TEHRAN — Visiting Tehran this week with former U.K. Labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont, I have been struck by how much will be at stake when the Iran nuclear deal returns to President Trump’s desk on Friday.
We were there to address the annual Tehran Security Conference but also had valuable private meetings with Vice President and nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, his deputy Abbas Araghchi and members of the Iranian parliament, which allowed us to talk frankly about nuclear issues, the civil war in Yemen, Iran’s relationships with its neighbors, sensitive consular cases and the recent bout of protests in Iranian cities.
As British ambassador in Washington when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the nuclear deal is formally known, was concluded in July 2015, and with experience of Iran going back to the four years I spent there in the mid-1970s, I followed the nuclear negotiations closely. I also spent many long hours on Capitol Hill explaining to U.S. lawmakers why the deal offered the only realistic path to ensuring that Iran never acquired nuclear weapons, and why it would be a mistake for Congress to vote it down.
Enough members of the Senate agreed. The deal was duly ratified and given the force of international law by the U.N. Security Council. Last October, President Trump nevertheless certified that this landmark achievement of the Obama administration and its partners was no longer in America’s national security interest and invited Congress to propose ways of improving it.
With no nuclear deal, the Iranian politicians who put their credibility on the line to achieve it would be humiliated — “politically dead,” as one of them put it to me.
No one expects him to reverse that decision pending a response from Congress. But the president faces a momentous decision on Friday, when he must make a separate ruling on whether or not to renew the sanctions waivers that form part of the deal.
The disturbances that have taken place across Iran over the last several weeks have dramatically altered the atmosphere in which that ruling will be made. According to the latest reports, at least 22 people have died and more than 1,000 have been arrested in protests across some 80 Iranian cities and towns.
Trump was quick to tweet his support for the protesters, who are unhappy at rapidly rising food prices and poor economic prospects. They are furious that the government plans to cut spending on subsidies and social services while it appropriates large and growing sums — in secret — for religious organizations and foreign military interventions.
President Trump’s clear message of hope that the protests would lead to regime change won him applause at home, but had the unintended consequence of making it easier for the Iranian government to claim that the demonstrations were the result of foreign conspiracies. But encouragingly, alongside the usual conspiracy theories about outside agitators, the last couple of days have seen clear messages from President Hassan Rouhani that the grievances of young people must be listened to, social media unblocked, and freedom of speech restored. Orders have been given for there to be no repeat of the violence, including rape and torture, with which the protests following the 2009 presidential elections were put down. There are disturbing reports of abuse, and worse, of some of those detained but Rouhani, at least, appears sincere.
If the Iranian authorities didn’t care for Trump’s tweetstorm, wondering why other, less democratic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Russia have been spared such censure, they were even angrier when the U.S. convened an open session of the Security Council last weekend to condemn their handling of the protests despite the view of most other member states that they did not pose a threat to international peace.
Some governments clearly hoped that going along with the U.S. request would give them the leverage to argue for the maintenance of the sanctions waivers. After all, the economic interests of the protesters the American president is keen to support will be far better served by allowing trade with Iran to continue to grow. It’s also clear that, according to the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear monitoring body, Iran is continuing to comply with the terms of the JCPOA—a fact the U.S. does not dispute.
But in Tehran, people are far from confident that these arguments will prevail. Like other observers of the Washington scene, they feel that President Trump might believe that now is not the time to be making a “concession” to Iran by again waiving the sanctions, and that he might find it irresistible to defy the conventional foreign policy wisdom at a time when he is under sustained attack after the publication of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” blockbuster.
To Iranians, and to the other five governments that negotiated the JCPOA, including the U.K., renewing the waivers is not a concession but a matter of the U.S. honoring its international commitments. They fear that not renewing the waiver risks destroying the whole deal. Already, European governments are finding it extremely difficult to persuade their banks and other firms to develop trade with Iran as intended in the JCPOA, out of fear of breaking existing U.S. sanctions law. Additional sanctions would make that task even harder.
The risk is real. Should the president decline to renew the waivers, the Iranians will be faced with a choice. Some in Tehran will argue for walking away from the JCPOA there and then, immediately resuming the nuclear enrichment program — orders to Iran’s Nuclear Energy Organization to do so, at an accelerated rate, have already been prepared.
Others, keen to avoid all the hard work that went into the JCPOA being wasted — and to retain the moral high ground — will argue for the activation of Article 36 of the agreement, which allows the other signatories 30 days to get the United States back on board before Iran becomes legally entitled to end its own commitments. That’s not long. Alternatively, the Europeans could resort to the kind of legislation we saw in response to the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, by making it a crime for their firms to comply with extraterritorial U.S. sanctions. But that would take time, and provoke a major transatlantic row.
Iranians chant slogans as they march in support of the government near the Imam Khomeini grand mosque in the capital Tehran on December 30, 2017 | Hamed Malekpour/AFP via Getty Images
Either way, we would likely be staring at the end of the one example we have of how a major security crisis in the Middle East can be resolved through patient diplomacy rather than military action, with Iran both unconstrained in its nuclear ambitions and no longer under any obligation to submit its nuclear activities to the agreement’s rigorous inspection provisions — exactly the opposite of what President Trump says he wants to achieve.
With no nuclear deal, the Iranian politicians who put their credibility on the line to achieve it would be humiliated — “politically dead,” as one of them put it to me. With tensions between Shia Iran and its Sunni Arab neighbors on the other side of the Persian Gulf at a worryingly high level, we could find ourselves facing a regional nuclear arms race. Back onto the agenda would come the arguments for military action by the U.S., Israel or both — any combination of which would almost certainly be illegal, could not conceivably destroy all Iran’s nuclear capability and would consolidate the hardliners’ hold on power. For good measure, Washington would be conveying a clear message to North Korea that there isn’t much point in signing a denuclearization deal with the U.S., since the U.S. can’t be trusted to stick to it.
The JCPOA is not perfect (did any sustainable international agreement ever give all parties everything they wanted?). But it is comprehensive and permanent. Contrary to the claims of its detractors — who, by the way, have yet to offer anything better — the agreement is not time-limited. Some provisions on enrichment and nuclear activities (the so-called sunset provisions) expire in the next 8-12 years, but the most important elements of the deal that prevent Iran from acquiring weapons and provide for comprehensive inspections are there for good.
Trump has a chance here to make a statesman-like decision: Stick with the deal, which is working. Allow young Iranians the chance to better themselves through the implementation of the JCPOA. And avoid America being blamed for precipitating an unnecessary further crisis in the Middle East. We can then get on with seeking solutions to the huge problems already besetting the region — and might usefully begin by engaging with Saudi Arabia and Iran on ways of bringing to an end the humanitarian disaster of the civil war in Yemen.
The Middle East has enough problems. America shouldn’t create more of them.