Recent reporting from Axios suggests that President Donald Trump is considering a new nuclear deal with Iran as a way to turn the temporary ceasefire into something longer-term and more sustainable. It also suggests that the Iranian regime is interested in playing ball. The reporting is light on details, but suggests that the deal will have the same core ingredients as the one negotiated by President Barack Obama and signed in 2015 that the U.S. later left—some kind of financial/sanctions relief in exchange for verification of promises not to pursue a weapons program.
These two ingredients are critical to any deal, but what is also critical is what is left off of the negotiating table. The president needs to remain vigilant and recall that the point of a nuclear deal is the nuclear weapons program and the nuclear weapons program alone. If we assume that the goal is preventing the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon, any deal around this must remain narrowly focused to give it the highest odds of success. If, however, the goal is to fail to reach an agreement, then it also makes sense to require that the deal address the activity of proxies in the region and deal with missile systems. The Axios reporting suggests that some are pushing to do just that.
This was exactly what helped nearly sink the original JCPOA in Congress—there was significant opposition to all the things the deal didn’t do. There was also much opposition to what it actually did—contempt for sunset clauses, for the fact that the deal would require some level of trust in addition to verification, and for arguments against any kind of financial relief for a regime some saw as illegitimate.
Nearly a decade later, with oil prices sky-high, it is beyond parody that we are back to where this all began, except this time with a massive war as a kickoff rather than negotiations in Oman (as was the case back in 2013, when the JCPOA was first discussed between the Obama administration and Javad Zarif of the Iranian Foreign Ministry).
This is by no means to say that the current negotiations aren’t worth pursuing; they absolutely are. The goal remains a quick end to the war before it has a chance to become another quagmire and cause sustained economic damage, although that window closes more with each passing day. It is for this reason that the president must guard very strongly against those who are unwilling to comprehend the basic reality of what a nuclear agreement needs to include and what can be left for another day. There is no time for an everything-bagel agreement. The administration must be willing to ruthlessly prioritize between nice-to-have and must-have, between things that can be negotiated in later agreements and what has to be part of any Phase 1 deal.
The United States is negotiating from a position of strength, so it is likely that any negotiation will be more favorable to the Americans than to the Iranians when compared to the negotiations a decade ago. That said, the country is still not in a position to impose its will on the Iranian government, and any kind of agreement will need to be give-and-take. As a function of that, it will contain the same key ingredients as the JCPOA with differences of degree far more than differences of type. There has been no unconditional surrender, and as such it is effectively impossible to impose unilateral terms, especially when the Iranians have shown what they’re capable of doing to maritime passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iranian nuclear weapons, despite being two weeks away for the better part of the last two decades, do represent a serious threat to America in a way that standard Middle Eastern saber-rattling does not; those seriously concerned about nuclear proliferation ought to guard against those with more expansive agendas. If the government is serious about a deal, it will require disappointing hawkish supporters, and the administration should steel itself for that sooner rather than later.
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