Trump and nuclear Iran: What has the president gotten right or wrong
YONAH JEREMY BOB
Only 18 months after he pulled the US out of the 2015 Iran deal, we have a pretty good idea of what Trump has gotten right and wrong on the Iran nuclear standoff.
(photo credit: REUTERS/JONATHAN ERNST)
Three years into the Trump presidency, 18 months after he pulled the US out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and six months after he ended sanctions waivers, we have a pretty good idea of what Trump has gotten right and wrong on the Iran nuclear standoff.
In one line, Trump has succeeded in winning many tactical battles, but appears to be consistently failing at stopping Iran’s slow but steady march toward a nuclear weapon.
On one hand, Trump gets accolades from much of the Israeli defense establishment for his maximum pressure campaign on Iran, including some like former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot on Monday, who might not be natural supporters.
They say that once Trump snapped sanctions back on Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah and some Iranian allies in Iraq started to feel the economic squeeze.
Many attribute the protests against Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, against Hezbollah and in Iraq to the success of the Trump pressure campaign in reducing the legitimacy of the Islamic republic’s radical adventurism in the region as well as that of its proxies.
Supporters of Trump’s Iran policy also note that the EU has finally regained some backbone as France, England and Germany have called on the UN to condemn Tehran next week for its ballistic missile program.
Though after the 2015 nuclear deal, the EU – and the US under the Obama administration – largely turned a blind eye to Iran’s ballistic missile program, now there is finally some pressure to crack down on it.
The ballistic missile program is a hot-button issue as it was technically exempted from the 2015 deal’s punitive provisions based on Iran’s manufactured fiction that the missiles are only for defense.
Israel, the Trump administration and now finally the EU, have pointed out that the ballistic missiles can be dual-use for nuclear warheads so that testing those missiles moves Iran close to being able to deliver a nuclear weapon. They also note that the program violates broader UN resolutions, though technically there are no specific punitive provisions for these violations at present.
Finally, the US-Israel confrontational approach, including a Mossad operation in 2018 revealing new nuclear sites, has moved the IAEA slightly into confronting Iran about its Turquzabad nuclear facility and undisclosed nuclear material which the IAEA found traces of there.
So Trump has gotten many things right about Iran.
But on the most crucial point, actually stopping the Islamic republic from getting nuclear weapons, he may be failing.
Iran’s regime is under pressure, but nowhere near falling. Its proxies are under pressure, but still making trouble.
The Islamic republic has used US actions as an excuse to violate the nuclear deal four times since May and is expected to violate the deal again in the coming weeks.
These violations include enriching more uranium, to higher levels, activating more advanced centrifuges, some reduced cooperation with the IAEA and other issues.
Collectively, Institute for Science and International Security President David Albright told the Jerusalem Post that this has brought Iran multiple months closer to a bomb than it was in May (and Albright was not a fan of the JCPOA.)
He warned that if Iran restarts a significant number of its IR-2m centrifuges (more advanced than the standard IR-1s), the time to developing enough enriched nuclear material for a bomb could quickly drop to six months.
Bottom-line: Iran is closer to a nuclear bomb now than it was in May, and may be closer than it would have been had Trump not pulled out of the deal.
In the midst of this deterioration, most also believe that Trump’s deterrence of Iran has suffered after he failed to respond with even a targeted use of force to the Islamic republic’ shooting down of an expensive US drone and Tehran’s striking Saudi oil fields.
These more aggressive activities by Iran were also likely brought on by the Trump pressure campaign – though in fairness to Trump, Iran was getting away with arresting US sailors under the Obama administration without much consequence.
There are also warnings that Trump may seek to cut a new weak deal to save face and get a good photo-op for his reelection campaign.
How did it come to this? What went wrong for Trump on Iran despite some notable tactical successes?
The Obama administration sealed the 2015 nuclear deal, making a number of bets. Its bet that Iran would start behaving better to rejoin the world as a more normal actor was wrong, and part of what Trump’s change in policy was designed to address.
But another bet the Obama administration made seems to have been correct: that they could only retain Chinese and Russian support for pressuring Iran up to a certain point.
Some in the Obama administration revealed quite frankly in the years after the deal that they might have liked to have pushed for a better deal in some areas, but that they believed they would have lost Chinese and Russian support. They said that without that support, Iran would no longer be pressured.
When Trump pulled out of the deal and when he ended sanctions waivers, he made an opposite gamble: that he could force China and Russia to toe the line longer than Obama had to force Iran into cutting a better deal.
It now seems clear that Trump’s gamble on this issue was wrong.
China has periodically cut back business with Iran for months at a time, but has always counter-rallied to continue importing oil from Iran at some later date.
Likewise, China has rescinded some very important public deals with Iran, but has worked a variety of off the books or untraceable economic deals with Iran to keep it afloat despite US pressure.
For example, at one point China reduced its purchasing of Iranian oil to close to zero, only to jump it later back to 800,000 barrels per day in April 2019.
China then briefly dialed down its purchasing of Iranian oil again after the US ended sanctions waivers in May, but has steadily increased back to 186,000 barrels per day and is expected to continue to increase.
There are also reportedly around 20 million barrels of Iranian oil in bonded storage off the Chinese coast and Beijing and Tehran are using goods to effectuate trade that do not leave footprints the way currency transfers do.
Earlier this week, Iran announced that Russia would be extending it a $5 billion loan.
Russia also continues to be involved in a variety of aspects of directly supporting Iran’s nuclear program, and Albright warned that Moscow may even be giving Iranian scientists additional know-how that it is prohibited from giving.
As long as China and Russia have Khamenei’s back, it is very likely that Iran can ride-out the Trump pressure campaign just as it was now for 18 months.
If Iran no longer believes that Trump is willing to use military force against it, then there is also no reason for it not continue to creep closer to the nuclear threshold.
This would leave Israel as the only party that could possibly block Iran with a military strike on the Islamic republic’s nuclear facilities.
All of this could come to a head in 2020, whereas if the nuclear deal had continued, it might not have come to a head until 2023, 2025 or even a bit later.
Some will argue that it was better to confront Iran earlier so that it could not “walk-out” to a nuclear weapon at the end of the 2015 nuclear deal because the deal’s sunset provisions put no real limits on Tehran once it expired.
Whether this is true, the fact is that Trump’s notable tactical successes on Iran do not cover the strategic failure, and absent a major new development, the day when Israel will need to make its own fateful decision continues to creep closer.