Assessing Trump’s Criticisms of Iran and the Nuclear Deal

LONDON: US President Donald Trump Friday announced a hostile shift in US policy toward Iran, alleging that the Islamic Republic has performed short of its obligations under its international nuclear deal.

Trump's diatribe was billed as an address outlining a more aggressive US strategy toward Iran, aimed at "fixing" the nuclear accord and rolling back Tehran's "malign" influence across the Middle East. It was the occasion for Trump to make public his long rumored decision to refuse to continue certifying that Iran is fulfilling its obligations under the nuclear accord (Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action), and that the JCPOA serves the US "national interest."

The US president said he would order the Treasury Department to levy new sanctions against the elite Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and declared that he could not certify Iran's actions under the nuclear accord.

But the rationale he provided includes several misleading or incomplete statements about the terms of the deal, what he considers a violation of the agreement and Iran itself. Here is an assessment.

Trump gave an incomplete account of Iranian history.

"Iran is under the control of a fanatical regime that seized power in 1979 and forced a proud people to submit to its extremist rule," Trump said, referring to the Islamic Revolution. 

It was a mass uprising against US backed monarchial rule of Pahlavi dynasty that culminated into an Islamic Revolution and formation of an Islamic Republic through a popular vote. 

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who led the triumphant revolution in 1979 was succeeded by Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei, who is currently the supreme leader of Iran. Supreme Leader is chosen by a an elected council of jurists known as " Council of Experts. The body is empowered to designate and dismiss the Supreme Leader.

Trump then listed the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, Iran's sponsorship of terrorism and its support of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria among other examples of the country's "hostile actions."

These require more context, according to Abbas Amanat, an Iran scholar at Yale University, who added that the 1979 revolution was a popular movement and that the revolutionary government has been moderating.

In 2013, Iranian voters delivered the presidency to Hassan Rouhani, a more moderate cleric, by a wide margin. His allies made strong gains in parliamentary elections in 2016, and Mr. Rouhani was re-elected this May.

"Any attempt to renege or decertify or impose sanctions again has a tremendously negative impact on the current moderates in Iran" who support Mr. Rouhani and, in turn, would fuel hard-liners who oppose any deal with the US, Mr. Amanat said, according to New York Times.

Trump's false narrative began with a whopper: that the Obama administration lifted sanctions "just before what would have been the total collapse of the Iranian regime" -- an assertion wishful thinkers in Washington have been making every year for the past four decades, according to Antony J. Blinken, another analyst for the New York Times.

 To the contrary, while sanctions may have helped bring Iranian government to the negotiating table, it had become clear they could not break it.

Islamic Republic is nothing if not resilient. It fought an eight-year-long war with Iraq to a draw despite losing hundreds of thousands of lives; it has survived decades of isolation, writes Blinken.

Meanwhile, Tehran had invested its national pride and an estimated $100 billion in its nuclear program. It was not about to give up on those investments, even though international sanctions painstakingly built by the Obama administration cost it some $150 billion. In fact, at the time the nuclear deal was negotiated, Iran was on the threshold of becoming a nuclear state with the ability to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon in a matter of weeks. The J.C.P.O.A. pushed that "breakout time" to more than a year.

Next, Trump trotted out the canard that the deal gave Iran "over $100 billion its government could use to fund terrorism." Never mind that the money in question is actually Iran's -- the proceeds from oil sales that countries around the world froze in bank accounts at the United States' behest -- or that virtually all of it is being dedicated to unmet domestic needs, to pay off debts and to prop up Iran's currency.

Before the 1979 revolution, Iranian king had paid $400 million for American military goods but, after he was overthrown, they were never delivered. The popular government demanded the money back, but the United States refused. The additional $1.3 billion is interest accumulated over 35 years. An initial reimbursement was released after the Iran deal was implemented.

Trump claimed that the deal gave Iran "over $100 billion its government could use to fund terrorism." Much of the amount is tied up in debt obligations. For example, $20 billion is owed to China for financing projects in Iran. Estimates for the actual amount available to Iran range from $35 billion to $65 billion.

Mr. Trump claimed, without providing evidence, that "the regime intimidated international inspectors into not using the full inspection authorities that the agreement calls for."

But the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the watchdog group tasked with inspection, has said the opposite.

Yukiya Amano, the International Atomic Energy Agency's director general, repeatedly stated in a September news briefing that Iran was following the rules. He did not mention any instances of intimidation.

"We have had access to locations more frequently than many other countries with extensive nuclear programs," he said of Iran.

After Mr. Trump's speech on Friday, Mr. Amano issued his own statement.

"So far, the I.A.E.A. has had access to all locations it needed to visit," he said. "At present, Iran is subject to the world's most robust nuclear verification regime."

Trump exaggerated when he suggested the deal's "sunset clauses" are imminent.

Trump claimed that provisions in the deal limiting Iran's nuclear abilities expire "in just a few years." In reality, the major provisions last a decade or longer. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a vocal critic of the deal, said it "largely expires after only 15 years."

Meanwhile in his first reaction to Trump's diatribe Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in a televised speech, that Trump's remarks on Iran... "contained nothing but expletives and a pile of delusional allegations against the Iranian nation."

In reply to Trump's denunciation of the 1979 popular revolution that overthrew the Shah's despotic, US-installed regime and his attempt to cast the past four decades of American war threats and sanctions against Tehran as Iranian "aggression," Rouhani said Trump should "study history better and more closely and know what (US officials) have done to the Iranian people over the past sixty-something years and how they have treated the people of Iran... after the victory of the Revolution."

All the other signatories of the nuclear accord--Germany, France, Britain, the European Union, Russia and China--have repeatedly said that it should not, and legally cannot, be reopened.

As it became clear in recent weeks that Trump was determined to overturn the 2015 agreement, world leaders, particularly the leaders of Washington's traditional European allies, issued increasingly dire warnings. Scuttling the agreement--whether immediately or, as Trump has now done, by lighting a fuse under it--will, they have warned, greatly exacerbate the war danger in the Middle East. And by demonstrating that Washington arrogates to itself the right to unilaterally modify or repudiate international agreements, the US will, they have stressed, slam shut the door to any diplomatic solution to the crisis in the Korean Peninsula.

Like Rouhani, the European Union's foreign policy chief, Frederica Mogherini, was quick to respond to Trump's speech. She dismissed the US president's claim that Iran has violated the JCOPA, declaring that there have been no Iranian "violations of any of the commitments in the agreement." (In fact, even the Pentagon and US State Department acknowledge that Tehran has implemented the agreement to the letter.)