Jamshid Chalangi:
Today we celebrate the International Workers’ Day and respect it along with millions of workers who through their daily hard labour make our world a better place.
However, forty years after the Khomeini regime came to power in Iran with his empty promises, we will try to find out what is the plight of Iranian workers under the country’s current economic crisis.
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Department of State
Office of the Spokesperson
For Immediate Release
Press Statement
April 30, 2019
The United States strongly condemns the Iranian regime’s growing crackdown on women advocating for their human rights. Yasmin Aryani, Monireh Arabshahi, and Mojgan Keshavarz have been arrested in recent days for the crime of peacefully protesting compulsory hijab. Vida Movahedi, who became the symbol of the nationwide protests against the regime last year as the Girl of Engelhab Street, has been unjustly sentenced to one year in prison for her protests against forced veiling. Shaparak Shajarizadeh was sentenced to 20 years in prison for peacefully protesting the hijab.
The United States again denounces the cruel sentencing of human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh to 148 lashes and 33 years in prison for standing up for those the Iranian government oppresses. Many other women are being threatened and interrogated by security forces as the regime increasingly fears the voices of its own people. We call on the Iranian authorities to end their harassment and imprisonment of women who are simply expressing their conscience and demanding basic rights.
We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
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Jamshid Chalangi:
In tonight’s program we will look at the state of sports in Iran under the country’s current economic and social problems, as the Revolutionary Guard which has now been designated as a terrorist group by the US controls most of Iran’s football clubs and other sport bodies.
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We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
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Jamshid Chalangi:
In tonight’s program we will look at the latest news of Iran and the Middle East region and the consequences of the recent devastating flood in Iran, as well as the plight of the soldiers of the war with Iraq.
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This week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo moved to end sanctions waivers on Iranian oil—a major step to increase financial pressure on Tehran. The new policy, once it goes into force on May 2, aims to force China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey to stop buying crude from Iran, depriving the country of its primary source of cash.
In the near term, the pressure tactic will mostly work, successfully siphoning off a significant share of Iran’s oil exports. The big buyers in the handful of countries still doing oil business with Iran will plead for leniency, or kick and scream, and then grudgingly wind down. They are unlikely to get to zero, for lack of affordable and available alternatives, possible permission from the United States to slow-walk their retreat, and good old-fashioned recalcitrance. But they will likely steer away from committing reputational and financial suicide by flagrantly breaching U.S. sanctions.
President Donald Trump will surely shout victory. He is right that the United States can, for now, weaponize the global financial system. Washington can use sanctions to bring businesses around the world to their knees, making them the unwilling executors of U.S. national security policy.
Tehran is seething and threatening retaliation. It is probably closer to leaving the 2015 nuclear deal than it has ever been. European countries and other supporters of the agreement are irate. Their limited willingness to cooperate with the United States on security issues is shrinking.
These are all desired outcomes for the Trump administration, regardless of the collateral damage to the working poor around the globe, who will bear the brunt of spiking energy prices.
Ultimately, by tightening the economic vice, the Trump administration aims to isolate Iran and create enough pressure to instigate regime change.Ultimately, by tightening the economic vice, the Trump administration aims to isolate Iran and create enough pressure to instigate regime change.
The White House wants to exact commitments from Iran to end its support for terrorism, missile proliferation, and human rights abuses—along with other destabilizing regional activities—and curtail the country’s nuclear ambitions. The administration also wants Iran to embrace transparency, liberal politics, and peace.
To be sure, many people both in and outside Iran want to see new leadership in Tehran that is more committed to rule of law, a free and protected civil society, and global engagement. However, there is little to indicate that the Trump administration’s brand of maximum economic pressure will deliver this result.
What the White House strategy is set to deliver is a meaningful, if temporary, dip in Iran’s oil exports. This hollow triumph will come at an exceedingly high cost.
To begin with, Iranian oil exports should only take a serious slide when most of the big players exit Iranian oil deals next month. But exports will inevitably creep back up and continue to flow. Smaller-scale traders will ferry cargoes to smaller-scale refineries. Smaller-scale banks or trading companies, with extremely limited exposure to the United States and U.S. sanctions enforcement, will process the oil transactions. Regulators in countries angered by the U.S. policy may look the other way as this barter and smuggling activity occurs. Chinese, Indian, and Turkish entities are the most likely candidates for this new kind of commerce.
