No better words describe the Memorandum of Understanding that President Donald J. Trump has just signed than what Trump himself wrote about President Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal: “It is hard to believe a president of the United States would actually put his name on an agreement with the terrorist state Iran that is so bad, so poorly constructed and so terribly negotiated that it increases uncertainty and reduces security for America and our allies, including Israel.”
The quote is the opening shot of a stinging op-ed that Trump, at the time a presidential hopeful, published on September 8, 2015, in the pages of USA Today. As a candidate, he accurately and ferociously dissected the nuclear deal the Obama administration had negotiated with the Islamic Republic of Iran. As a president, he has just done infinitely worse.
It took the Obama administration almost two years to produce a 159-page-long detailed document, plus classified and secret annexes and memorandums, that an army of lawyers, non-proliferation experts, financial regulators, nuclear scientists, and compliance officers all helped craft, making sure every T was crossed and every I was dotted. Trump called it amateur hour. Yet the Obama version of the nuclear deal, with all its indisputable flaws, does not even come close to the debacle that Trump has just fathered. To Trump’s credit, he was faster and more personnel and word-count-efficient than Obama: it took only two months, three amateurs, and a two-pager to get across the capitulation line.
Trump’s emerging Iran deal – to be sure, still to be negotiated, still open to the unexpected, still susceptible to changes and the vagaries of diplomacy – is much worse. Trump has agreed to remove significant economic leverage upfront, even before Tehran makes one significant concession, and rapidly lift all sanctions – which could include terror and human rights sanctions and arms embargoes – once the agreement is sealed.
In exchange, he is content with repeating a familiar promise that Iran will not build nuclear weapons. The Iranian regime has been a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty since 1970 and reiterated its commitment to never build a nuke in 2015. Those were empty promises Tehran never felt were binding. Now, the president is conceding much of the leverage America had in exchange for the same meaningless promise the Ayatollahs gave Obama in 2015, alongside many more economic inducements than Obama conceded.
Trump criticised Obama’s deal at the time because Iran received “a windfall of $150 billion, which will no doubt fund terrorism around the world”. Yet he is offering double that amount in a reconstruction fund, alongside the immediate lifting of all sanctions. It’s as if America had offered Nazi Germany a Marshall Plan in 1944, while Hitler was still in power, the Wehrmacht and the SS still armed to their teeth, and V-2s still raining down on London. After all, once sanctions are lifted and the regime’s frozen assets repatriated, Iran could rebuild its ballistic missile arsenal. Back in February, the Iranian missile arsenal was, arguably, casus belli. Now, Trump no longer minds and even said at the G7 summit that there was nothing wrong with Iran having missiles.
The Obama deal offered Iran’s nuclear programme sunset clauses that would eventually leave its ability to pursue nuclear weapons contained for a time but ultimately unrestrained after those clauses expired. Still, they spread the risk over 15 years. The Trump deal seeks to resolve the disposition of enriched material “pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon... with the minimum methodology to be down-blending on site.” As experience teaches us, such “minimum” demands are bound to become the maximum achievable. What is down-blended can also be up-blended, and in order to do so, the US will likely have to help Iran retrieve the material, since it is mostly buried under the rubble. And just like with the Obama deal, there won’t be a total ban on enrichment but just a moratorium – kicking the problem down the road for the next US presidents, which is precisely what Trump had criticised about previous administrations and promised not to do.
But by agreeing to remove all sanctions as soon as the deal is done, it essentially gives the regime access to technology and trade, so long restricted, that will quickly enable Tehran to rebuild what was destroyed and accelerate its efforts in the nuclear arena. Iran’s economy, meanwhile, will quickly recover. The regime will be awash with cash, no longer facing the sanctions architecture the US took more than 40 years to patiently build.
As if this were not bad enough, Trump accepted Tehran’s demands that Washington muzzle Israel in Lebanon. The regime is effectively forcing Trump to save Hezbollah from annihilation and fund the Islamic Republic’s endeavour to rebuild its proxy network, ensuring the Ayatollahs will be able to continue to wreak havoc in the region, with a major difference from the Obama-era deal: America’s deterrence is gone. The regime now knows it can survive a war by disrupting the global economy because its main adversary will fold.
The president went into a war without making the necessary preparations to confront his adversary’s likely response – the closure of Hormuz. He admitted this spectacular failure live at the G7, in front of all those allies he spent his first 17 months in office alienating, by acknowledging that Iran’s closure of Hormuz risked causing a global recession and could not be militarily prevented. He is now busy blaming everyone else but himself while still claiming victory and relying on the same excuses that the Obama team used to defend its own disastrous deal.
Gone is his social media bluster about eliminating Ali Khamenei; forgotten are his initial war goals of destroying Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, ending Tehran’s support for proxies and terrorism, or coming to the rescue of the Iranian people. He hyped their hopes by promising that “help is on the way” and misled them into believing that their evil regime had finally met its match.
In the end, the only help on the way is heading straight into the arms of the Iranian regime. The people, and the region, will have to pick up the debris this clown show left behind.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Research on Terror Financing (CENTEF)
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