(Appeared first in the New York Daily News)
Identifying the greatest mistake committed by the Trump administration is a mammoth undertaking, and the obvious frontrunner is the handling of COVID. But if there is a challenger, it’s the withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran.
It was a brazen campaign by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu that compelled President Trump in 2018 to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, reached three years earlier between Iran and the U.S., China, France, Russia, the U.K. and Germany. Netanyahu’s winning card was casting the deal as an Obama project.
Iran is consequently much closer to a bomb today, not less — even as Republicans crow about their contribution to global security.
To spare them the effort of reading the agreement, I’ll summarize: Iran agreed to cease enriching uranium at levels near weapons-grade, eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium and most of its centrifuges, and cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%. It agreed to only enrich uranium up to a harmless level and not build new heavy-water facilities — and submit to monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In exchange, nuclear-related sanctions were to end. The term was for 10 years.
Was it the best possible outcome? Of course not. The best possible outcome involving Iran would be to free the country from the mullahs who hijacked it 40 years ago, saddling its talented people with a brutal and backward theocracy.
Did the West get everything from the mullahs? No. The deal did not touch Tehran’s support for terrorism and bad players including Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia (another mafia that hijacked a country). It also didn’t address the development of long-range missiles that can carry nuclear weapons. But it was the best deal attainable from the mullahs, and it did stop the nuclear program.
There is no evidence that Iran did not honor the deal until Trump walked away, as was confirmed repeatedly by the IAEA. A showy news conference by Netanyahu in 2018 that was slyly framed at proving otherwise in fact did not, exposing Iranian misdeeds from well before the deal was signed.
The wily Netanyahu’s main argument, which was unquestioningly adopted by the logic-challenged Trump, was ridiculous. He contended that the deal allowed Iran to immediately rush to a weapon when it expires. So fluent was he that credulous listeners could be forgiven for concluding that the deal practically compelled Iran to rush headfirst toward nuclear weapons in 2025, as if not doing so would upset the Obamas.
It would have been nice for the deal to obligate Iran into the infinite future, but this is not the nature of agreements. The world powers had hoped to renew or extend the deal; the expectation was for the West to renew sanctions if Iran resumed its program.
Because of Trump’s withdrawal, Iran no longer had the same incentives and disincentives — and it gradually ended its compliance, according to the IAEA. Now officials in Israel and elsewhere say Iran has never been closer to a bomb.
The boneheaded gambit carried at least two additional costs.
By walking away from a deal signed in good faith by his predecessor, Trump rattled U.S. credibility and discarded the principle of continuity, which will dog America’s relations with the world for some time.
And as for Israel, by recklessly showing up in Congress in 2015 to speechify against a sitting president regarding the deal, Netanyahu began the process of poisoning the Jewish state’s relations with the Democratic Party, which is now back in power. That’s not good for Israel, which relies on bipartisan support from its indispensable ally.
The Biden administration is now seeking a renegotiated deal, with prospects uncertain. Meanwhile, new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett hints darkly that Israel may have new tricks up its sleeve, telling the UN General Assembly this week that patience has run out.
But eliminating the nuclear program by force seems unlikely; former Israeli premiers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert in recent weeks have strongly suggested it is too late (essentially, the targets are too far underground). And a major Israeli attack on Iran would risk a devastating counterstrike that would cost innumerable lives and quite possibly spark a wider war.
All of this was perfectly predictable. This is why Israeli security figures tended to support the deal. U.S. security experts supported it as well. They held this position not because the deal created the best imaginable reality, but as a decent attainable outcome.
If the Iran deal was bad, it was mainly bad for the Iranian people.
Remember the fundamental transaction: In exchange for Iran’s comedown, the West would cease to undermine the Iranian regime. Implicitly, it means the West would no longer take actions reflecting even the hope of regime change.
It is reasonable to oppose that transaction out of a sense that the West has an obligation to undermine such a regime. That position has decreasing currency, as we see in Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban — but it is not unreasonable.
Yet this was not the goal of Trump and Netanyahu. They claimed to want to prevent Iranian nukes and safeguard global security. They got it precisely backward. It was a miscalculation of such epic dimension, a mistake of such devastating consequence, that it is hard to believe that it even could have happened.