For a time, early on in US President Donald Trump’s administration, a
week seldom went by without a government rant of some sort concerning the
nuclear accord struck by the prior administration with Iran and five other
leading nations. Today, little mention is made of the accord in Washington,
following the decision earlier this year by the Trump administration to remove
Washington from the equation, despite the United States’ having been the chief
architect of the seven-nation pact.
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| Trump-Rouhani...face-off |
This silence—despite new attempts by the US president to impose further
sanctions on Iran—is unusual but hardly incomprehensible. Unusual because Mr.
Trump tends to be highly and continually vocal about his ostensible successes
and actions. Comprehensible, however, because his much-heralded pullout pretty
much fizzled like wet fireworks. It was apparent that Mr. Trump’s purpose in withdrawing
from the pact with nothing to replace it was based more on his constant rivalry
with former President Barack Obama and his disregard for America’s European
allies than on any urgent concerns regarding the agreement itself. There should
have been no rush to get out of the Iran accord—at least not without having a
strategic plan to replace it with something Trump and his party deemed better and
that they saw as negotiable with America’s partners and with the Iranian
government.
That said, while the US pullout from the accord has been broadly
lamented by other partners to the agreement, in practical terms, the US exit,
though unfortunate, has hardly made a dent in the everyday functions of the
pact. Contrary to the predictions of all those radically opposing the
agreement, Iran is, in general, fully complying with its obligations with
respect to the pact, and the other five nations, minus the US, have said that
they will continue to hold up their end of the bargain and that they will
oppose additional nuclear-related sanctions against Iran, no matter what the
United States decides to do.
Rightwing Republicans have joined the Trump administration in condemning
the agreement, claiming it doesn’t go far enough in keeping Iran from returning
to its path toward nuclear weaponry. In point of fact, however, the historic
accord—largely crafted by the Obama administration and negotiated intensively
between Iran and the five-plus-one (the five permanent members of the UN
Security Council plus Germany) for two years before finally being signed—it has
proven to be the best deal possible and a classic example of successful
diplomatic negotiation for the cause of world peace.
Major points in the pact included the following conditions:
Iran must reduce its centrifuges (used to enrich uranium) by two-thirds.
It must slash its enriched-uranium stockpile by 98 percent.
It must cap uranium enrichment as such at 3.67 percent.
Many experts agree that these three factors were sufficient to permit
Iran to continue to pursue atomic energy development for peaceful means (such
as power production) but not to build nuclear weaponry.
Meanwhile, the other signers agreed to lift all nuclear-related
sanctions against Iran. But this does not affect sanctions in place against
Iran for fomenting terrorism or for indulging in human rights violations.
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| Trump with the Iran nuclear accord "death certtificate" |
Nowhere has there been greater controversy over the deal than in the US
(and in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ecstatic over the
Trump administration’s decision to pull out). Mr. Trump and his staunchest
supporters have bashed the deal as poorly negotiated, poorly conceived and
ineffective in reining in Iran’s political aspirations.
It is interesting, however, the take a moment to look at what true
experts on the subject have said about the Iran nuclear accord. On the heels of
the agreement, a consensus took shape among such experts and nuclear watchdog
groups that saw it as practically the best case scenario in terms of a deal
that would be acceptable to both Iran and the international community.
For instance, Frank von Hippel, who is a senior research physicist and
professor of public and international affairs emeritus for Princeton University’s
Program on Science and Global Security, called the agreement "a political
miracle". As a direct result of it, he said, "Iran has agreed to back
away from the nuclear-weapon threshold in exchange for a lifting of
nuclear-related sanctions." Von Hippel indicated that by ratcheting back
Iran's enrichment capacity the world would
have a much longer warning time if Iran attempts to build a nuclear device in
the future.
Monterey Institute of International Studies nuclear non-proliferation
expert Jeffrey Lewis said that if he were grading the Iran nuclear accord, he
would give it an “A”. He called the agreement "a good deal” because it not
only slowed down that country’s nuclear program, but also put in place
stringent monitoring and verification measures. What this meant, he indicated,
was that “if they try to build a bomb, we're very likely to find out, and to do
so with enough time that we have options to do something about it. There's a
verifiable gap between their bomb option and an actual bomb. That's why it's a
good deal.”
