“Insane.”
While on a visit to my university’s campus a few weeks ago, French President Emmanuel Macron did not mince words about American flip-flopping on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran Deal. Despite an amusing personal chemistry between Macron and Trump, the eloquent Frenchman was willing to push back against the administration’s worst instincts on the nuclear deal with our biggest rival in the Middle East.
As Macron (and the rest of the world) sees it, watching the United States trying to pull out of the Iran Deal is madness. Iran’s benefits from the deal were mostly front-loaded; when the agreement was finalized, America unfroze Iranian assets in exchange for an end to the Iranian nuclear program. On top of that, the deal is the only thing meaningfully keeping Iran from deciding to fire up their centrifuges again.
If we were to cancel the deal now, what happens? Well, Iran gets to keep all of those unfrozen assets and will likely restart their nuclear program. If we cancel the deal now, less than three years in, we lose most of what we got and Iran keeps most of what it got. Without the deal, Iran could throw out international inspectors and start the nuclear program again, taking what at this point would have been at the very least a seven-year timeline to get the bomb and shrink that down to less than a year.
But there’s another reason that pulling out of the Iran Deal is a real dumpster-quality idea — the message that it sends to the world. Abandoning a deal on a whim tells other countries that the United States is not a reliable negotiator.
There’s one place where the message will probably be perking up ears: North Korea.
At the moment, the administration is feverishly attempting to cobble together a diplomatic solution to deal with North Korea.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo reportedly made a trip to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang in early April to lay groundwork for direct talks with the United States. This clandestine rendezvous came just before the North Koreans announced they would no longer be testing nuclear devices. Although a more accurate reading of this event is that Pyongyang doesn’t need to test what it knows already works, some American talking heads have taken this as a concession before high-level talks.
Now in the smiling face of this charm assault, why would the North Koreans even vaguely consider giving up the weapons they’ve spent so much time and treasure constructing? Why would they be willing to do some kind of deal with a country that just abandons its treaty commitments partway through the agreements?
This is not to say that American unreliability from administration to administration is the largest factor in the success of the North Korea talks; most certainly it isn’t. Far more likely to tank any deal is the President’s capriciousness and failure to grasp the situational nuances of the Korean Peninsula, all compounded by the fact that North Korea’s benefit from holding nuclear weapons is probably greater than any alternative we can offer them.
That said, pulling out of the Iran Deal and branding the United States an untrustworthy negotiating partner is yet another item in the near-overflowing cart of reasons a deal between Washington and Pyongyang likely won’t materialize.
Ian Hutchinson is a Greenfield native pursuing his master’s degree in international affairs in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at [email protected]. Send comments to [email protected].