The United States cannot possibly hit every Iran sanctions violator, no matter how much it wants the pressure policy to work. Washington cannot rely on the same international intelligence sharing and enforcement assistance as it made use of during the 2012-2015 period of intensive Iran sanctions. As some Iranian oil continues to make its way to market, observers may conclude that U.S. sanctions are not so tough after all, which could supercharge the incentive to push the envelope or breach them. This will make Trump’s Iran policy less effective.
Many expect that Iran will suffer through the intensive sanctions regime instead of capitulating. Irregular warfare is cheap, and Iran has always put funding for terrorist proxies ahead of a broad social safety net and domestic investment. Iran’s revolutionary generals will continue to threaten Israel and others in the Middle East.
MARK FITZPATRICK 10 APRIL 2019
When yet more sanctions are always the answer, one has to ask why.
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with a Trumpian title (“Build an Iranian Sanctions Wall”) on April 2, Mark Dubowitz acknowledges that the principal purpose of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Iran is to foster the regime’s collapse. Left unsaid is that regime change is also Dubowitz’s own thinly cloaked goal for Iran. Blocking any future administration from returning to the 2015 nuclear deal is his newest justification for piling on more sanctions. Unwise in so many ways, it could also provoke Iran into violating the deal itself and thereby start a spiral to war.
Here is his stated premise: Further penalizing Iran on grounds of support for terrorism, human rights violations, and any other malign behavior would create so much economic pain that Iran would have to capitulate. It would give in to all 13 of the demands imposed to date by the Trump administration, including that it abandon uranium enrichment forever, end missile testing, stop supporting Hizballah, and improve human rights (presumably measured by a different yardstick than that used for Saudi Arabia). Dubowitz apparently would also add a 14th demand by sanctioning Iranian corruption.
The demands on Iran are unattainable because they require unconditional surrender. Those who know the Islamic Republic and the people of Iran know they will not capitulate on every front like this. They may improve human rights (a goal of President Hassan Rouhani unrelated to foreign pressure), but Iranians are surely aware that no improvement will be sufficient for those in Washington who are unalterably opposed to the Islamic Republic. Iran may continue to cut back financial support to Hizballah, but it will not cut off an organization that is so integral to its foreign and defense policy. The United States cannot even persuade Europeans to take sides against Hizballah. How can Washington expect Tehran to denounce the group that it has fostered?
The other reason the leverage argument fails is that sanctions are easy to apply and hard to remove. Indeed, this difficulty is the very reason Dubowitz argues that terrorist designations and other measures be imposed now, to impede the negotiation flexibility of future administrations. The Trump administration’s April 8 designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization adds little to the sanctions pressure already being applied against the Guard Corps and puts U.S. servicemembers operating in the Middle East in somewhat greater danger due to Iran’s retaliatory designation of U.S. Central Command as a terrorist organization. Worse, multiplying sanctions as Dubowitz advises also impedes Trump’s own options and those of any Republican successor.
Suppose, for a moment, that Iran did make significant changes to its human rights behavior or stopped providing missiles to Houthi rebels, who are far less important to Iran’s deterrence posture than Hizballah. The United States should want to encourage more such positive moves by rewarding them. But Dubowitz’s prescription would make it hard to do so. The policy flexibility that Trump has employed vis-à-vis North Korea, by exclusively focusing on the nuclear and missile threat, would be lost to any Iran policy.
Knowing this, the Iranians would have little incentive to moderate their behavior. With diplomacy less effective a tool, military options will rise in prominence as a means for resolving issues with Iran. Needless to say, the unrelenting sanctions policy would also sharpen U.S. conflicts with allies and partners, particularly in Europe.
As shortsighted as the overall theme of Dubowitz’s argument is, certain of the specific measures advocated in the op-ed are astoundingly ill-conceived. Dubowitz calls, for example, for “paying more Iranians to go on strike through a covert fund run by the Central Intelligence Agency.” As others have noted, this gives the regime strong reason to believe that the CIA is already funding labor union strikes in Iran. For an op-ed that purports to support such labor activists, associating them with U.S. intelligence paints a bulls-eye on their backs.
