By Doug Mills
If you find yourself unsure what to think about President Trump’s decision to exit the Iran nuclear accord, and to violate its terms by imposing broad sanctions that the United States had pledged to lift, you are not alone. Most Americans say they do not know enough to say whether their country should stick with the deal. Most express distrust of Iran, which feeds suspicion of any agreement involving the country. At the same time, foreign policy and arms control experts are warning of dire consequences from Mr. Trump’s decision. It can be difficult to know what to believe.
What follows, then, is a clear, straightforward explanation of why typically even-keeled foreign policy hands are calling this, as the CNN host Christiane Amanpour put it, “possibly the greatest deliberate act of self-harm and self-sabotage in geo-strategic politics in the modern era.”
1) This sets up a major economic conflict with Europe
The first crisis will probably not be with Iran, but rather with European countries. Formally, the Iran nuclear deal has seven parties: Iran, the European Union, and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States). But it helps to mentally divide those parties into three subsets: Iran, which gave up most of its nuclear program and accepted invasive inspections; The United States, which acts as de facto enforcer of the agreement; and the other countries, which reward Iran’s concessions (or, more accurately, lift punishments for its past nuclear activities) by removing the sanctions that had crippled Iran’s economy.
The thing to understand is that American trade with Iran is not worth very much, so Washington’s sanctions do relatively little damage on their own. For Iran, the really valuable trade is with Europe and, to a lesser degree, with Asia. This arrangement puts Mr. Trump in a bind. If he simply exits the agreement, then Iran gets to keep most of the economic benefits of the deal, while facing less risk if they cheat on the nuclear restrictions, knowing that the United States no longer has the legal standing to enforce them. It’s nearly all upside for Tehran.
That is the arrangement that Iranian and European officials say they will now seek. So if Mr. Trump really wants to kill the deal and to reimpose the global sanctions that were once in place he needs to persuade the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese to go along.
He is promising to do this by imposing “secondary sanctions” against any entity that does business with Iranian institutions that are subject to American penalties. In other words, the United States would impose sanctions on European companies and banks its own allies and trading partners to force them to stop doing business with Iran. Airbus, a plane maker based in France, stands to lose contracts worth $22 billion, for instance. European Union officials have said they are prepared to protect European trade with Iran both for financial reasons and to keep the nuclear agreement in place by issuing special “blocking” laws that prohibit compliance with American trade restrictions.
The European Union is, collectively, the United States’ largest trading partner. If Mr. Trump imposes secondary sanctions on European companies and banks, but those firms and banks continue to do business with Iran, then two things will happen both of them quite bad for the United States. First, Mr. Trump may get a worst-case-scenario version of the Iran nuclear agreement, in which Tehran sees the deal’s economic dividends but feels less need to comply with nuclear restrictions that Washington no longer has standing to enfore. Furthermore Mr. Trump’s secondary sanctions would disrupt trade between the United States and Europe, hurting the American economy and severely damaging diplomatic relations with Europe, not to mention with Russia and China.
2) Nuclear restrictions on Iran begin to fall away
International agreements prohibit any country other than the five world powers from developing a nuclear weapon. (A few countries have subsequently violated this.) But the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran imposes a special set of restrictions that apply only to Iran and that are generally considered the most stringent in the world. With Mr. Trump’s decision, the United States has no legal standing to enforce those restrictions. And because the United States was the agreement’s de facto enforcer, Iran has less reason to worry about complying. This could mean one of two things. If Iran and the other signatories succeed in keeping the deal in place without American involvement, then Tehran will have more freedom to cheat, knowing that the remaining signatories the European Union, Russia and China are less likely to punish it.
But if Mr. Trump succeeds in killing the deal entirely, then Iran will be within its rights to resume work that stops just short of building a nuclear bomb. The restrictions on Iran’s nuclear enrichment, uranium mining and plutonium production will all fall away. The country could develop what nuclear experts sometimes call a turns crew capability a warhead that is effectively one turn of a screw away from completion. Ehud Barak, at the time serving as Israel’s defense minister, once said this would be a “zone of immunity” in which Iran would have an effective nuclear deterrent.
Perhaps more consequentially, inspection and monitoring regimes would fall away. Without international inspections on Iran’s uranium mines and plutonium plant, it would be much easier for the country to siphon off those nuclear fuels to secret enrichment facilities, where it can stockpile weapons-grade fuel in secret. And without inspections on Iran’s centrifuge research and production centers, it can build up thousands of advanced centrifuges without the world knowing. Even if the inspections remain, the absence of threatened American enforcement means that Iran may feel that cheating is less of a risk. Likewise, with Mr. Trump’s threats against Iran, the perceived benefits of cheating, and building up a nuclear deterrent like the North Korean program that brought Mr. Trump to the table, may appear higher.
The world’s ability to credibly deter such a program has just declined, and its ability to detect such a program will be drastically weakened if Mr. Trump succeeds in killing the nuclear agreement entirely.
