• Possibility of a New Iran Deal
  • Trump’s Challenges in Foreign Policy

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

U.S. & Iran Close to New Nuclear Deal

The original Iran deal – concluded in 2015 by Iran, the US and other world powers – took a lot of flak for being just that: a nuclear deal, without any concessions on other troubling activity by Iran (Chris Good/Fareed’s Global Briefing, May 28).

A new one, it seems, could be similar.

Calling the 2015 agreement “a catastrophic failure,” FDD Action (an interest group affiliated with the think tank Foundation for Defence of Democracies) wrote last month that the old nuclear deal “ignored Iran’s ballistic missiles program, support for terrorists, extremists, and regional proxies .  .  . ,

“cyberattacks against the United States and Israel, .  .  .

"horrific human rights violations, and hostage taking.”

Sanctions relief – the backbone of America’s quid pro quo for Iran’s nuclear-program-restrictions in the 2015 arrangement – lets Iran access money that can be used to fund malign regional activity, FDD Action points out.

The group listed those problems among the “seven deadly sins of a bad Iranian nuclear deal.”

The others, per the group, include allowing Iran to enrich uranium “at any level”, sacrificing US negotiating leverage and allowing Iran too much say in nuclear-program monitoring (Good).

President Donald Trump exited the 2015 deal during his first presidential term, despite international monitors saying Iran was abiding by it, and in doing so the US president and his allies aired many of the same complaints.

Now, Trump is pursuing a new deal.

There are important reasons to think Trump could get a better deal today than President Obama did back in 2015, as Fareed Zakaria argued recently.

Iran is significantly weaker now.

Last year, Israel decimated Hezbollah of Lebanon, once Iran’s most powerful regional ally, through a military campaign in Lebanon.

As Israel and Iran squared off, Israeli strikes last October hit Iranian missile and drone facilities and “rendered Iran’s four [ Russian-made ] S-300 air defence systems inoperable,” as Annika Ganzefeld wrote for the Institute for the Study of War.

Saudi Arabia – a decades-long rival of Iran and a political force against allowing Iran any leeway – is stronger today, with less reason to be afraid, and has opened friendlier relations with Tehran under a China-brokered rapprochement.

International sanctions leveraged by the Obama administration, coupled with the “maximum pressure” sanctions enacted during Trump’s first term, have given Iran even more reason to seek economic relief.

Perhaps most importantly – according to Zakaria --- Trump is uniquely positioned to overcome opposition from the 2015 deal’s harshest critics: Congressional Republicans and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Two essays outlining how a new deal could work, however, point back to nuclear restrictions with some enhancements.

Richard Nephew, who served as a deputy Iran envoy under President Joe Biden and worked on Obama’s National Security Council, writes for Foreign Affairs: “A deal that grants broad oversight over Iran’s declared and undeclared nuclear sites and limits uranium enrichment, in exchange for some sanctions relief, could recapture the benefits of JCPOA.”

Improvements under a new deal could include “enhanced inspections and transparency”.

A more ambitious project might involve a permanent cessation of Iranian enrichment, in exchange for economic benefits.

The US should demand restrictions on Iranian missile, drone and weapon exports, and Washington could ask that Iran refrain from meddling in other Middle Eastern countries politics.

“Iran would almost certainly not respect such a commitment, but future violations could serve as a justification for future responses,” Nephew writes.

Another supporter of nuclear diplomacy, Ellie Geranmayeh of the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote recently for The American Conservative: “The core trade-off seems settled: to deny Iran pathways to a nuclear weapon in return for economic relief.”

Key improvements on the 2015 deal, Geranmayeh writes, should include more “expansive verification and monitoring” of Iranian nuclear facilities, longer-term caps on Iran’s maximum degree of uranium enrichment [civilian nuclear electricity-generating power plants can use less-enriched uranium than bombs require], and avenues to “enable direct trade and gradual investment” – including from US businesses, unlikely as that may seem.

A nuclear-only deal could open up other diplomatic tracks, as some in the Obama administration seemed to hope, tentatively, 10 years ago.

“On the Iranian side, there is a stunning rhetorical turn actively welcoming U.S. trade and investment,” Geranmayeh wrote.

“Unlike in 2015, today’s Middle East geopolitics gives Trump a chance to make a U.S.-Iran deal a regional gamechanger .  .  .

“While the U.S.-Iran deal should stay focused on nuclear issues, it can be interwoven with a separate track of security dialogues between Iran and its Arab neighbors, led by Saudi Arabia.”

Not everyone thinks a new Iran deal would necessarily be, as in 2015, so limited in scope.

“The main reason why a grand bargain [between the US and Iran] is more likely to happen now than at any time in the past twenty years is Trump,” historian Christopher de Bellaigue wrote recently for The New York Review of Books.

“The president seems to bear no special animus toward the Islamic Republic, and having gained little from his interventions in Ukraine and imposition of tariffs, he needs a trophy.”

External Issues for the Trump Administration

Trump entered office for the second time touting big designs and facing big challenges in foreign policy.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) writes in an editorial that in three very significant areas, his policies will soon be tested.

