President Trump’s anticipated decision to exit the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran comes as his administration seeks cooperation with North Korea, and sources close to the process say the president is somewhat worried about the long-term consequences.
Trump has spent months threatening to ditch the deal by reinstating economic sanctions against Iran when they expire on May 12. He has often seized on the agreement’s inclusion of so-called “sunset clauses” that fail to permanently prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was dead the day of Trump’s inauguration. It’s the equivalent of burying a body 18 months ago and all you’re really doing is throwing a bit more dirt on the grave,” said Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest. “The Iranians have essentially been free to build their delivery system for 10 to 12 years from now, when this [agreement] goes away, and this administration was never going to tolerate that.”
People familiar Trump’s thinking on Iran say he and his national security team are confident in their ability to withstand the backlash for exiting the agreement, which they believe will last for “one to two weeks tops,” one source close to the White House said.
“One of the things they always say to me is that this is just a big band-aid for the problem, which they want to tackle at its infancy,” the source said. “What the administration is really concerned about is that scrapping the deal is part of trying to confront a growing Iranian power. They know our European partners are going to be aggravated, but that it’s not going to cause an existential crisis in our relations because even they (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) are starting to realize the shortcomings of the agreement.”
A senior National Security Council official declined to comment on how exiting the JCPOA would impact the Trump administration’s European partners, saying only that Trump’s forthcoming decision would be “based on the best interests of the American people and U.S. national security.”
Should Trump choose to pull out of the deal, its collapse would occur just weeks after he was urged to preserve the agreement in a pair of bilateral meetings with his German and French counterparts. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week the only possible scenario in which Trump would remain a party to the nuclear deal would be if negotiations with European partners yield tangible results.
“There is still work to do,” Pompeo told reporters during a Middle East tour, noting that some progress has been made. “They said ‘Great, we will support you if you get the fixes.’”
British Prime Minister Theresa May made a statement after Pompeo’s comments , following conversations with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “They committed to continue working closely together and with the U.S. on how to tackle the range of challenges that Iran poses — including those issues that a new deal might cover,” May said.
Administration officials have focused on three key changes that would expand the agreement and make permanent its restrictions on uranium enrichment. They want the sunset clause erased, limitations placed on Iran’s ballistic missile program, and Tehran’s support for terrorism in the region addressed.
“The long-term challenge is the way the Obama administration sold this deal in that they hoped it would change Iran’s behavior — that somehow they would bring Iran out from the cold and they weren’t going to sponsor terrorism anymore or cause problems in Iraq and Syria,” Kazianis said, adding that “none of that has happened, which underscores the need for change” in the form of a new or expanded deal.
Though defenders of the agreement acknowledge that Iran’s behavior remains a major threat to international security, they claim the deal was only ever intended to deal with the regime’s nuclear program.
“Am I concerned about their continued bad behavior with regards to ballistic missiles and their activity in Syria and Yemen? You bet. Do I think we need to take action to deal with those problems? Absolutely. Do I think pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal is going to help us deal with those challenges? The answer is no,” said Frank Rose, a former State Department official who dealt with arms control under the Obama administration.
Rose urged the Trump administration to instead focus on improving missile defense architecture in the Middle East by enhancing “interoperability with our [Gulf Cooperation Council] allies.”
Beyond the outstanding issues with Iran and its behavior in the region, some administration officials and national security experts are concerned about the impact withdrawing from the nuclear deal could have on historic negotiations with North Korea, which are expected to culminate in a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un this month.
“These things are all interconnected. Things that happen in one region tend to have impacts on other regions,” Rose said, adding that other countries “expect the United States to keep its word… especially when the other party is in compliance.”
Though Trump has said exiting the agreement would send “the right message” to the Kim regime, the senior NSC official cautioned that ongoing negotiations with North Korea are “separate and unrelated” to the president’s decision on Iran.
“I think the North Koreans are watching, but I think they are smart enough to realize that the challenges posed by Iran are very different than the challenges posed by North Korea,” Kazianis said. “They’re completely different regimes; North Korea’s biggest goal is regime survival.”
Newly-appointed White House national security adviser John Bolton, a steadfast critic of the JCPOA, said recently the administration’s goal is to model its negotiations with North Korea after Libya’s decision in 2003 to dismantle its nuclear weapons program and permit unannounced inspections by U.S. officials.
“We’re also looking at what North Korea itself has committed to previously,” Bolton told CBS in late April, adding that Trump is “determined to see this opportunity through” to denuclearize the Korean peninsula.
Bolton’s decision to join the administration came less than a year after he penned a column for National Review titled, “How to get out of the Iran nuclear deal,” which many viewed at the time as a memo intended for the president.
“Both North Korea and Iran realize they’re now dealing with the toughest, most hardline person” when it comes to non-proliferation agreements, Kazianis said in reference to the notoriously hawkish Bolton. “Iran’s economy is not in the best shape. They went through a bunch of protests earlier this year. The country’s current leaders have lot of pressure on them [to agree to an expanded version of the nuclear deal], especially with the looming threat of renewed economic sanctions.”
A senior White House official suggested Israeli intelligence on Iran’s defunct nuclear program, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented in public last week, has also impacted the president’s thinking on Iran ahead of the May 12 deadline to waive or reinstate nuclear sanctions.
“Now, given what we know about Iran not telling the truth about just how far along their nuclear program was during original negotiations, it makes it that much more important to protect the United States,” the official said, adding that Trump “has the right not to stay in [the nuclear agreement] as a duly elected president… just as Obama had the right to make the deal because he was a duly elected president.”
