Six months into its existence, the Trump administration seems unsure what its stance toward Iran ought to be. That’s less because the current president and his advisers don’t know what they think about Iran’s leaders than because the previous president committed the United States to a reckless and credulous agreement—the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, by which the Iranians promised to forgo their nuclear ambitions in exchange for the removal of economic sanctions. The Islamic Republic never intended to keep its word, of course, as this magazine and many others repeatedly warned when the deal was signed. The Iranians have vastly exceeded the limits on advanced centrifuges and heavy water production imposed by the deal, and they won’t give inspectors the access to the nuclear facilities required by the agreement.
President Trump has been appropriately skeptical of every claim out of Tehran, yet this week he chose to recertify Iran’s compliance with the terms of the agreement. To their credit, administration officials show no inclination, as their predecessors in the Obama administration did, to expect the truth from a regime that brutalizes its citizens, funds terrorism around the world, and abets savagery in Syria. They assure us that the decision to recertify is best understood as a way to maintain diplomatic leverage with the other signatories of the deal (Britain, Germany, France, Russia, China, and the EU) while the administration formulates a comprehensive Iran policy. By saying two things at once—that Iran is in “technical compliance” with the nuclear deal and yet is “unquestionably in default of the spirit of the agreement,” as national security adviser H. R. McMaster put it—the administration can buy time while it figures out the best way to deal with a rogue regime.
It’s a defensible argument, but we’re skeptical. The more time the administration takes, the more time Iran has to build a nuclear weapon and an accompanying delivery system. In any case, what sort of leverage does the Trump White House really think it can exercise with the deal’s other parties? A nuclear Iran would diminish American influence in the Middle East and thus suit Russia and China just fine.
There are other, less defensible arguments for the president’s reluctance to dismantle the nuclear agreement with Iran, as he promised he would during the campaign. One of those arguments, as Emanuele Ottolenghi reveals elsewhere in these pages, is jobs.
The easing of economic sanctions brought about by the 2015 nuclear deal opened a lucrative market to aerospace companies, and Boeing struck a $16.6 billion deal with the theretofore sanctioned Iran Air to build 80 passenger jets. (Its European rival, Airbus, agreed to sell 100 planes to Iran Air, and deliveries began in January.) Boeing had aggressively supported the Obama administration’s negotiations. It argued that the agreement would spur the creation of thousands of jobs and promised that the planes it wished to sell to Iran would only be used for civilian air travel, per the agreement’s terms.
The first of these arguments is suspect—though it’s likely to appeal to Trump’s “America First” instincts. Boeing has been laying off American workers and outsourcing its manufacturing; indeed the company announced hundreds of layoffs in April of this year, and in 2016 cut its workforce by a full 8 percent. Such is the folly of modern politicians’ fixation on “jobs” rather than economic growth. It’s far more politically beneficial to proclaim jobs numbers than it is to boast of long-term economic growth—even if the jobs a president or a governor boasts of having “created” or “saved” today are cut or moved overseas tomorrow.
The second and more serious argument, though, is utterly bogus. The Islamic Republic of Iran makes no distinction between civilian and military uses of its resources, and the regime’s “civilian” passenger jets—as Ottolenghi shows—have been routinely commandeered by the Iranian military to support the regime’s proxy in Syria, Bashar al-Assad. Thus the Iran deal engineered by Barack Obama yields yet more ruin: As if it weren’t bad enough that the deal enriched Iran’s coffers, legitimized its brutality, and allowed it to work more conveniently toward nuclear capability, American wealth now facilitates the regime’s support of butchery in Syria.
These revelations are appalling, but they were foreseeable. The naïveté that drove American policymakers to believe Iran would use its Western-purchased planes to transport tourists and businessmen and not brigades of armed militiamen was of a piece with the naïveté that drove them to think they could “decouple” Iran’s nuclear ambitions from the regime’s criminality. The absurdity of that delusion came to light again this week. Even as the Trump administration reluctantly agreed to validate Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal while making it clear that Iran has not complied, the country’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, accused the United States of violating the terms of the agreement—he was unclear on the details—and his government announced a 10-year sentence on an American citizen for “spying” when every indication suggests that Princeton history postgraduate Xiyue Wang was merely reading historical documents from the Qajar dynasty. No ordinary person would conclude that this is a government with which one would be wise to sign an accord.
“Never ever ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran,” Donald Trump said in 2015 when he was running for president. We couldn’t agree more. But now it’s in his power to do something about it, and so far he’s deferring to advisers who’d prefer to wait—and then perhaps wait some more.While America buys time, Iran exports terror and steps ever closer to becoming a nuclear power. At some point, there will be no more time to buy.