First, the Journal writes, Trump’s negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin are beginning to reach a limit.

Trump famously pledged [and failed miserably] to end Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine within 24 hours.

Whether Trump can get any concessions out of Putin could soon become evident.

Second, Trump is also pursuing a new nuclear deal with Iran.

As CNN’s anchor Fareed Zakaria argued recently, Trump is well positioned to secure a better deal than President Obama did in 2015 – among other reasons, because Iran and its proxies – Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis – have been weakened by Israeli strikes and US sanctions.

Thirdly, and most disconcertingly, the Journal includes US-China relations in its list, as Trump wages a trade war against Beijing.

The paper writes: “Trump told Journal editors in October that Chinese leader Xi Jinping wouldn’t blockade or invade Taiwan because the Chinese leader knows Trump would impose crippling tariffs .  .  .

“But the President has already imposed such tariffs and retreated when financial markets rebelled .  .  .

“This can’t have impressed Mr. Xi .  .  .

“The problem is that broad-based tariffs hurt the U.S. as much as they do China, which is why Mr. Trump backed down.”

Trump’s foreign policy frustrations are pilling up

From another perspective, CNN-analyst Stephen Collinson writes that every US president thinks they can change the world – and Donald Trump has an even greater sense of personal omnipotence than his recent predecessors (May 31).

But his policies are not working out too well for the 45th and 47th president.

Trump might intimidate domestic tech titans to toe the line and use government power to try to bend institutions like Harvard University and judges, but in the international arena, some world leaders are harder to bully.

He keeps being ignored and humiliated by Russian President Vladimir Putin who is defying the US effort to end the war in Ukraine.

Russian media is now portraying Trump as the tough talker who always blinks and never imposes consequences.

Trump also thought that he could shape China to his will by facing down leader Xi Jinping in a trade war.

But he misunderstood Chinese politics – and Chinese psychology.

Xi could not afford to lose face, and the one thing an authoritarian in Beijing can never do is bow down to a US president.

Now, US officials say they’re frustrated that China hasn’t followed through on commitments meant to de-escalate the trade conflict.

As with China, Trump backed down in his tariff war with the European Union (EU).

Then Financial Times commentator Robert Armstrong enraged the president by coining the term TACO trade – “Trump Always Chickens Out”.

Everyone thought that Trump would be on the same page as Benjamin Netanyahu.

After all, in his first term he offered the Israeli prime minister pretty much everything he wanted.

But now that he’s trying to broker peace in the Middle East, Trump is finding that prolonging the Gaza conflict is existential for Netanyahu’s political survival, much like Ukraine for Putin.

And Trump’s ambition for an Iranian nuclear deal is frustrating Israeli plans to use a moment of strategic weakness for the Islamic Republic to try to take out its reactors militarily.

Powerful international leaders like Emmanuelle Macron of France and Friedrich Merz of Germany are pursuing their own versions of the national interest that exist in a parallel reality and on different historical and actual timelines to shorter, more transactional, aspirations of American presidents.

Most aren’t susceptible to personal appeals with no payback.

And after Trump’s attempts to humiliate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office, the lure of the White House is waning (Collinson).

Trump spent months on the campaign trail last year boasting that his “very good relationship” with Putin or Xi would “magically solve deep geopolitical and economic problems between global powers that might be unsolvable”.

He’s far from the first US leader to suffer from such delusions, writes Collinson.

President George W. Bush famously looked into the Kremlin tyrant’s eyes and “got a sense of his soul.”

President Barack Obama disdained Russia as a decaying regional power and once dismissed Putin as the “bored kid in the back of the classroom.”

That didn’t work out so well when the bored kid annexed Crimea.

More broadly, the 21st century US presidents have all acted a though they’re men of destiny.

Bush came to office determined not to act as the global policeman.

But the September 11 attacks in 2001 made him exactly that.

He started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – US won, then lost the peace.

And his failed second term goal to democratize the Arab world never went anywhere.

Obama tried to make amends for the global war on terror and travelled to Egypt to tell Muslims it was time for “a new beginning”.

His early presidency pulsated with a sense that his charisma and unique background would itself be a global elixir.

Joe Biden travelled the globe telling everyone that “America is back” after ejecting Trump from the White House.

But four years later, partly due to his own disastrous decision to run for a second term, America – or at least the internationalist post-World War II version – was gone again.

And Trump was back.

Trump’s “America First’ populism relies on the [false] premise that the US has been ripped off for decades, never mind that its alliances and shaping of global capitalism made it the most powerful nation in the planet’s history.

Now playing at being a strongman who everyone must obey, he is busy squandering this legacy and shattering US soft power – i.e. the power to persuade – with his belligerence.

The first four months of the Trump presidency, with its tariff threats, warnings of US territorial expansion in Canada and Greenland and evisceration of global humanitarian aid programs show that the rest of the world gets a say in what happens too.

So far, leaders in China, Russia, Israel, Europe and Canada appear to have calculated that Trump is not as powerful as he thinks he is, that there’s no price for defying him or that their own internal politics make resistance mandatory (CNN/Collinson).

The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com