U.S. and European allies are developing plans for a new Iran policy in the event that President Trump decides to withdraw from a nuclear deal with the regime, a senior State Department official said Wednesday.
“We always have to prepare for any eventuality and so we are engaging in contingency planning because it would be irresponsible not to,” Brian Hook, the director of policy planning for the State Department, told reporters. “We are kind of dual-tracking this.”
Hook is Trump’s top negotiator in the effort to write a supplemental agreement to address “deficiencies” the president has identified in the original Iran deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. He acknowledged the “contingency planning” just days after a series of meetings with European allies, who worry that Trump’s proposed improvements amount to an attempt to rewrite the agreement in an impermissible way.
“We have had constructive meetings toward reaching an agreement, and we’ll see,” he said.
U.S. officials are pressing Europe to agree to an array of new pressure points on Iran, including new restrictions on the regime’s ballistic missile program and tighter inspections by international monitors. But the question of limiting Iran’s ability to develop nuclear material — a reversal of ‘sunset clauses’ contained in the JCPOA that allow Iran to conduct some nuclear operations — is a key sticking point between the allies.
“I don’t want to get into the substance of our negotiations,” Hook said when asked about the sunset clauses. “Where we have agreement, we are capturing the agreement, and where we have differences we are working to narrow them to see if we can reach an agreement.”
European officials are reportedly mulling new sanctions on Iran that are designed to target the regime’s ballistic missile programs and punish its intervention in the Syrian civil war. Trump’s allies doubt that will convince the president to remain in the deal absent an agreement to roll back the nuclear sunset clauses as well.
“The administration will say it’s a good start but not enough; the president’s not screwing around about this,” a veteran Middle East adviser close to the White House told the Washington Examiner. “The Europeans have to agree to fix all three fatal flaws in the deal, which means they have to agree to reimpose the specific sanctions lifted by the deal if the Iranians ever go beyond the current restrictions, or keep developing ballistic missiles, or block inspections of military sites.”
Hook was agnostic about whether they would come to terms. “I can’t predict whether we will reach an agreement with them or not,” he said.
But he was candid about what would happen if they don’t.
“This is an agreement that has many deficiencies,” he said. “We think that these deficiencies are such threats to national security that we can’t allow the deal to remain in place without the supplemental agreement to address its deficiencies.”
