The new sanctions slapped on Iran (and Russia and North Korea) last week by the U.S. Congress—and the sanctions placed the previous week on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) by the U.S. Treasury, State, and Justice departments—threaten to make the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA - aka the Iran nuclear deal), hostage to the vagaries of hardliners in both Tehran and Washington.
Hardliners in both countries appear to be getting the upper hand as both countries decide what to do next regarding, what has been until now, an unprecedented breakthrough in relations between the two adversaries. Iranian President Rouhani seemed stung by the mid-July administration sanctions and quickly back-pedaled by calling out the Trump administration, saying that the new sanctions were “in contravention of the spirit and the text” of the agreement. Rouhani stressed that “Iran will respond appropriately” to U.S. sanctions.
Clearly, Rouhani has been put into a difficult situation by the sanctions. The JCPOA was the great achievement of his first term in office, and he has already been heavily criticized by the Islamic right for not securing greater economic benefits from the agreement. Rouhani’s remarks appear aimed at keeping the door open to further diplomacy.
Iranian hardliners have jumped on the U.S. sanctions by attacking the nuclear deal. Supreme Leader’s foreign policy advisor and member of the Iranian commission charged with monitoring the JCPOAs implementation, Ali Akbar Velayati, stated that “the U.S.’s breaking of its promises with regard to the nuclear deal will not go unanswered” and characterized the sanctions as America “going back on its word.”
The head of the Iranian Parliament’s Foreign Policy and National Security Committee, Alaeddin Borujerdi, said “under no circumstances will [Iran] take up the burden” of another negotiation. Indeed, the Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif said that Iran will not accede to a re-negotiation of the deal and that the imposition of sanctions has violated the agreement.
More ominously, Muhammad Ali Jafari, the head of the IRGC, stated that before the U.S. imposes sanctions on Iran or the IRGC, it should first “gather up all its bases in the region within 1,000km of Iran.” He added that the U.S. should understand that the damage of “its miscalculation needs to be repaid at a high price.”
The Trump administration and its allies in Congress are playing a reckless game in their handling of the nuclear agreement. Never a fan of the JCPOA, candidate Trump called the deal the worst deal the U.S. ever had. Candidate Trump also promised that his administration would implement new policies to bear on old problems. However, President Trump’s administration seems intent on embracing old hardline policies toward Iran that will only make Supreme Leader Khamenei’s distrust of America’s ability to keep its word seem prophetic.
One thing that is clear is that President Trump’s attitude toward the nuclear agreement at best will be similar to the way Ronald Reagan handled the SALT II arms control treaty: criticize the perceived shortcomings of the agreement but never abrogate the agreement. At worst, Trump will follow through on his threat and tear up the agreement. Trump’s emerging retrograde Iran policy closely resembles the hardline policies that Washington has taken toward Iran for the past three and half decades, a policy that has been short on achievement, and one that has only served to empower the hardline clergy and IRGC officials in Tehran.
As seen from Tehran, the Iranian leadership sees a U.S. President hostile to the JCPOA; U.S. administration allies (i.e.: Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, etc.) who are embracing the Iranian opposition while pocketing healthy stipends for their support, and a Washington that has identified Iran as the source of the region’s problems. Likewise, Tehran also sees Trump’s embrace of the Gulf Arabs at the recent anti-terror summit in Riyadh in June as directly aimed at better organizing Arab political and financial heft to weaken the Islamic Republic (even though the summit has had the opposite effect by producing a debilitating rift within the Gulf Cooperation Council over Qatar’s support for terrorists and its seeming embrace of Iran).
More importantly, sanctioning Iran and Tehran’s reaction to sanctions could lead both sides to a realization that there is simply no negotiating with one another. This would most likely move Iran closer to having the capability for a nuclear weapon and would increase pressure on Washington to prevent this from happening. Washington has consistently maintained that it does not want to see a nuclear armed Islamic Republic. However, if you eschew diplomacy and the agreement reached that took years to hammer out, what other option is there to prevent conflict from happening?
