Renegotiating Iran nuclear deal is not easy

There is no chance the other parties to the accord would agree to the changes even if new talks somehow took place

espite having promised during his election campaign that his No 1 priority was to “dismantle the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran”, United States President Donald Trump has so far refrained from doing so. Indeed, during his nearly eight months in office, Trump has twice certified to Congress that Iran is in compliance with that deal and has continued to waive the economic sanctions on Iran that the US agreed to lift as part of the agreement. Tomorrow, the next deadline for considering those waivers, the president is expected to again renew them, lest the US be blamed for destroying an agreement that the rest of the United Nations Security Council, the European Union, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and just about every other country in the world agree is working.

At the same time, however, Trump and some of his senior officials now are reported to have a new plan in mind — not to blow up the deal, but to renegotiate a better one. According to Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, administration officials think this could be achieved by punting the issue to Congress for action and using the threat of renewed sanctions as leverage to get the Iranians to agree to fundamental changes in the agreement.

As attractive as such an outcome would be, the notion that it can be achieved in this way is a fantasy. There is virtually no chance the other parties to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action would agree to insist on such changes (even under the threat of US “secondary sanctions”) and virtually no chance Iran would agree to the changes even if new talks somehow took place. Instead of a new and better agreement, America would quickly be back to a place where Iran was advancing towards a potential nuclear weapons capability, and the US had to decide whether to accept it or prevent it with military force — this time with virtually no international support and while dealing with an urgent nuclear crisis in North Korea at the same time.

The concerns about Iran’s ballistic missile development and its destabilising activities throughout the Middle East are hardly misplaced. US and international sanctions can and should be used to punish Iran for such activities. It also makes sense to undertake discussions with America’s key international partners about how to handle Iran after some of the current agreement’s nuclear restrictions expire. But trying to suddenly conjure up a brand-new deal that addresses every problematic aspect of Iran’s foreign policy and blocks its path to a nuclear weapon is a recipe for achieving neither set of goals.

Critics of the Iran nuclear deal like to point to North Korea as the case against “flawed” agreements. But the North Korea precedent actually carries a different message. Not long after the administration of former US president Bill Clinton had negotiated an agreement in 1994 to stop Pyongyang’s nuclear programme, a newly-elected Republican majority in Congress withdrew support for that agreement, insisting that the Clinton administration negotiate a “better deal”. In part, as a result, and not surprisingly, America ended up not with a better deal but with no deal at all — and the paranoid, nuclear-armed North Korea that we are dealing with today. US Congress and the administration should keep that precedent in mind before they make the same mistake.

Philip Gordon is the Mary and David Boies senior fellow in US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region from 2013 to 2015.

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