Donald Trump hates the Iran nuclear deal. Brokered by the Obama administration and officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement has the stated purpose of preventing Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability. But the president believes the deal gave Iran what it desperately wanted—relief from economic sanctions—while providing few to no mechanisms for pressuring Tehran to stop expanding its nuclear program. So the administration has quietly started talking about negotiating a new deal instead.
Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has told him as much. “I’ve had very good conversations with Tillerson about it,” says Corker. “I know his goal is, again, to have a different agreement over time that prevents them from ever enriching [uranium].” A White House source characterizes the administration’s ideal outcome as neither scrapping the JCPOA nor modifying it. Instead, the administration would seek a new follow-on deal with buy-in from the European allies who signed onto the agreement in Vienna two years ago.
What would a new Iran deal look like? Generally speaking, it would do away with what the Trump administration views as the JCPOA’s most deadly flaw: the so-called sunset provisions that limit the length of time Iran faces restrictions on uranium enrichment. It would also impose more and broader nonnuclear sanctions, with tougher enforcement measures, on Iran for any failure to implement and comply with the deal. The details are unclear but will be worked out during the administration’s ongoing interagency Iran policy review, led by senior members of the president’s National Security Council.
But expert observers, including even some within the White House, say a new deal would be nearly impossible to achieve. Attempting to do so could enrage European allies, who have swooped into Iran to do business following the JCPOA’s sanctions relief. It could also give the Iranians another opening to accuse the United States of violating the current deal and acting in bad faith.
On the other hand, Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an outside adviser to the administration on the Iran deal, says the Europeans would welcome amendments to the JCPOA that make permanent the current deal’s sunset provisions. “The Europeans I talk with privately say that’s consistent with what they want to see,” says Dubowitz. The Trump administration, he adds, is “not going to be paralyzed by this perennial Washington desire to have the Europeans buy in to everything.”
Either way, the possibility of a better deal has driven the administration’s plan to recertify the JCPOA for a second time, in accordance with a congressional mandate, on July 17. The decision, which continues to provide Iran with sanctions relief for its alleged fulfillment of the terms of the deal, comes after an intense internal debate within the administration about the pros and cons of recertification and just days after leading hawks on Capitol Hill urged the president not to certify Tehran’s compliance.
“The Trump administration is currently conducting a comprehensive review of our Iran policy,” said a State Department spokesperson in an email to The Weekly Standard. “Once we have finalized our conclusions, we will meet the challenges Iran poses with clarity and conviction. The Trump Administration has made clear that at least until this review is completed, we will adhere to the JCPOA and will ensure that Iran is held strictly accountable to its requirements.”
The situation is exceedingly frustrating for President Trump, who promised on the campaign trail to “tear up” the Iran deal and called it his “number-one priority.” The administration already certified Iranian compliance with the deal’s terms in April, in accordance with a 2015 law that requires the State Department to confirm to Congress every 90 days that Iran is “fully implementing” the agreement, not in “material breach” of the agreement, and not acting against America’s national-security interests.
Experts disagree about whether Iran has fulfilled these requirements. The president believes the regime continues to act in violation of the spirit as well as specific provisions of the deal. Reports have shown that Iran has stockpiled heavy water in excess of the deal’s threshold, is capable of mass producing advanced nuclear centrifuges, and has repeatedly attempted to purchase nuclear technology illegally.
For these reasons, four hawkish Republican senators wrote a letter last week urging President Trump not to certify. “In April, you certified Iran’s compliance for the first 90-day period of the Trump administration,” reads the letter, signed by Senators Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, David Perdue, and Ted Cruz. “That certification was understandable, given the need to grant time for the interagency review of the JCPOA that you described in the certification letter you sent to House Speaker Paul Ryan. But now as we near the end of another 90-day review period, U.S. interests would be best served by a sober accounting of Iran’s JCPOA violations as well as the regime’s aggressive and destabilizing behavior.”
“He thinks they’re right,” says one White House source of President Trump’s thinking. But his secretary of state, who has been delegated the authority on recertification, seems to have won the internal argument for the moment.
Tillerson believes that because the deal was frontloaded with benefits for Iran, leaving it now would reduce the ability of the international community to seek compliance at a time when Iran is already reaping rewards for simply signing the deal. Secretary of Defense James Mattis backs Tillerson on recertification, while Steve Bannon has argued for abandoning the agreement. National security adviser H. R. McMaster is no supporter of the deal but has sought to facilitate debate among the principals rather than push the president in one direction or another. CIA director Mike Pompeo, an outspoken critic of the deal when he was in Congress, remains skeptical.
If recertification is a step to renegotiating a bad deal into a better one, the most hawkish members of the Trump administration—including and especially the president himself—will grit their teeth and go along. And with a more comprehensive Iran policy, the administration could pursue a strategy to satisfy congressional hawks like Marco Rubio.
“It’s not just about the certification,” says Rubio. “It’s also about what the follow-up plans are on the violations of missiles, violations on human rights, violations on supporting terrorism, cyber violations, maritime violations.”
Rubio adds: “We should not be prohibited from pursuing additional sanctions on those violations, and I think there are many in the White House that agree with that assessment.”
Michael Warren is a senior writer and Jenna Lifhits is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