The op-ed is also flawed by factual mistakes that aim to paint Iran in the worst possible light, all the better to fan a U.S. policy of regime change. It is simply not true that Iran has “become more hostile since Mr. Rouhani’s election in 2013.” According to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, for example, Iranian fast boats stoppedharassing U.S. Navy ships in August 2017. It is also not true that “key restrictions on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs … begin to lapse in 2020.” In reality, nuclear constraints only begin to loosen in 2023, per Article A.3 of the agreement. And it is an exaggeration, at the very least, to suggest that new sanctions are needed to keep international firms from entering Iran. They already are deterred from doing so, and firms that started doing business in Iran after the nuclear deal was inked have largely withdrawn. There must be some other reason for adding new sanctions.
Imposing new sanctions would also push Iran toward abandoning the nuclear deal. Knowing that pulling out would trigger economic penalties is a key reason Iran is sticking to its obligations under the deal even though Trump unilaterally abandoned America’s. For the United States to multiply sanctions anyway obviates this disincentive. This, of course, is a purposeful part of the plan: to goad Iran into missteps that would both sink the nuclear deal forever and pave the way for military conflict.
While Dubowitz nastily denigrates pro-diplomacy Democrats as being “pro-Tehran,” it would be equally insulting to label all advocates of dialed-up sanctions as being “pro-war.” But as National Security Adviser John Bolton made clear before taking up his current post, military action is the preferred outcome for a significant number of them. Pressing for massive new sanctions paves the way to that path whether Dubowitz wants it or not.
As the CEO of an organization that purports to defend democracies, Dubowitz’s ideas for blocking a future president from carrying out election promises is a curious subversion of a democratic norm. If preventing diplomacy is such a good idea, Trump should campaign on it, and let the voice of the people decide.
Mark Fitzpatrick is an associate fellow with the International Institute for Strategic Studies and co-author of Uncertain Future: The JCPOA and Iran’s nuclear and missile programs (2019).
by Andreas Krieg
In the era of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” the European Union has woken to the disruptive potential of disinformation and weaponized narratives—particularly in the context of the Kremlin’s covert attempt to disrupt liberal discourse in Europe. Yet, Brussels has paid little attention to the covert influencing campaign of another authoritarian player trying to distort liberal discourse in Europe’s capital: the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The UAE is a small Gulf state with extensive financial power levers and an assertive regional foreign and security policy: “little Sparta,” as former Secretary of Defense James Mattis once referred to it. Despite its size, the UAE has built an extensive disinformation network in the region and in the West, which goes beyond conventional lobbying. Spearheading the counterrevolutionary campaign to restore authoritarian rule in the Arab world post-Arab Spring, Abu Dhabi has activated adisinformation network of media outlets, troll and bot nets, think tanks, and policy makers to not just conduct public diplomacy but to sell the region and the West a narrative of “authoritarian stability.” This narrative frames political Islam as terrorism and civil society in the Arab world as destabilizing.
The UAE’s extensive meddling in Washington has been well documented. Stories about how the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba, equipped with a blank check from Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Zayed (MbZ), had been able to buy-off conservative think tankers and court former policy makers, started to appear after leaks from the ambassador’s emails revealed the extent of Emirati meddling in American policy discourse.
Otaiba was asked to find a means to repackage Abu Dhabi’s phobia of a mobilized civil society in the Arab world. According to the fear-based narrative of authoritarian stability, the revolutions of the Arab Spring were covert Islamist conspiracies to install Sharia-based caliphates. This narrative borrowed the simplistic conveyer-belt theory to frame moderate political Islam as an “entry drug” to salafi-jihadist terrorism, a spin that resonated well among neocons with an antipathy toward Islam. UAE-sponsored think tanks would provide the narrative with credibility while their revolving door to strategic policy-making provided the access. When it became apparent in 2016 that the next tenant in the White House would build his Middle East policy on a right-wing basis, Abu Dhabi’s disinformation network went into overdrive. Subsequently, during the Gulf Crisis in 2017, Crown Prince MbZ could rely on the administration’s ear and initial support when branding the UAE’s action against its neighbor Qatar as fighting “terrorism.”
In Brussels, the UAE’s disinformation network is still in its infancy. But in Westphalia Global, Abu Dhabi has found two conservative PR men, Tim Eestermans and Timo Behr, who have worked in the UAE’s Foreign Ministry for years and share the Emirati fear of political Islam. Westphalia Global is a small boutique strategic communications firm whose primary client appears to be in Abu Dhabi.
