“My number one priority,” Donald Trump said to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee on March 21, 2016, “is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” Six months into Trump’s presidency, it’s looking more like number 10 or 20.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported last week that the White House had decided to recertify Iranian compliance with the terms of the 2015 deal negotiated between the Obama administration and the Iranian government (cumbersomely known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). And today, accordingly, the administration will take that course of action. But the debate goes on at the highest levels of our government.
The debate isn’t between those who favor the deal itself and those who don’t. No one in the current administration, thankfully, thinks it was a good idea to lift economic sanctions on Iran for the promise that it wouldn’t pursue the development of nuclear weapons. The disagreement, rather, is between those who favor scuttling the deal altogether (strategist Steve Bannon, CIA director Mike Pompeo) and those who think the U.S. can work to counter the Iranian regime most effectively by keeping the deal in place as leverage (Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis).
The president is deeply uneasy about recertifying Iranian compliance. He’s right, for the excellent reason that Iran is not, in fact, complying with the agreement. As Sens. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, David Perdue, and Marco Rubio pointed out in a letter to Tillerson last week, the regime has exceeded the number of uranium-enrichment centrifuges and levels of heavy water production it’s permitted under the agreement; it’s aggressively trying to attain nuclear and missile technology outside the terms of the deal; and it’s refusing to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect its nuclear operations.
The White House claims Iran is in “technical compliance” with the JCPOA’s terms, but this sounds like a bit of legal legerdemain that allows the administration to say two things at once: Iran is bound by the agreement it’s openly flouting. In any case, neither Tillerson nor anyone else in the administration seems seriously to believe in the Iran deal’s merits and utility. The president wisely rejects his predecessor’s dreamy belief that we can separate the question of Iranian compliance with JCPOA from the larger problem of the regime’s behavior—as if Tehran could go on supporting terrorism and aiding rogue regimes but somehow keep its word not to pursue nuclear weapons. On Monday, before explaining the decision to recertify the agreement, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster listed the regime’s offenses: support of terrorism, aid to the Assad regime, malevolence toward Israel, cyber-attacks on the U.S. and its allies, brutal treatment of dissenters, and “arbitrary detention of foreigners, including U.S. citizens, on special charges and without due process.”
As if to prove this latter point, the Iranian regime announced on Sunday that it had sentenced an American student to 10 years in prison for “spying”—Princeton’s Xiyue Wang disappeared months ago while doing historical research for his doctoral dissertation.
McMaster was sharply critical of the Obama administration’s “myopic focus on Iran’s nuclear program to the exclusion of Iran’s many other malign activities” and insisted that the decision to recertify the agreement is part of a policy to address “the totality of the Iran problem.” Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin announced that Treasury is using its discretion outside the JCPOA to impose economic sanctions on seven entities and five individuals for aiding Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and other Iranian criminal organizations.
We appreciate the difficulty of what the administration is trying to accomplish here, but the sheer disingenuousness is impossible to ignore. Even as administration officials criticize Iran for its bellicosity and repeated violations of the nuclear agreement, recertifying that agreement requires the Trump administration to declare that the “suspension of sanctions related to Iran pursuant to the agreement is … vital to the national security interests of the United States.”
Administration officials tell us that this recertification is pro forma, a congressionally mandated box-checking that buys the White House time to complete a comprehensive policy review. The real debate about Iran policy continues. Fair enough, but we strongly suspect the same reasons for keeping up the conceit will exist 90 days from now, when the next recertification is due. Tillerson has said his goal is a new deal, or at least significant provisions to strengthen the existing one. But it’s unclear how the Trump administration, having paraded its American First foreign policy throughout Europe in recent weeks, will convince other parties to the Iran deal—some of whom have strong economic ties to Tehran—to sign up for an Iran deal, part deux.
Donald Trump was engaging in a bit of campaign hyperbole when he promised to make dismantling the Iran deal his first order of business as president. The longer he waits to formulate a comprehensive Iran policy, the more likely it is that Iran will become the top priority on its own.
