As Iran continues to violate the JCPOA, it seems as though many of the deal’s proponents now see it as an end in itself.
As Iran continues to violate the JCPOA, it seems as though many of the deal’s proponents now see it as an end in itself.
W hen a U.S. proposal to extend the U.N.’s arms embargo on Iran failed last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was furious. “The Security Council’s failure to act decisively in defense of international peace and security is inexcusable,” he said in a statement issued on Friday.
A meager two countries — the United States and the Dominican Republic — voted for the measure. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom and France, along with nine of the council’s nonpermanent members abstained. Predictably, Russia and China — which want to sell the Iranian regime weapons — vetoed it, despite Tehran’s history of backing terrorist groups across the Middle East and its violations of limits to nuclear enrichment activity under the agreement. Such is the diplomacy of the Iran deal.
The U.N.’s conventional arms embargo against Iran is set to expire on October 18, per U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231. That resolution implements the Iran deal at the U.N. by lifting international sanctions previously put in place by the Security Council, though it is a legal instrument distinct from the agreement signed in Vienna, whose official name is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Although the United States withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, the other parties remain in the agreement, and Resolution 2231 is still on the books. The expiration of the arms embargo is an outcome that the Trump administration has been working to avoid, in light of Iran’s support for terrorist groups across the Middle East and a transparent willingness on the part of Russia and China to sell Tehran such weapons. Few foreign-policy initiatives find support from Representatives Liz Cheney and Ilhan Omar, but they both signed onto a May letter urging Pompeo to engage in “robust diplomacy to prevent the expiration of the embargo and of U.N. travel restrictions on Iranians engaged in proliferation activities.”
With the failure of the embargo extension at the U.N, the Trump administration has moved on to a more controversial backup plan, a special procedure under Resolution 2231 to reimpose all the sanctions that were set to expire as part of the Iran deal. Without snapping sanctions back in place, not only will the conventional arms embargo be lifted in October, so too will five other sets of sanctions imposed by the U.N. at various points before the JCPOA was signed in 2015. The year 2023, for instance, will see an end to restrictions on international support for Iran’s missile program. And 2025 marks the expiration of the U.N. snapback mechanism.
The present controversy at the U.N. is about whether the United States actually has the legal standing to trigger snapback under Resolution 2231, since it withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018. The Trump administration makes no attempt to hide its intentions to undo the Iran deal — with the hopes of pressuring Iran to accept a stricter agreement — and the deal’s backers (former Obama-administration officials, European governments, and many others) see such a snapback of sanctions as its death knell.
Pompeo will reportedly trigger snapback today at the U.N.’s headquarters in New York. The plan to do so has been met with an indignant response from other Security Council members, who argue that snapback “would be incompatible with our current efforts to preserve the JCPOA,” as the U.K.’s mission to the U.N. put it. Another key group inveighing against the move is the cohort of former Obama officials who championed the deal — and Resolution 2231’s snapback mechanism — while in office. One of them, former deputy secretary of state Tony Blinken, described that perspective on Twitter this weekend. “The remedies in the resolution are available to “participant countries. In pulling out of the agreement that [White House] literally titled its statement ‘Ending US Participation in the JCPOA,’” he wrote.
If, as Blinken suggests, the U.S. relinquished its snapback privileges under Resolution 2231 by withdrawing from the JCPOA, then it cannot move to reimpose the sanctions. But supporters of the Trump administration’s strategy assert that that argument ignores the text of the resolution, which defines the U.S. as a “JCPOA Participant,” irrespective of its continued participation in the Iran deal. The sort of argument that Blinken makes seems to place politics over the law.
In a funny twist, former national-security adviser John Bolton agrees with Blinken. The staunch Iran deal opponent wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this weekend arguing that a U.S. snapback push is “too cute by half,” since the U.S. left the JCPOA. He worries that the snapback mechanism’s structure bypasses the permanent members’ ability to veto proposals, and that using it would encourage other countries to support such structures in the future. While Bolton raises an interesting point, the U.S. could veto any measures creating a similar structure going forward. And in this case, snapback furthers a core national-security object.
In fact, the JCPOA’s defenders on the Security Council could themselves damage the veto power by denying the U.S. its standing to trigger snapback, as Rich Goldberg, a former Trump national-security official wrote in a recent essay for Foreign Policy. Triggering the snapback process begins with submitting a notification to the security council that Iran is breaching the agreement (which the International Atomic Energy Agency has alleged starting in 2019). Upon that notification, the council’s members or its president must introduce a resolution to continue the suspension of the U.N. embargoes under 2231. What’s special about snapback is that it allows a single veto-wielding member to kill the resolution. It was designed to allow the United States to reimpose the sanctions by itself in a twist on the council’s typical procedures.
Goldberg envisions a scenario where the Security Council entertains a resolution by China or Russia that says that the United States is no longer a “JCPOA Participant” under Resolution 2231. Normally, the United States would be able to veto such document, but Goldberg raises the possibility that the council could try to prevent the U.S. from exercising its veto on preliminary and agenda-setting votes, thereby preventing it from exercising its veto on a possible resolution. Another possibility is that the council’s president just ignores the U.S. notification of Iran’s noncompliance with the JCPOA.
A third possibility, though, is what the International Crisis Group’s Richard Gowan calls “Security Council in Wonderland,” where the U.S. snaps sanctions back into place at the Security Council, but Russia, China, and Iran call the result illegitimate and proceed with arms deals once the October 18 expiration comes around.
Is there any way to prevent these messy possibilities and reimpose the conventional arms embargo? Probably not. Russian president Vladimir Putin has offered to convene a summit to discuss the expiring arms embargo, but it’s doubtful that he would budge on much. A compromise to avert snapback would almost certainly not result in renewal of the embargo.
What’s clear is that snapback’s opponents have no solutions to the problem of the expiring arms embargo. They place a higher priority on preserving the JCPOA at all costs in the hopes that Iran will someday comply with it again. At its core, the anti-snapback campaign amounts to little more than an attempt to relitigate the U.S. decision to withdraw in 2018, merely offering blind faith in a crumbling agreement. As they write off some key security concerns, and as Iran continues to violate the JCPOA, it seems as though many of the deal’s proponents now see it as an end in itself.