On the think tank side, the newly created Bussola Institute promises to provide Abu Dhabi with both a hub to legitimize its narrative of authoritarian stability and a platform to tie senior, exclusively conservative, EU policy makers to the Emirati agenda. Board members José María Aznar and Anders Rasmussen allow the institute to tap into their Brussels networks. So far, events organized by the institute have merely been used to promote “tolerance” in an effort to whitewash the image of a country that frequently incarcerates activists, journalists, and academics. But the first published reports on its website suggest that Bussola promotes the same fear-mongering strategic narrative that frames political Islam in the region as terrorism.
The UAE narrative, promoted by a Muslim country on a vendetta against civil society in the Arab world, paradoxically resonates among conservatives and right-wingers in the European Parliament (EP) with Islamophobic leanings. In the complex, post-revolutionary context in the Middle East, the UAE’s attempt to shape perception in Brussels is increasingly dangerous as the Emirates are looking for ways to find moral and political support for their authoritarian protégés in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen.
The UAE’s lobbying campaign is having an effect, a political advisor in Brussels tells me. A range of conservative MEPs recently abstained from condemning the UAE’s catastrophic war in Yemen, while the populist government of Italy tried unsuccessfully to lobby for the UAE to be removed from the EU’s blacklist for tax havens in March.
If the UAE’s impact in Brussels proves to be as disruptive as its operations in Washington, the alliance between conservative populists and the UAE lobby could be more subversive to EU politics than its infant network currently suggests. Much depends on whether the UAE chooses to lobby to the right of the European People’s Party, potentially empowering forces that oppose the idea of a liberal Europe altogether.
Andreas Krieg is an assistant professor at the School of Security and Institute for Middle Eastern Studies at King’s College London.
AARON STEIN – 12TH APRIL 2019
The Trump administration is a walking billboard for the value of nuclear weapons — and the most recent sanctions levied on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps will further undermine any coherent American policy to grapple with the spread of nuclear technology in the Middle East. Nuclear technology is 76 years old, and many countries have the requisite capabilities, or access to a coterie of suppliers, to overcome key bottlenecks and develop nuclear weapons. Iran is no exception and had plans to build five nuclear weapons in secret until the government made the political decision in 2003 to halt coordinated weapons related work (albeit with continued centrifuge development) and make the necessary concessions to verify this decision through agreements with the international community.
At its core, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), dubbed the Iran “nuclear deal” for short, put in place monitoring mechanisms to verify the Iranian government’s pledge not to build nuclear weapons. To ensure an agreement with Iran, certain elements of the JCPOA’s inspection regime will remain in place throughout the 25-year agreement, while others are set to expire at different times. Eventually, Iran would be treated like a “normal” nuclear state in 2040, when the extra inspection provisions will end. After 2040, Iran would still be subject to monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the safeguards regime the United States and the rest of the world relies on to ensure the peaceful use of nuclear technology.
The Trump administration’s policy of ending the inducements given to Iran for its decision to allow for more robust inspections and a pledge of peaceful nuclear intent could have a negative effect on regional nonproliferation norms. Beyond this, it is unlikely the unprecedented move to label an element of the Iranian government a terrorist group would bring about the collapse of the Iranian regime — the intended end-goal of the current American policy. Sanctions are intended to impose an economic cost on countries to change behavior. However, when implemented independent of any inducement or a positive enticement to change the policy choices of an adversarial regime, there is little evidence to suggest a “sticks only” approach leads to policy change.
The problem with the Trump administration’s sanctioning of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is that it severely complicates any current or future effort to offer the Iranian government a “carrot” to alter or amend military or foreign policy in the Middle East — a region where the United States remains heavily engaged, with no plans to leave in the foreseeable future. Worse, the decision to sanction a uniformed military unit as a Foreign Terrorist Organization risks establishing a new (and negative) global norm, whereby governments can simply choose to label adversarial armed forces akin to non-state actors, and therefore make them legitimate military targets. Indeed, this has already been the case with the Global War on Terror and the legitimization of a country’s right to target groups in third countries in the name of combating terrorism. The risk, now, is that the goalposts have moved regarding who and what is a terrorist group and how to use military force against a uniformed adversary that politicians have labelled as a terrorist.
