Donald Trump is decertifying the Iran deal, and gave a tough-minded speech announcing his decision.
We have opposed the Iran deal from the beginning. Building on the North Korean model of negotiations, Tehran engaged in a years-long dialogue with the West over the question of whether it would have a nuclear program, all the while developing its nuclear program. The upshot of the agreement was that we accepted Iran’s becoming a threshold nuclear power and showered it with sanctions relief — including, literally, a plane-full of cash — for the privilege.
Since the deal left the rest of Iran’s objectionable and threatening behavior untouched, the regime was free to invest proceeds from its economic windfall into its ballistic-missile program and its agenda of military expansion across the region. The Obama administration hoped that the agreement would moderate Iran’s behavior, but, predictably, it has emboldened it. Giving more resources to a terror state has never reduced terror. Couple these failings with a weak inspection regime and key sunset clauses, and the deal is nearly as historically bad as President Trump says in his characteristically over-the-top style.
We would prefer that the U.S. pull out of the deal, reimpose the sanctions that had begun to bite the regime prior to the agreement, and force Europeans eager to do business with Iran to choose between us and them. The goal would be to bring the regime to its knees and, short of that, force it to rip up its nuclear program.
The Trump administration isn’t willing to go this far, at least not yet. President Trump will refuse to certify every 90 days that the deal is in the vital security interests of the U.S. — an obvious fiction — and seek to get Congress to pass a series of “triggers” further sanctioning Iran if it doesn’t meet various new standards under the deal. This is a halfway approach that reflects the White House’s divisions (Trump wants to get all the way out of the deal, but most of his national-security principals don’t), the enormous diplomatic task pulling out would represent (Iran would join North Korea as an urgent, dominating foreign-policy issue), and perhaps internal doubts about what the administration is capable of pulling off (sometimes it has merely been struggling for coherence on foreign policy).
If Congress did indeed pass additional Iran sanctions it might be a way, in effect, to toughen the Iran deal unilaterally. The Europeans would probably be willing to go along in the interests of saving the overall agreement, and Iran probably prefers to be inside the deal rather than out, for the reasons noted above. But it will take 60 votes for the Senate pass anything, and President Trump may soon confront the decision whether he really wants to stay in or not.
Trump’s speech, appropriately, addressed much more than the nuclear deal. In frank terms, he made the case against the terroristic theocracy in Tehran and described its threat to the U.S. and the region. He sketched in outline a strategy to pressure the regime on all fronts, especially focusing on the nefarious role of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. All of this was to the good, although much will depend on execution; the administration doesn’t yet have a strategy to check Iran’s growing clout in Syria, and we must remember that the regime has the ability to hit back against us, both in Syria and in Iraq.
But Trump’s speech was a welcome dose of realism after eight years of willful naïveté about our enemy in Tehran. If nothing else, we have a president who doesn’t see the regime through a film of delusion — finally.
READ MORE:
How to Get Out of the Iran Deal
Why Trump Is Right and the Experts Are Wrong about the Iran Deal
The Conservative Politics of the Iran Deal
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