3) Weakened American leverage with adversaries, starting with North Korea
Mr. Trump’s decision to violate an agreement that the United States signed only three years earlier despite presenting no evidence of an Iranian violation of that agreement sends a concerning message to foreign leaders. The United States, this implies, cannot be trusted to keep commitments past the next presidential election. Some officials have made this point explicitly. Brian Hook, the State Department policy planning director, told NPR last month that the nuclear deal was “a political commitment by an administration that’s no longer in office.”
This is an odd position to take just as the administration settles in for negotiations with North Korea, whose nuclear and missile programs are far more advanced than Iran’s. It tells Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, to assume that American commitments are good only through the 2020 election, so he should not commit to anything past that himself. And it tells Mr. Kim that the United States cannot be trusted, so he should quietly hedge against any deal that he signs. “Killing the Iran deal would confirm Kim’s bias and all but ensure that any deal the U.S. reaches with North Korea will be one in which Kim feels the need to cheat, if he negotiates one at all,” said Van Jackson, a political scientist who studies American-North Korean relations.
Other would-be rogue nuclear powers face similar lessons. Give up your weapons in exchange for American promises, as Iran did, and you’ll be punished. Defy the Americans and race toward a bomb, as the North Koreans did, and the Americans will be forced to respect you. At the same time this will play into the world view of hard-liners in countries like Iran, where there is a split between hard-liners who say the Americans cannot be trusted and soft-liners who call for diplomacy. Polling suggests that Iranians have grown more skeptical of diplomacy with the United States and less supportive of soft-line leaders like Hassan Rouhani, the current president. The hard-liners had opposed the agreement and pushed for rogue nuclear development, so boosting those voices makes such an outcome likelier.
Even authoritarian governments must listen to public opinion. In Iran, public support for Mr. Rouhani and rapprochement with the West helped to create momentum for the agreement and quiet hard-liners. Shifting Iranian opinion toward hard-liners makes another agreement more difficult a dynamic likely to play out in other countries split over how to deal with the United States.
4) American global leadership under question
The potential consequences for American influence go well beyond rogue states. The Iran deal, after all, was not just a binding American commitment to Iran, but one made to other world powers. Last year, in a series of reporting trips through European, Asian and North American capitals, we tried to understand how American allies planned to deal with Mr. Trump.
We typically heard two schools of thought. One said that Mr. Trump was an aberration who, though already breaking international agreements and promising to violate more, though skeptical of alliances and disinclined to America’s traditional role as global enforcer of the status quo, would eventually leave office. In this school, allies like Germany and Japan would ride out Mr. Trump’s tenure and wait for the next president to put things back in order.
The other school said that Mr. Trump was not an aberration, but rather represented the true face (or at least one true face) of the United States. Observers of this school saw Mr. Trump as a continuation of the United States that led the 2003 invasion of Iraq and abrogated a major arms control treaty in 2002. In this view, the United States should be considered unpredictable, aggressive and a threat to the very international order it has pledged to uphold.
That school called for allies to hedge against the United States. To keep the global order and their own nations safe, they would have to reduce their reliance on American power, which didn’t mean breaking with Washington outright, but treating it as just another ally rather than their global leader. No one can say for sure how precisely that would play out. We heard many possible pathways. Develop a European nuclear weapons program. Get a little closer to Russia or China. Forge a more independent path. But any version assumes, and thereby creates, a world where the United States is less influential, less trusted and, when necessary, actively contained.
5) Rising oil prices: Good news for Iran and Russia
Global oil prices had already been rebounding in recent from months from a long period of historic lows. But Mr. Trump’s decision, by creating uncertainty over the future of global trade with Iran, has sent prices skyrocketing. This is terrific news for Iran and Russia, which rely on energy exports to drive their economy. Dipping oil prices had played a significant role in restraining Russia’s recent foreign policy adventurism and had caused tremendous political problems for President Vladimir Putin.
This could also be potentially good news for Venezuela, another major oil exporter, although at this point the country’s energy sector is in such ruin that even a price increase is unlikely to make much of a political difference.
6) American gains from this decision remain unclear
Neither Mr. Trump nor other administration officials have articulated what comes next or described concrete benefits of exiting this agreement. There is no stated argument for how withdrawing from the agreement will more effectively contain Iranian behavior, either on nuclear issues or on other fronts such as Iran’s role in the Syrian war. Nor is there a stated policy for accomplishing these goals. There is no stated plan for limiting or monitoring potential Iranian nuclear development without the agreement, which arms control experts have called the most stringent such agreement ever signed.
There is no stated strategy for convincing Iran to sign what Mr. Trump has said must be an even more stringent agreement, immediately after the United States has demonstrated it cannot be relied on to abide by whatever deal it might sign. Nor is there a stated strategy for bringing European allies, much less China and Russia, back to the negotiating table.
In other words, though it is certainly possible that withdrawing from the agreement will bring the United States something that is worth all these risks, Mr. Trump has yet to articulate what those are or how they will be achieved.
‘Courtesy New York Times’.