For a country like the United States, which has escalation dominance over any potential adversary, this may not be too concerning (although, for troops deployed in Iraq, the stakes are different than for the country as a whole). However, for American allies and partners embroiled in disputes with irregular forces that receive support from uniformed military personnel, many of which are engaged in low-intensity conflicts with neighbors, the precedent could lead to outcomes the Trump administration has not accounted for. One potential negative outcome could be other countries following the Trump administration’s lead and deeming foreign militaries it disagrees with as terrorist organizations deserving of targeting for acts of “terror” committed in the name of a foreign armed service’s uniformed branch.
Beyond this, the broader efforts to link American sanctions with efforts to deepen partnerships with key Gulf states, including more pronounced cooperation on arms sales and even civil nuclear technologywith the aim of deepening support on countering Iran, risks the further undermining of regional and global nonproliferation norms. The two issues may not seem connected. However, there is a clear linkage between open-ended American support for Saudi Arabia as a means to combat Iranian influence and ensure continued access to regional airbases. This outcome may risk further eroding American national security because the United States will not have received any real tangible benefit for its alliance-building efforts and instead will have suffered overwhelming negative consequences that undermine broader foreign policy concerns.
The Trump administration is on the precipice of undermining the JCPOA, which verifies that Iran continues to abide by its pledge to not seek out nuclear weapons, and undercutting efforts to include language that bars enrichment and reprocessing in countries that sign nuclear cooperation agreements with the United States. All of this could stem from interlinked decision-making to pressure Iran for long-halted past activities, and to use sanctions to prevent future American concessions to Iran (which would to induce real political change in the country). This approach, all in the name of the “maximum pressure”strategy, is not working and is now being implemented so as to tie the hands of future American administrations —in ways that undermine America’s relationship with Europe and erode trust in international organizations. The outcome, of course, is a weaker Washington, independent of any notional changes in Iran. This isn’t a smart strategy; in fact, it is counter-productive and harmful to American interests.
Regime Change via Sanction: Maximum Pressure and Economic Coercion
From the outset of his time in office, President Donald Trump has sought to dismantle the JCPOA, arguing incorrectly that the agreement needs to be “fixed” to enshrine the inspection provisions in the nuclear agreement forever. Brian Hook, the Trump administration’s special representative for Iran, incorrectly asserted that nations should demand that Tehran “end the pursuit of nuclear weapons,” an assertion at odds with American intelligence estimates. In a more nefarious way, the Trump administration is moving the goal posts, claiming that Iran’s harboring of Al Qaeda operatives after the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan toppled the Taliban is proof that Tehran supports Al Qaeda. Therefore, a U.S. military strike would be legal under the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), which authorized military action against nations and actors linked to the 9/11 attacks.
The administration’s goals are twofold. First, Trump’s national security team is using the media to reinforce a narrative about Iran’s relationship with Al Qaeda to keep options to circumvent the congressional check on the use of force, no matter how flimsy that has become since 9/11. Second, this effort signals to Iran that “all options” remain on the table to bolster sanctions and to pressure the regime. In the case of the latter, Mark Dubowitz, the head of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, made the case directly in an op-ed, where he argued that the United States should pair sanctions with clandestine support for Iranian labor unions to foment unrest similar to the labor strikes in 1980s era Poland that eventually led to the end of communist rule in 1989.This unrest, then, would either lead to the toppling of the regime, or a country so weak that it would capitulate to American demands and modify its foreign policy. Iran’s demonstrated track-record would suggest that the regime would react violently to any mass protest, and recent lessons from the Middle East suggest that even weak regimes are capable of using overwhelming force to ensure that the regime survives. American tools, in cases where the regime does choose to stand and fight, are quite limited.
The Trump administration’s heavy use of sanctions to compel changes in Iranian policy does not have the necessary support from key American allies (Europe), is opposed by American adversaries (Russia and China), and is beyond U.S. capabilities to unilaterally implement. These three factors, in combination, will ensure that the self-declared “maximum pressure” effort will fail. In a vacuum, the failure of an American foreign policy is not that big of a deal. Policy fails. Leaders change. New policy is enacted.
However, the legacy of this particular screw-up will outlive the Trump administration and further undermine nonproliferation norms. For decades, the United States has been able to rely on a policy oftechnology denial and inspection to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Ironically, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a nonproliferation success story. This may seem counterintuitive, given that the Islamic Republic made the choice to clandestinely build nuclear weapons in the 1980s and eventually managed to develop enrichment technology in the early 2000s. The regime tried to keep this secret and failed. U.S. and allied intelligence detected Iran’s nuclear developments and made the decision to publicly reveal the existence of key nuclear facilities in 2002, just as the regime was preparing to expand enrichment capacity.
