A day after he delivered his debut address to the United Nations General Assembly, in which he expressed his negative assessment about the Iranian nuclear agreement as a poor bargain for the United States, President Donald Trump told reporters that he has made his decision on whether the U.S. will walk away from it. While he wouldn’t divulge what his decision was, Trump’s past comments suggest he is seriously considering de-certifying Tehran’s compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—a move which would not only open up a Pandora’s Box in terms of the deal’s survivability, but would also put the U.S. far away from its closest and deepest allies on this issue.
Trump is notorious for changing his mind depending on whom he talks to, so there is always a possibility the president will decide to keep the United States in the JCPOA for the lack of a better alternative. The president’s concerns and doubts about the terms of the agreement are legendary—he hasn’t been timid in his criticism, referring to the JCPOA in his U.N. General Assembly speech as an “embarrassment to the United States” and the worst negotiating performance that he has ever seen in his five decades as a dealmaker. His hatred for the JCPOA has also been reinforced by many in the Washington community that have eagerly jumped at the opportunity to provide the administration with talking points about the deal’s inadequacies, unsolicited advice about how best to get the U.S. out of the accord, and recommendations on what the U.S. should do in order to force Tehran into more concessions.
One should hope President Trump and his national security team won’t take their bad advice.
As imperfect as the JCPOA is, the agreement is the only instrument affording the international community with the ability to prowl into a nuclear program that, for years, was outside the scope of rigorous IAEA inspections.
But there is another reason why Trump should lock up all of these policy memos and reports in a drawer somewhere: The arguments that the anti-JCPOA crowd in Washington have made over the last year are at bottom exaggerated, inaccurate, and factually deficient. Many, if not most, of the talking points the deal’s opponents have used in their public relations campaign to abrogate the agreement are refuted by the facts.
1. Unsubstantiated claim: Iran is repeatedly violating the JCPOA’s terms.
The technical nuclear experts and inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency disagree. Since the JCPOA was first implemented in January 2016, the IAEA has reported on nine separate occasions that the Iranians are complying with the terms of the agreement. Tehran’s enriched uranium stockpile remains below the 300 kg that the country is allowed to keep on its soil at any given time. Two-thirds of its centrifuges remain under IAEA seal, meaning they are inaccesable to Tehran. Iran’s plutonium reactor at Arak, previously a significant source of proliferation concern, remains inoperable.
The Natanz enrichment plant, a facility monitored by the IAEA on a 24-hour basis, consists of no more than 5,060 IR-1 centrifuges, the slowest and bulkiest machines in Iran’s inventory. And the IAEA continues to watch like a hawk Iran’s production of rotor tubes and bellows for centrifuge production.
There haven certainly been technical violations during the first year and a half of implementation: Iran exceeded the cap on heavy water production on two occasions. But the problems associated with that breach have been mitigated constructively in the Joint Commission, the body responsible for ensuring that disagreements over compliance are remedied. The agreement successfully checked and corrected this mistake: Tehran shipped out excess heavy water to Oman, where it was stored until the international market did its magic. The fact that Tehran is selling that heavy water in accordance with the JCPOA rather than storing the water clandestinely is an indication that the country is in fact addressing minor violations that may arise in a forthright manner.
2. Unsubstantiated claim: Iran is refusing to provide the IAEA with access to military sites.
If the JCPOA’s critics have any information to support this allegation, they should provide it. However, according to all known facts, Tehran has not rejected an access request to a non-declared facility from the IAEA. The one report that alleges the IAEA was blocked from accessing a suspected site—a September 17 article in Haaretz—was rebuffed by an IAEA official a day later as “not accurately” reflecting how the organization conducts its inspection work inside Iran.
Critics of the deal fail to distinguish what the Iranian government has said from what it has actually done. Tehran has said on numerous occasions it would never permit the IAEA to access its military sites, describing those requests as far outside the bounds of what the JCPOA allows. Iranian officials can say whatever they like for domestic political consumption—what’s far more important is what Tehran actually does. And as far as is publicly known, the Iranians have not prevented the IAEA access to any location the agency requested to inspect or investigate.
Were Tehran ever to actually attempt and keep out inspectors from a suspect facility, there is a provision in the JCPOA that would force access. As long as the U.S. and our European allies on the Joint Commission overseeing the deal hold firm on enforcement, they can compel Tehran to comply with the IAEA’s access request. If the Iranians refuse, then they are in material violation of the agreement and the multilateral sanctions that plunged the Iranian economy into a free fall would snap right back into place.
3. Unsubstantiated claim: The JCPOA is “fatally flawed,” so we should renegotiate it.
This is perhaps the most disingenuous myth of all, as if a major nonproliferation accord that took about three years of diplomacy to produce in the first place could just as easily be renegotiated without much of a fuss. Speaking to Fox News last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all but stated that this was the Trump administration’s de-facto policy on the JCPOA: "If we’re going to stick with the Iran deal, there has to be changes made to it.”
Why the administration believes that this is a realistic option in the current environment is unclear. It takes two to tango in the world of diplomacy, but with respect to the Iran nuclear issue, it takes seven to tango. As European and Iranian officials have stressed repeatedly over the last several months, the JCPOA is an international agreement, not a bilateral U.S.-Iran accord. France, the U.K., the European Union, Germany, Russia, China, and Iran were all main players during the years of negotiation and indeed remain main players in the deal’s implementation. If the White House wanted to sit down and renegotiate the deal, it would need to gain the consent of each of these parties—none of which are particularly enthralled with the idea of engaging in another few months of arduous talks with an Iranian delegation that doesn’t seem interested in re-opining the discussion.
Moreover, JCPOA opponents talk about a renegotiation as if this wouldn’t require any further concessions from the United States and its P5+1 partners. The Iranians will not agree to any further concessions on their end without commensurate concessions from the other side. To believe that we could bully Tehran into a harsher inspections regime or into accepting additional limits on its uranium enrichment capability without offering more sanctions relief in return is delusional.
It would be more helpful process if the Trump administration decided to work with the proposal set out by French President Emmanuel Macron, who rightly suggested that the P5+1 coalition should begin discussions on what the post-2025 and post-2030 environment will look like. The agreement’s sunset provision on how many centrifuges Iran is permitted to operate expires in 2025. The cap on the amount of enriched uranium Iran is allowed to store will expire in 2030. In contrast to walking away from an accord that is currently keeping Tehran’s nuclear activity in check, President Trump should treat the 10 and 15 year pauses embedded in the agreement as a window to explore with its allies (and with the Iranians) whether a supplemental deal is possible. This discussion, of course, will likely be just as challenging as the original negotiation, so the sooner the administration begins the discussion, the better off we will be.
We will have to wait for President Trump’s decision about what he plans to do with the Iranian nuclear agreement. But pragmatists and realists should use the remaining time to remind the White House that it would be much better to embrace the facts and strategic reality that are ahead of us rather than fall for the opinions of those in Washington who have an ideological agenda or an axe to grind.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities. He can be followed on Twitter at @DanDePetris