As had been speculated, President Trump has decided to kick over the sandcastle called the JCPOA, which happened while I was on vacation. His reasons, according to this WaPo article, appear to be specious (or he’s desperately confused, take your pick), and in some cases, I’d judge them not to be relevant. But how do others see things? Former Senator Jim Talent (R-MO) on National Review:
I’m not saying the regime is about to fall, but it is overextended, and that makes it peculiarly vulnerable now to the re-imposition of American sanctions. One of the few good national-security developments in the last 15 years is that the United States has figured out how to make sanctions particularly effective. You target the banks. The world trades in dollars, which means that every transaction — including the sale of oil — has to surface eventually in a bank which cannot operate if it must disconnect from the American financial system.
Yes, the rogues can and do launder cash and pursue other illicit activities, such as the drug trade, to get some resources. But you can’t run a country on that, not for long anyway, and especially not when you want your country to be the hegemon of the Middle East. That was why the Iranians were so desperate for a deal three years ago; the tough sanctions which Congress passed over the opposition of the Obama administration had brought them to their knees.
Let’s see what happens now as the sanctions go back into force. The Europeans will complain, but Trump can mollify them by cutting them a little more slack in his tariff policy. The Iranians may promote a conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, but that was coming anyway, and the Israelis wouldn’t still be around if they weren’t a very tough nut to crack. Besides, Hezbollah has a lot on its hands already in Syria.
He thinks Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize if this works. Someone who breaks a deal should be a prize winner? Talent also likes to dance around the fine points, such as Iran’s agreement not to ever build nuclear weapons.
Kevin Drum in the adroitly title post “Trump Frees Iran to Pursue Nuclear Weapons“:
Anyway, I guess we’re now back to the North Korea strategy: keep ratcheting up sanctions in hopes that their economy will collapse before they successfully build a nuclear bomb. That worked great! I’m sure it will work great with Iran too.
The North Korean population appears to be completely cowed, while the Iranians have had their tastes of freedom – the situations are not really analogous.
Dan Drezner on PostEverything:
Reinstating sanctions undercuts the U.N. Security Council, as well as our European allies that are signatories to the JCPOA. But the only way Iran feels any uptick in economic pressure is through secondary sanctions pressuring European countries to scale back their trade and investment in Iran. So, in essence, the Trump administration is deciding that the way they will improve the Iran deal is by threatening to sanction our NATO allies.
Nicholas Miller on Monkey Cage:
President Trump has argued for a better deal — one in which, for instance, Iran accepts permanent limits on its enrichment program or its missile development. But is that realistic?
A look at past nonproliferation diplomacy with Iran suggests that any U.S. effort to win still more concessions would fail. Three factors made the 2015 concessions possible: an uptick in Iranian nuclear provocations, a powerful multilateral coalition to stop those and domestic receptivity in Iran. None of those conditions exists now.
In particular, Nicholas notes that Russia is no longer willing to play along, and they were a key part of the JCPOA. Miller’s conclusion?
It took 30 years of diplomacy and an unlikely confluence of factors to get Iran to agree to the JCPOA’s limits on its nuclear program. Attempting to achieve a better deal without any of these favorable conditions would be quixotic at best.
But characteristic of Trump’s approach to damn near anything.
The Iranian government is unhappy, of course, as they’ve been certified as being in compliance. From the Tehran Times is the transcript of the Iranian letter to the United Nations:
As you are aware, on 8 May 2018, the President of the United States announced his unilateral and unlawful decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in material breach of Security Council Resolution 2231 (2015) to which the JCPOA is annexed. Simultaneously, he signed a Presidential Memorandum instructing relevant U.S. authorities “to cease the participation of the United States in the JCPOA” and “to re-impose all United States sanctions lifted or waived in connection with the JCPOA”, thus committing multiple cases of “significant non-performance” with the JCPOA, and in clear non-compliance with Security Council Resolution 2231. These acts constitute a complete disregard for international law and the United Nations Charter, undermine the principle of peaceful settlement of disputes, endanger multilateralism and its institutions, indicate a regress to the failed and disastrous era of unilateralism, and encourage intransigence and illegality.
There’s more – more than I cared to read – at the link, so make of it what you will. I think that, handled properly, the Iranian government can make this into a propaganda victory. However, it’s not clear how much of a problem the Iranian hard-liners, destitute of the Presidency for a second Presidential term (4 years) and deeply resentful of the JCPOA, will pose for the Rouhani Administration – and keep in mind that President Rouhani is subject to the will of Supreme Leader Khamenei, who is more conservative than the reform-speaking Rouhani. It’s no slam-dunk for the Iranian government, but it’s certainly an opportunity to weaken American influence globally.