In a tranche of documents and in a presentation that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave to the world and then laundered through friendly U.S. think tanks —including the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Institute for Science and International Security — Tehran sought to build five 10-kiloton nuclear warheads for delivery by ballistic missile. The development of nuclear weapons would, no matter what the scale and scope of Iran’s ambition, change security dynamics in the Middle East and severely constrain American and allied policy options. However, the documents suggested Iran intended to pursue the South Africa model, which built a small number of bombs in secret, and only planned to use them if the country was invaded and the regime threatened. This approach is, at its core, defensive and indicative of a leadership that felt fundamentally insecure and willing to absorb considerable cost to ensure that it would have the tools to prevent regime collapse. This is obviously a problem, given that continued coercion could re-ignite these concerns, empowering the elements within the Iranian government that lobbied to develop nuclear weapons in the first place.
The JCPOA, in this sense, also had the secondary political outcome of signaling that American military intervention to prevent Iranian nuclear development was decidedly off the table. The United States, along with Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China, reached agreement with the Iranian government as an equal and imposed a set of criteria for Tehran to meet in return for reciprocal actions from these world powers. To date, Iran has met its obligations, only to be repaid with a U.S. withdrawal and, now, the imposition of sanctions beyond those that were in place before the American violation of its own agreement. With the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps now under further American sanctions, Iranian policymakers would be unwise not to consider the case of North Korea, a partner in the development of Iranian ballistic missiles, and the country that provided Iran’s ally, Syria, with a reactor to build nuclear weapons in secret. In contrast to Iran’s “bomb in the basement” approach followed by President Hassan Rouhani’s acceptance of key U.S. demands, North Korea loudly developed nuclear weapons and the capabilities to target American cities with long-range missiles (both in defiance of U.S. and global pressure) — and was rewarded with two high-profile summits with the American president and Trump’s personal intervention to roll back sanctions. In essence, Chairman Kim Jong Un was rewarded for building the bomb, while Iran was punished for giving it up.
The Gulf Connection: Alliance Management and Shared Nonproliferation Goals
Amidst the Trump administration’s efforts to enact its maximum pressure policy against Iran, the United States has also pursued a nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. During these negotiations, Riyadh has resisted American demands to forego enrichment and reprocessing. According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “[Saudi Arabia] has said they want a peaceful nuclear energy program, and we have told them we want a gold-standard Section 123 Agreement from them, which would not permit them to enrich. That is simply all I’ve asked of Iran, as well.”
If the United States caves and either omits enrichment and processing language from any civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the Kingdom, or skirts the issue by keeping any Saudi pledge in the non-binding preamble (as was the case with Vietnam), it will have a reciprocal impact in the United Arab Emirates. This is because the Emiratis agreed to “voluntarily forego any enrichment or reprocessing of nuclear material within its territory,” so long as other regional states are not accorded a different set of standards [emphasis added by author].” This conditional pledge, then, means that what the United States and Saudi Arabia agree to will then impact the United Arab Emirates and likely lessen a hard-won concession for a nebulous benefit only tangentially linked to Iran.
The issue, of course, is that Saudi Arabia does not actually need to reach agreement with the United States to develop nuclear power. And herein lies the problem: One outcome of the maximum pressure policy is that the Trump administration has decided that the alliance with Riyadh is sacrosanct and imperative to pressure Iran. Therefore, it is in the United States’ best interests to provide political cover for Riyadh, even after the country’s leader ordered the murder Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post, and committed war crimes in Yemen.
The United States now finds itself in a bind. One the one hand, Washington has signaled to the Kingdom that its support is critical and that it will retain Trump’s backing even when the leadership defies international law. And yet, on the other, Saudi Arabia has refused to accept the U.S. demand to replicate the United Arab Emirates’ pledge to suspend reprocessing and enrichment. Instead, Riyadh has signaled that it would like to retain the right to enrich uranium. Iran makes the same argument, using the same legal rationale, arguing that Article 4 of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons allows for signatories to “develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination.” This is an uncomfortable position to wind up in.
Given this reality, it would be wise to ensure that the United States retains leverage over Riyadh and demands the Saudis conform to certain American foreign policy aims. The history of the Trump administration, however, signals just the opposite.
