As the French president urged his American counterpart to press for new concessions, Iran’s foreign minister says Tehran won’t accept any changes to the deal Obama agreed to.
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| Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast |
He came, he saw, he cajoled. French President Emmanuel Macron on a state visit to Washington on Tuesday
may actually have persuaded President Donald Trump—who called him a
“great friend” and a “leader”—that simply tearing up the deal with Iran
that froze its nuclear program until 2025 would not be a good idea.
But
if Trump embraces the kind of program Macron is talking about, which
includes pushing Iran to make a whole new series of concessions on other
issues, the situation in the war-torn Middle East could grow a whole
lot worse before it gets better.
The reason, according to Iranian
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who has been making the
diplomatic and journalistic rounds in New York, is that Tehran is not
going to agree to anything beyond the current nuclear accords
painstakingly negotiated with the Obama administration. And Zarif
suggested that added pressure may make even that existing deal worth
less than the paper it is printed on.
Trump is due to make his
decision by May 12. North Korea, which has close and controversial ties
to Iran, will be watching closely, and Zarif notes that any leader,
including Kim Jong Un, would see little value in agreements with
Washington that would last only as long as the term of the president who
signed them.
So, while Trump may have high hopes for his upcoming
talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the “Little Rocket Man” he
decided to describe on Tuesday as “very honorable,” Zarif is blunt:
“People will not be prepared to give if the take is only temporary.”
Macron,
for his part, tried to put the Iran deal in a context that would be
easy for Trump to understand and, he hoped, for Trump to explain to his
core supporters.
What the two presidents sketched out in their remarks on Tuesday would have four central “pillars,” as Macron put it.
First is maintenance of the current nuclear deal, the so-called Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreed to in 2015 by Iran, the
United States, France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China. At the time
it went into effect, Iran was within months of producing enough nuclear
material to start building atomic weapons, if it so chose. Those
operations were halted for 10 years, and in return Iran’s long-frozen
assets in the West were released, while some international sanctions
were lifted. The hope was that this would usher in a new era of more
positive relations. But that was not to be.
“The United States,
under President Trump … has violated almost every U.S. commitment under
the JCPOA, so we’ve had almost 16 months of a trial period for official
withdrawal,” Zarif told The National Interest.
“If the United States officially withdraws from the JCPOA, the
immediate implication would be that it would free Iran of any obligation
to remain …”
Zarif says the pressure Trump already has put on
U.S. allies to curtail trade also has undermined the credibility of the
original deal, which President Hassan Rouhani had promised his people
would bring new prosperity. The Trump administration has “taken every
measure in order to make sure that Iran does not benefit economically
from the deal,” Zarif told CBS in
an interview broadcast Sunday. “If the benefits of the deal for Iran
start to diminish, then there is no reason for Iran to remain in the
deal. Because it’s not acceptable for us to have a one-sided agreement.”
In recent months, the value of Iran’s currency has plummeted,
strengthening the hand of hard liners in Tehran who never wanted the
nuclear agreement in the first place. So, if the deal falls apart, Zarif
told CBS, then, “as the United States has a habit of saying, ‘All
options are on the table,’” and those would include “resuming at a much
greater speed our nuclear activities.”
Zarif insists that would
not mean building nukes, but without the JCPOA and the inspections that
are part of it, the West would once again be dealing with “unknown
unknowns” about weapons of mass destruction, much as it was before the
invasion of Iraq.
The second pillar of policy that Macron presented to Trump is the idea that a new accord must be negotiated for what happens in “the long run” after 2025,
when the current agreement expires. Critics of the deal have always
denounced it as too temporary, leaving the door open at the end for Iran
to race toward the development of nuclear weapons. Zarif points out
that the first paragraphs of the accord repeat multiple times the Iranian commitment to an “exclusively peaceful” nuclear program.
The third pillar, and in Macron’s view a separate agreement, would lead to the curtailing Iran’s ballistic missile program.
In fact, U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 imposed missile-related
restrictions that Iran has violated repeatedly and unapologetically,
insisting they are not part of the accord itself. “They ignored them in
the past, and they continue to ignore them,” says Valerie Lincy of The
Wisconsin Project, which watches these developments closely. Not least
of the concerns is that Iran and North Korea may be sharing technology
or hardware for their missile programs.
The fourth pillar is to block Iran’s expanding influence on the ground,
directly or through client militias, in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. In all
three countries, to varying degrees, Iran sees itself supporting local
forces to fight Sunni jihadists and wage a proxy war against Saudi
Arabia. “We are responding to a threat created by U.S. allies,” Zarif
told members of the Council of Foreign Relations in New York on Monday.
It
is to help contain Iran that Macron argued the United States must
maintain a military presence in the east of Syria even after the
so-called Islamic State has been obliterated. Defense Secretary James
Mattis and other Trump advisers have made similar arguments, despite
Trump’s stated wish to get all 2,000 American forces out of there.
And
Trump may actually have listened. While he used to say flatly that the
U.S. soldiers would be back home “soon,” he now adds the indeterminate
phrase, “as possible.”
When Trump rattled off his views on Syria,
there was a certain echo of Macron’s. Iran must be stopped from
profiting off the success of the American-led coalition defeating ISIS,
and must be prevented from establishing a so-called land bridge
stretching through Iraq and Syria all the way to the Mediterranean,
Trump said. Others, meaning mainly the Saudis, must help pay the bills,
and they should send troops as well.
At the end of the day, how
all this will stabilize the region is unclear. The Four Pillars of
Macron, if met by Iranian resistance and retaliation, will have done
little to bring peace. But such is the confusion in Washington that any
framework for dealing with the chaos of the Middle East must be welcome,
even to Donald Trump.
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