Crawling our way back to Obama's Iran nuclear deal

Donald Trump has claimed that of all the presidents going back decades, only he was willing to do what needed to be done about Iran. Only he was decisive and unwavering in confronting the Iran problem head on, and would finally resolve it.

Trump's decisive stroke was taking the country to war, a war which is illegal, unconstitutional, and a violation of international law. And which created the "greatest energy security threat in history." Among other nasty effects.

Trump's reasons, goals, and expectations were never coherently articulated, and have varied day to day and sometimes moment to moment. But let's go with Trump's insistence that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. How has Trump's war got us any closer to that outcome?

It hasn't. Unresolved problems abound.

The first order of business is to figure out how to dispossess Iran of its more than 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium. The uranium is 60% purity, which is "a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%."

Except that isn't actually the first order of business. The most urgent issue is getting the Strait of Hormuz open, and oil and other commodities flowing. To do that a memorandum of understanding (MoU), currently being negotiated, must be signed with Iran. The MoU will specify further steps and negotiations that need to take place over a potentially long time horizon. Those negotiations, which will not be fast or easy, will determine the disposition of the highly enriched uranium.

There's also an estimated 2,200 pounds of 20% purity uranium. That too is considered highly enriched, and it too can be further enriched to weapons grade rather quickly. It too will be the subject of further negotiations, as will Iran's nuclear program overall.

After all his bluster, this creates a rather uncomfortable situation for Trump, who early in the war demanded "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" (Trump's caps) of Iran. Didn't happen. Not being able to dictate, Trump finds himself in the position of having to negotiate, which is exactly what Obama did between 2013 and 2015. CNN notes that "For a relatively short 'memorandum of understanding', the draft agreement between the United States and Iran is taking a very long time to finalize." Could it be that Trump is sweating the fact that the prospect of lengthy further negotiation will demonstrate that his misbegotten war wasn't the decisive stroke that he imagined?

Indeed, we're arguably crawling our way back to an agreement something like what Obama signed (called the JCPOA) in 2015, eleven years ago, with a couple of differences.

One difference is that we need to get the status of the Strait of Hormuz back to what it was before the war. Isn't that remarkable? Thanks to Trump, Iran has found a new lever and is willing to use it. In this and so many other ways, Trump has actually made things worse. Contrary to the tone and implication of Trump's boast, all those other presidents who didn't go to war understood complexity where Trump could not. As conservative commentator Mona Charon recently said, "he’s not very bright."

Understand this also: Iran was in compliance with the JCPOA until Trump withdrew from that agreement in his first term, in 2018. Under that agreement Iran was not allowed to enrich uranium beyond 3.67% purity, and it turned over the 20% enriched uranium it had been accumulating since 2010, ostensibly to fuel its Tehran Research Reactor. Iran had never possessed 60% uranium as it does today. The stockpiles of highly enriched uranium that are a problem today did not exist until Trump abandoned the JCPOA, at which point Iran resumed enrichment. Thus much of the difficulty of the current situation is of Trump's own making.

Because of the complexity that Trump perhaps cannot fathom, it took Obama two years of very hard work to negotiate the JCPOA. Top level U.S. negotiators of that deal included Secretary of State John Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman. Moniz was himself a nuclear physicist, so he well understood the intricacies of corralling Iran's nuclear program.

Note too that the JCPOA was an international agreement between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus the European Union. Compliance was monitored by the the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

That's what Trump walked away from in 2018. Is there any surprise that we find ourselves back in the situation of having to negotiate a solution that could well be reminiscent of what Obama did eleven years ago, but after all the damage caused by this ugly war? And make no mistake: There has been massive damage. The Gulf region is littered with tens of billions of destruction to energy infrastructure that will take years to rebuild. East Asian countries have suffered monumental energy shortages that have devastated their economies. It seems Obama knew what he was doing, and Trump didn't. Mona Charon was right.

On May 25, Daniel Shapiro, who was U.S. ambassador to Israel when the JCPOA was negotiated, said of the deal now being worked out:

It sounds like it's still work in progress. But I think we know the basic outlines of it. It's a fairly weak deal, but probably a necessary least bad alternative to end this ill-conceived war. Largely, it would mean opening the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, that that would alleviate the economic crisis that was caused when Iran closed it and caused inflation and gas prices and everything else to soar. And then there would be a period of negotiations - it's outlined for 30 to 60 days - to determine limits on Iran's nuclear enrichment - enriched uranium stockpile and further enrichment of uranium and the verification of that.

Shapiro notes that Iran is adept at dragging out negotiations, so those 60-day intervals could be renewed and go on for a long time.

Sixty days is not nearly enough to hammer out an agreement of such a complex dispute, so the negotiations will likely be protracted.  The MoU, being a short initial document, won't resolve any of the thorny issues currently in play. All it does is start the process.

Again, Shapiro:

It would set some limits on enrichment and on their nuclear stockpile, but it wouldn't do that permanently. It wouldn't address their ballistic missile program. It wouldn't address support for terrorist proxies. And so it's not surprising that the same critics of the Obama deal are looking very unhappy and looking askance at the deal that this seems to be shaping up with.

Iran is also insisting on the unfreezing of a large amount of its frozen assets—$25 billion, according to Shapiro. The $1.7 billion provided to Iran as part of the JCPOA, for which Trump has skewered Obama mercilessly—is chump change compared to that.

Negotiations with Iran are always difficult, but Trump has made them more so. He has validated over and over Iran's conviction that America cannot be trusted: first by abandoning a the JCPOA that the U.S. had agreed to, and then by attacking Iran—twice!—while negotiations were being conducted. The first attack was on the Iranian nuclear sites last June, and the second was the sneak attack on February 28 that started the current war. In both cases there were active negotiations underway.

Trump is surely squirming now, and no wonder. He looks very weak, and that's not a look he likes. He solved nothing, made much worse, and needs to get back to something that looks similar to what his predecessor, who he loves to mock, actually accomplished.

 

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