29 Mar 2024
Saturday 5 November 2016 - 14:29
Story Code : 237834

Donald Trumps art of the Iran deal

The Cairo Review of Global Affairs?|: The U.S. Republican presidential candidate is outspokenly hostile towards the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Yet his erratic promises to renegotiate, or cancel, the deal reveal an ignorance of diplomacy.

If Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, the Iran deal will have had something to do with it. According to his son Eric Trump, the Barack Obama administrations agreement with Tehran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was one of the main factors in his fathers decision to run for the Republican nomination. As seen by Trump, Obamas diplomats failed to learn the negotiating skills that the Republican nominee outlined in his 1987 best-selling book, Trump: The Art of the Deal.

Despite his campaign bluster on the Islamic Republic of Iran, Trump was actually an early advocate of talking to Tehran. In December 2011, he told CNNs Wolf Blitzer, Look, nobodys even talking to Iran. Now, maybe theyre the evil empire, maybe theyre the bad people, and maybe theyre not, you know, got to talk. Nobody talks.

Trump said he was even willing to deal with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline president of Iran at the time, who Trump said may have good reason to hate the United States. In the CNN interview, Trump feared that Obama, lacking deal-making skills, might end up starting a war with Iran thinking it was a way to get re-elected to a second term.

Most of Donald Trumps pro-deal sentiment can be found on his Twitter feed. In one tweet, he said that a nuclear deal was possible because Tehran knew Washington could blow them away to the Stone Age. Between 2012 and 2015, Trump continuously advised Obama on social media to be cool, calm, and move slowly when negotiating a deal with Iran.

When the P5+1 diplomatic groupincluding the United States, Britain, China, France, Russia, and Germanysigned an interim nuclear agreement with Iran in November 2013, Trump blasted it as rotten, imbecilic, and a bad deal. Trump had the same opinion of the final agreement, reached in 2015. With a view to preventing Iran from building a bomb, the nuclear deal restricts Irans uranium enrichment and prevents weapons-grade plutonium production; it requires Iran to cooperate with inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In exchange, Iran received economic benefits such as relief from banking and nuclear-related sanctions.

Trump seized on the nuclear negotiations when he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015. I will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, he said in his Trump Tower speech. And we wont be using a man like Secretary [John] Kerry that has absolutely no concept of negotiation, whos making a horrible and laughable deal, whos just being tapped along as they make weapons right now.

In August 2015, he told NBCs Meet the Press, the Iran deal would lead to nuclear holocaust. During his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention a year later, he described Obamas Iran deal as the worst in U.S. history and argued that Tehran was well on its way to obtaining nuclear weapons.

So what is Donald Trumps art of the Iran deal? Trump believes that Obamas negotiating strategy should have included tightening sanctions on Iran, banning Irans trade with North Korea, insisting on the release of Americans imprisoned in Iran, refusing to unfreeze $150 billion in Iranian assets held in the United States since the U.S. embassy hostage crisis in 1979, and generally playing hard to get.

Trump told CNN in July 2015, We should double up and triple up the sanctions and have them come to us. Later to the New York Times he said, We should have doubled up the sanctions and made a much better deal. In his latest book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, Trump wrote that he had no faith in the sanctions snapback clauseone of the mechanisms in the JCPOA to ensure Irans continued compliance with its obligations in the nuclear accord.

Nonetheless, during his presidential campaign Trump continued flip-flopping on the idea of making some kind of deal with Iran. Its very hard to say, Were ripping it up, he explained. Trump elaborated on MSNBCs Morning Joe in September 2015: I love to buy bad contracts where people go bust, and I make those contracts good. This is a perfect example of taking over a bad contract. I will find something in that contract that will be very, very well-scrutinized by us, and I think they will not be able to do it, whatever it may be.

At the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention in March, Trump proclaimed, My number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. Then Trump told the New York Times: It would have been so much better if they had walked away a few times.

During a rally in April, Trump made odd statements that seemed to imply acceptance of normalizing relations with Iran, with a Trump twist. He proposed selling $12 billion in weapons to Tehranbut faulty ones, in the hope that Iran would sue the United States so he could then respond, Oh, Im sorry they dont work. Gee, thats too bad. Trump complained to the Washington Post editorial board that Iranians were going out of their way not to spend any money in our country. A case in point was Boeing airplanes, Trump explained, even though Boeing in fact is finalizing a deal to sell some eighty planes to Iran.

Whether any of Trumps complaints have merit or not, he seems oblivious to the fact that dismantling the Iran deal would have serious repercussionsfor Americas standing with international allies who partnered in the deal, and for the prospects of Iranian moderates seeking to normalize Irans relations with the world. The Obama administrations decision to negotiate was partly driven by a concern that Irans hardliners would persist with clandestine means to potentially develop nuclear weapons if Tehran was not given incentives to accept international monitoring; and that failing to prevent Irans nuclear weapons capability through peaceful negotiations could lead to a new Middle East conflict with Israel and the United States on the forefront.

The candidates for the American presidency have competed to vilify Iran in their speeches, and this is a sign of hostility, said Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in his Nowruz speech last March. Hossein Shariatmadari, editor-in-chief of the conservative Kayhannewspaper, gave Trump a backhanded endorsement: The wisest plan of crazy Trump is tearing up the nuclear deal.

Tearing up the Iran deal would give ammunition to hardliners to humiliate Irans pragmatic president, Hassan Rouhani, who oversaw the negotiations with the P5+1. It would be confirmation of the hardliners article of faith: Washington cannot be trusted. If the art of the deal fails, and Irans nuclear program proceeds without international monitoring, the world may have to contend with Trumps art of the war.
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