Beyond Pageantry: The Long-Term Damage to Nonproliferation Norms
The Trump administration’s sanctioning of a uniformed military service is a bold step and in line with the self-described maximum pressure policy. As has become common in this administration, Trump ignored the advice of the military. The military is now having to grapple with changes to force protection guidelines in the Middle East and the Trump administrations normative changes to U.S. policy without much thought for either the ramifications of American actions, the negative repercussions of these actions, or how — in combination with policy choices in the Gulf — they could undo bipartisan nonproliferation consensus.
The short-term risks are clear. Iran has retaliated and placed sanctions on U.S. Central Command, an action that could presage the start of an effort to target U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Tehran could also make the political choice not to target U.S. forces. In either case, it sets the tempo, leaving American military forces in a position of reacting to aggression from a hostile power — and not the other way around. Only time will tell how Iran chooses to respond, but the reality is the United States will remain in a reactive position and is not actually dictating much of anything.
Beyond this narrow concern for U.S. troops, the broader effort to destabilize the Iranian regime is undermining the nonproliferation institutions and norms the United States depends on to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. This is classic short-term thinking, made worse by how nakedly political and partisan this entire effort is. If the real goal of this effort were to bottle up Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, then the mixture of pressure and inducement that resulted in the JCPOA was proof that diplomacy could work. Iran’s bomb program was halted and placed under inspection. All the United States had to give up to get this outcome was to lessen sanctions and allow Iran access to international markets without the threat of secondary sanctions on countries that choose to engage economically with Tehran.
Stepping back, as Mark Fitzpatrick argued in War on the Rocks, Americans should look inwards and ask introspective questions about the country’s Iran policy: What is the point? What are sanctions designed to do? In the past, it was clear: Sanctions were leverage to be traded for Iranian concessions on the nuclear issue. This policy worked once the United States agreed to certain key Iranian demands, and a compromise was made. With the end of that political bargain reached, even the most stringent sanctions the United States could impose remain aspirational in intent, designed only to inflict pain and to bring down a government. Absent any acceptance that sanctions only create leverage when they can be removed, the room for compromise is so tiny that no Iranian government could ever make the necessary concessions to address the long list of U.S. concerns.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is four years older than the average life expectancy of a male Iranian and, independent of the quality of his healthcare, is statistically likely to die well before the terms of the JCPOA expire. Given this statistical reality, one could deem the JCPOA a regime change policy because, assuming that American malfeasance and efforts to undermine it don’t force a change to Iranian policy, the inspection regime is almost certainly going to outlive the Iranian leader . His replacement — and how he will make policy vis-a-vis the United States — remains a mystery.
The nuclear deal decided to manage a solvable problem and, in its own way, hope for positive change. The maximum pressure policy seeks a similar outcome but is dependent on fomenting an internal, American-backed uprising. The assumption that it is the only way to effectively manage Iran’s defunct nuclear weapons program is fallacy. In fact, what is happening is only serving to undermine key institutions that the United States relies upon to verify Iran’s non-nuclear pledge while underscoring how valuable Iran’s nuclear program once was. A South African “bomb in the basement,” coupled with long-range missiles similar to those in North Korea, does not invite more American pressure. Just the opposite. Indirectly admitting to past weapons work and allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect a pledge of peaceful intent is what results in more pressure to give up more in return for an American pledge to not make things worse economically — and not a U.S. offer to make things better.
The incentive structure is off. The lesson, of course, is that missiles and bombs can win even the nastiest regime on earth the respect of the world’s superpower. This will be the legacy of the Trump administration’s nonproliferation policy. It may feel good to sanction the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and talk loudly about pressure, but this only matters if the United States turns that pressure into a tangible policy outcome. Thus far, there is no evidence to suggest the Trump administration is any closer to its goal of Iranian regime change. Just the opposite. The American pursuit of maximum pressure has eroded tools to counter proliferation, and lessened pressure on allies to acquiesce to American hard asks in support of decades-old efforts to limit the spread of enrichment and reprocessing. These twin failures, and the broader inability to accept that Washington cannot topple the Iranian regime without severely damaging itself, is bad for the country. What is worse is that the ongoing efforts to entrench this bad policy has put U.S. troops at risk (again) and made it harder for more rational policymakers to fix nonproliferation policy in the future. The Trump administration’s efforts to topple Iran is just making the United States weaker.
Aaron Stein is the director of the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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