Trump’s Iran revisionism won’t help with North Korea: Columnist
US President's criticism of agreement misleading and misinformed
Mr Donald Trump may soon learn that revising history can come back to haunt him - especially as he approaches his own historic reckoning on North Korea.
On Tuesday, with France's President Emmanuel Macron looking on in the Oval Office, the US president again smeared the Iran nuclear deal as "insane" and "ridiculous" and criticised former Secretary of State John Kerry for not wanting to address Iran's regional misdeeds because doing so "was too complicated".
Mr Trump is wrong. Wrong about the effectiveness of the nuclear agreement, and wrong about the reasons why the deal between Iran and the world's major powers was confined to the nuclear issue.
I served as chief of staff to Mr Kerry, whose engagement on the Iran nuclear issue began through a secret Omani backchannel while he was still a senator and concluded years later, when he played a leading role in negotiating the 2015 agreement with Teheran.
Despite years of crippling sanctions, by the time Mr Kerry became secretary Iran was just a few steps in the nuclear fuel cycle away from being able to produce 10 nuclear bombs.
The US faced military options that were imperfect and impermanent: we believed that attacking Iran would have only driven a nuclear programme deeper underground and strengthened the position of hardliners inside the theocracy. We knew that sanctions brought Iran to the table, not to their knees.
In our view, the 2015 nuclear agreement achieved what force alone never could. The Teheran regime eliminated 97 per cent of its uranium stockpile, removed and destroyed the core from its Arak reactor, blocked production of weapons-grade plutonium, ripped out more than 13,000 centrifuges, halted all uranium enrichment at the underground Fordow site, and implemented the gold-standard of verification.
The accord has moved the regime farther from a nuclear bomb than at any time over the last decade. If only all nonproliferation agreements were so "insane".
Mr Trump is also dead wrong about the reasons the agreement was focused exclusively on nuclear weapons, not Iran's broader activities.
The negotiations were limited to nuclear nonproliferation for reasons serious and straightforward. Iran's nuclear threat alone had galvanised back-breaking multilateral sanctions, enlisting China and Russia - two nations that don't share the US' opposition to Iran's non-nuclear misdeeds like its role in Syria propping up Bashar al-Assad.
After 35 years of mistrust between Teheran and the US, there was no goodwill to deal with other issues.
It took years at the table even to arrive at a comprehensive, detailed nuclear agreement; the administration and its European partners never doubted that piling on issues like Hezbollah or Syria would have broken up the coalition pressuring Teheran or run out of time, leaving no option but war. Nuclear issues could never be a bargaining chip to be traded away - they were too critical.
The scope of negotiations was not limited by the Obama administration's ambitions, but by reality, and by the world's determination to drive a hard bargain on nonproliferation.
The deal should have been the model and jumping-off point for further engagement by the current administration. Instead, Mr Trump's misleading statements are widening the gulf between the US and its closest allies, from France's Macron to Germany's Angela Merkel.
But most short-sighted of all, Mr Trump's own words fashioned a measuring stick by which I doubt he wants to be judged as he prepares to launch his riskiest diplomacy yet on the Korean Peninsula.
Why? Because after almost 20 years of absent direct talks with Pyongyang, even this administration knows that its negotiators won't be able to tackle every issue at once, including the regime's starvation of its own people, its state sponsorship of terror and its disregard for human rights. The nuclear issue alone will be the issue at hand, and that's how Mr Trump should want to be measured.
Mr Trump should hope allies and experts will judge him by a realistic standard, not the fictitious one he invokes to judge the Obama administration.
With a date with North Korea on the horizon, he should ditch the revisionism on Iran. The odds are not in his favor that he will ever strike as good a bargain there as the one he now derides. - REUTERS
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