He Still Hasn't Torn It Up

Donald Trump hates the Iran nuclear deal. Brokered by the Obama administration and officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement has the stated purpose of preventing Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability. But the president believes the deal gave Iran what it desperately wanted—relief from economic sanctions—while providing few to no mechanisms for pressuring Tehran to stop expanding its nuclear program. So the administration has quietly started talking about negotiating a new deal instead.

Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has told him as much. “I’ve had very good conversations with Tillerson about it,” says Corker. “I know his goal is, again, to have a different agreement over time that prevents them from ever enriching [uranium].” A White House source characterizes the administration’s ideal outcome as neither scrapping the JCPOA nor modifying it. Instead, the administration would seek a new follow-on deal with buy-in from the European allies who signed onto the agreement in Vienna two years ago.

What would a new Iran deal look like? Generally speaking, it would do away with what the Trump administration views as the JCPOA’s most deadly flaw: the so-called sunset provisions that limit the length of time Iran faces restrictions on uranium enrichment. It would also impose more and broader nonnuclear sanctions, with tougher enforcement measures, on Iran for any failure to implement and comply with the deal. The details are unclear but will be worked out during the administration’s ongoing interagency Iran policy review, led by senior members of the president’s National Security Council.

But expert observers, including even some within the White House, say a new deal would be nearly impossible to achieve. Attempting to do so could enrage European allies, who have swooped into Iran to do business following the JCPOA’s sanctions relief. It could also give the Iranians another opening to accuse the United States of violating the current deal and acting in bad faith.

On the other hand, Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an outside adviser to the administration on the Iran deal, says the Europeans would welcome amendments to the JCPOA that make permanent the current deal’s sunset provisions. “The Europeans I talk with privately say that’s consistent with what they want to see,” says Dubowitz. The Trump administration, he adds, is “not going to be paralyzed by this perennial Washington desire to have the Europeans buy in to everything.”