On Lawfare Jack Goldsmith explains the legal basis of the original agreement:
The particular manner in which President Obama crafted the Iran deal paved the way for President Trump to withdraw from it. Obama made the deal on his own presidential authority, in the face of significant domestic opposition, without seeking or receiving approval from the Senate or the Congress. He was able to do this, and to skirt constitutional requirements for senatorial or congressional consent, because he made the deal as a political commitment rather than a binding legal obligation. As Curt Bradley and I recently explained, a political commitment “imposes no obligation under international law,” a nation “incurs no state responsibility for its violation,” and thus “a successor President is not bound by a previous President’s political commitment under either domestic or international law and can thus legally disregard it at will.”
Which is to say, the GOP’s control of the Senate, and their desperate series of NO! to anything President Obama tried to do made this approach necessary – and necessarily fragile.
J. Dana Stuster on Lawfare:
Trump suggested in his statement on Tuesday that the goal of withdrawing from the JCPOA is to eventually secure a new agreement that goes further than the current deal. “The fact is they [the Iranian government] are going to want to make a new and lasting deal, one that benefits all of Iran and the Iranian people,” Trump said on Tuesday. “When they do, I am ready, willing, and able.” What that might entail exactly is unclear, but administration officials have often expressed frustration that Iran retained any enrichment capacity and that the deal did not include constraints on Iran’s ballistic missile development. The Obama administration, when the JCPOA was negotiated, argued that eliminating Iran’s civil nuclear research and its missile program were unrealistic concessions that the Iranian regime would not accept—and that was when the United States had the cooperation of its negotiating partners and an international sanctions campaign on its side. The Trump administration seems to think it can get more concessions with less leverage. How? There is no plan. The United States is now lurching toward a direct confrontation with Iran with an ad hoc strategy.
Don’t take my word for it. That comes straight from the State Department. In a background briefing on Tuesday, a befuddled reporter pressed two State officials for how the United States would work with its partners to constrain Iran’s nuclear program now that the White House had shot down the supplementary agreement being worked on by France, Germany, and Britain. The State Department’s response: “We did not talk about a Plan B in our discussions because we were focused on negotiating a supplemental agreement, so we did not—we did not talk about Plan B.” The administration does not have a plan for how to make the sanctions, which they valued more than the agreement and their relations with Europe, work. It also does not have a plan for how else to pressure Iran. The Washington Free Beacon reports that officials are now mulling a proposal from the Security Studies Group—a small think tank founded by veterans of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, a hotbed of paranoid and misinformed policy—that advocates the Trump administration adopt a clear policy of regime change in Iran, including support for groups trying to destabilize the government. “U.S. policy toward Iran currently does not publicly articulate two components vital to success: That a new birth of liberty based in self-determination for the Iranian people should be official policy; and that military action should be anticipated if other measures fail,” the paper states.
This entire Administration appears to have no concept of how to plan – but they’re mostly amateurs who’ve learned contempt for government at the teat of the conservative media and haven’t the wit to think for themselves. They’re hip-deep in serious business with one of the most deluded men in the country at the helm. We can only hope he scares everyone so much that they keep out of the way of our madly careening ship of state.
Stewart Baker discussing a podcast on The Volokh Conspiracy:
Speaking of cyberattacks, you’d better buckle up, because Iranian retribution for US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is probably being prepared as you read this. And according to a highly educational Recorded Future/Insikt report, Iran’s semi-privatized hacking ecosystem is likely to err on the side of escalation.
And given the vulnerabilities built into the Internet, it could get messy. But that might be intemperate of them, since it’d be necessary to leave a fingerprint behind in order for the message to be loud and clear.
And China? From WaPo:
New freight train connections usually have limited potential to make global headlines, but a new service launched from China on Thursday could be different. Its cargo — 1,150 tons of sunflower seeds — may appear unremarkable, but its destination is far more interesting: Tehran, the capital of Iran.
The launch of a new rail connection between Bayannur, in China’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, and Iran was announced by the official news agency Xinhua on Thursday. Its exact path was not described in the dispatch, but travel times will apparently be shortened by at least 20 days in comparison to cargo ship. The sunflower seeds are now expected to arrive in Tehran in about two weeks.
A clear signal that China may ignore U.S. sanctions – a move that may have influenced Trump’s decision to succor China’s ZTE Communications firm today, a move which otherwise appears to be madness. Trump may twist himself into a pretzel trying to make his withdrawal from the JCPOA pay off.