Kingston Reif, Director for Disarmament and Threat Reduction Policy at
the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, opined that while the Iran
accord was "not perfect", it would be “a net plus for
nonproliferation” and would enhance regional security. Among other plusses
posed by the accord, Reif said that it clearly forced Iran to “retreat from
many of its initial demands, including in the areas of the scale of uranium
enrichment it needed, the intrusiveness of inspections it would tolerate, and
the pace of sanctions relief it would demand.”
Reif went on to say that the agreement would “keep Iran further away
from the ability to make nuclear weapons for far longer than the alternative of
additional sanctions or a military strike possibly could.” What this meant was
that the threat of regional nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East
was thus diminished. Reif said that while it might not be a perfect agreement,
it was “a very strong and good deal.” He suggested that no accord could have resulted
in a one-hundred-to-nothing score in favor of Washington. “That's not how
international negotiations go,” he said. But he added that “the monitoring and
verification regime in this deal is the most comprehensive and intrusive regime
that has ever been negotiated.”
As I’ve pointed out here before, there was severe collateral damage done
by the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord. More specifically, instead
of seeking to further Iran’s slow but sure move toward a more open and liberal
society, the Trump administration’s reversal on the previous administration’s
progress in reinserting the Persian state into the world concert of nations has
undermined it by weakening the position of moderate President Hassan Rouhani
and delighting hardline Muslim clerics who opposed the deal on the grounds that
Washington could not be trusted to keep its word. The Trump administration’s
disowning of an historic agreement forged under the previous US administration
proved their point, and knocked Rouhani’s outward-looking, liberal progress off
course.
Iran, on the contrary, has largely kept its word in terms of the
agreement, perhaps more to demonstrate that Teheran is not Washington than for
any other reason. The fact that the US has reneged on the deal doesn’t, Iran
seems to feel, justify its turning on the other signers of the pact, no matter
how much the radically right-wing clerics might be tempted to.
The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran accord, as well as
its disdain for the European Union and its reneging on the Paris climate change
treaty are all symptomatic of a much broader trend. In his Armistice Day speech
at which Donald Trump was present in Paris, French President Emanuel Macron
pointedly spoke out against the “America First” agenda that Mr. Trump has been
pushing since his election campaign. Fittingly,
Mr. Macron chose Armistice Day (this year marking the 100th
anniversary of the end of World War I) to warn against a new rise of
nationalism worldwide.
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| And now...Macron versus Trump |
Until now, Macron has been, perhaps, the European leader who has most tried
to befriend Trump and convince him to not turn his back on the world and draw
the US into the political autism of ultra-nationalist policies. But the speech
that he delivered at the Armistice ceremony before the Arc of Triumph was in
Trump’s face, warning that ultra-nationalism was “a betrayal of patriotism” that
might well lead to “old demons coming back to wreak chaos and death,” an
obvious reference to the rise of Fascism following World War I and in the
run-up to World War II. His rebuke was extensive to Russian President Vladimir
Putin who was also in attendance along with dozens of other world leaders, as
well as to President Trump.
Macron emphasized the continuing need for a global order based on
liberal values. He said that the millions of soldiers who fought and died in
the Great War fought to defend “universal values”, rejecting the “selfishness
of nations only looking after their own interests.” He punctuated this by
saying that “patriotism is exactly the opposite of nationalism.”
“By putting our own interests first, with no regard for others,” Macron
said, in a direct reference to Trump’s America First (read: America alone) policy,
“we erase the very thing that a nation holds dearest, and the thing that keeps
it alive: its moral values.”
President Macron’s words should echo in the minds of every democrat as
far-right leaders and would-be nationalist demagogues seek to return to a time
when pacts were made to be broken, when nationalism pitted one country against
another—laying the groundwork for two devastating world wars—and when global
policies focused on national and regional differences rather than on the
acceptance of worldwide diversity and the need for everyone to celebrate these
distinct traits, while embracing cooperation and the sustaining mortar of
democracy and a universal bill of rights as the road to world peace.
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