rule of American politics: If really put to the test, the argument that best fits on a bumper sticker is most likely to prevail.
To oppose the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action all one had to do was note the pallets of cash; the shouts of “Death to America!;” the place at the negotiating table for ayatollahs who have been our enemies from the 1979 hostage crisis to the Iranian-made IEDs that killed U.S. soldiers in Iraq; the numerous loopholes in its provisions containing Tehran’s ambitions.
Proponents had to make complicated arguments about uranium enrichment; intelligence assessments and nuclear breakout times (this time with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq cutting against them rather than their political foes); the problems posed by our alliance with Saudi Arabia.
A keen student of marketing, if not arms control diplomacy, President Trump recognized that money for mullahs was a less saleable proposition than cracking down on Hezbollah’s pals. The agreement failed the bumper sticker test in almost every particular, thus Trump exited stage right.
Unfortunately, arguments that fit on bumper stickers are often wrong.
The Iran deal was deeply flawed. The Obama administration was too eager to consummate it and tendentious at best in selling it to the American people. They did not succeed at all in selling it to Congress and thus did not submit it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, a move that would have made it more secure from Trump’s desire to repeal and replace his predecessor’s handiwork wherever possible.
President Obama often married defensible policies — such as a negotiated settlement of the Iranian nuclear question and the easing of ineffectual trade restrictions on Cuba — with attempts at a broader rapprochement with hostile regimes that was premature.
Even so, it is entirely possible that the limited insight that the deal gave the U.S. into Iran’s nuclear machinations and the modest constraints it imposed on them in fact represented the most that could be realistically achieved. The pact delayed an Iranian bomb even if it couldn’t prevent one without the costs of military strikes that would do much the same.
Even if a “better deal” was theoretically possible then, the Trump administration is proceeding with less leverage and fewer allies now. It is commerce with Europe that Iran seeks. Can Trump really persuade Europe to agree to new sanctions that hurt its own companies as well as Tehran — or impose such sanctions himself? If not, the pressure on Iran will be less rather than more.
Trump could have kept up the strategic ambiguity that was a hallmark of his foreign-policy rhetoric on the campaign trail, keeping the ayatollahs guessing about what he was ultimately going to do as well as what they needed to do keep the foreign investments flowing. He has instead broken more decisively with the deal.
“We’re out of the deal,” national security adviser John Bolton told reporters on Tuesday. “We’re out of the deal.” Comically, a journalist then asked, “Are we out of the deal?”
“You got it,” Bolton replied.
The best hope is that the Iranian government’s position with its own people is now more fragile, to the point that it cannot survive the encouragement of opposition demonstrators plus the reimposition of so-called crippling sanctions.
“The Iranian people must lead; the West must support,” writes Bloomberg’s Eli Lake.
Yet there are risks. The people and the government do not live in hermetically sealed containers. Like military action, the sanctions can bite their intended beneficiaries as well as their intended victims.
When the U.S. has started talking about toppling regimes, it has in recent years had trouble knowing when to stop. Trump has frequently castigated the past decade and a half of intervention in the Middle East, but both his Iran talk and personnel choices threaten to ratify at least some of the core assumptions driving the policies he dislikes: a shift away from fighting Sunni terrorism, involvement in other countries’ revolutions and the at least tacit embrace of preventive war as a nonproliferation tool even as rogue states increasingly view nuclear capabilities as insurance against regime change.
Our biggest constraint is Trump’s confidence in his deal-making skills, which is on par with Obama’s faith in his oratorical gifts.
Whatever the answer, it likely won’t fit on a bumper sticker. Though, “Honk if you don’t want another Iraq,” is a good one.
