Trump’s Speech on Iran: Warmed-Over Rejectionism

by Paul R. Pillar

Donald Trump’s speech on Iran is the latest chapter in his struggle to reconcile his overriding impulse to destroy any significant achievements of his predecessor with the fact that the most salient of those achievements in foreign policy—the Iran nuclear agreement or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—is working. The agreement is fulfilling its objective of keeping closed all paths to an Iranian nuclear weapon. As international inspectors have repeatedly determined, Iran is fulfilling its obligations under the agreement.

The struggle for Trump is more difficult on Iran policy than with the Affordable Care Act, where Trump has been using his own executive actions to destroy directly what he has denigrated. However painful his actions on health care are to American citizens who are adversely affected, there is no international multilateral agreement that his direct destruction violates. With health care there are no equivalents to the senior national security officials in his administration who have been telling him what a bad idea abrogation of the JCPOA would be.

With those adults uncomfortably restraining him, Trump is turning to Congress to square the circle between impulse and reality, to do what the adults are advising him not to do, and to come up with an Iran strategy that is markedly different from what previous administrations have done. Neither the brief boilerplate in his speech about countering Iran’s “destabilizing activity” and conventional weapons development nor the paper labeled as a “new strategy on Iran” that the White House released shortly before the speech provides such a strategy. Most of the paper could have been written in either of the previous two administrations and probably in any of the previous half dozen.

Iranian Compliance 

The issue of Iranian compliance with the JCPOA is where the dissonance Trump is experiencing, in the face of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s confirmation of that compliance, is most acute. Trump’s speechwriters went to the usual wells tapped by longtime opponents of the JCPOA who have tried to find any possible source for claiming an Iranian violation. There was mention of heavy water, without any mention that in the two instances in which its supply of heavy water bumped up against the agreed-upon limits Iran promptly did exactly what it is supposed to do under the agreement, which is to sell or otherwise dispose of the excess. Nor was there any mention that, given Iran’s reconfiguration of its heavy-water reactor at Arak and permanent obligation under the JCPOA not to reprocess spent fuel, the heavy water does not represent a proliferation concern.

Trump also asserted that Iran had “intimidated international inspectors,” a line which evidently hinges on some Iranian rhetorical bravado about not giving foreigners the run of their country and which continues a theme pushed by Nikki Haley intended to foster the belief that Iran is denying inspectors access to suspect sites. Neither Trump nor Haley has provided a shred of evidence that there has been any such denial, or that the procedures under JCPOA for inspection of nondeclared as well as declared sites are not working well.

The key to reality as far as Iranian compliance is concerned can be found in Trump’s own speech. When he announced that he was withholding certification under the terms of the legislation governing congressional review, he explicitly said that he was doing so on the basis of the clause in the legislation that does not pertain to Iranian compliance but instead refers to whether sanctions relief is still “appropriate and proportionate” to the benefits from the JCPOA. If the administration had genuine grounds for claiming Iranian noncompliance, Trump surely would have invoked the clauses in the law that instead refer to whether Iran is meeting its obligations.

Familiar Opposition Themes

Trump also went to the usual wells in complaining about “flaws” in the JCPOA. Also as usual, the implicit comparison was with a mythical, impossible-to-achieve pact, with no attention given to what the real negotiating possibilities were when the JCPOA was laboriously hammered out or what those possibilities are now. This was true, for example, of what Trump said about the “sunset” provisions. He disregarded the key considerations about these provisions, including how the most important elements of the agreement never expire and how whether such restrictions remain in place will depend more on how all the parties to the JCPOA see their interests years from now (including whether the United States lives up to its commitments) than on the fine print of a past agreement.

Most important about the sunset clauses is that if the JCPOA were killed, the relevant restrictions on Iranian nuclear activities would vanish right away, not 10 or 20 years from now. This fact makes especially ironic Trump’s closing threat that if Congress doesn’t somehow come up with legislation to his liking, and other parties to the JCPOA do not—contrary to every indication those parties have been giving—bend to whatever it is Trump wants, then “the agreement will be terminated.” If he really is worried about those sunset clauses, then this threat is akin to committing suicide because of fear of death.

The entire speech was filled with what is hoary, well rehearsed, and well refuted. This was true of Trump’s efforts to encourage other misconceptions about the JCPOA, including the favorite one among opponents that Iran got its benefits “up front” before fulfilling most of its obligations. In fact, the reverse was true, with Iran having to dismantle centrifuge cascades, dilute enriched uranium, gut its reactor, and take most of the steps it was required to take to close pathways to a nuclear weapon before it got an ounce of additional sanctions relief. Besides the outright falsehoods, there was hardly a syllable of recognition in the speech that what is one of the most significant nuclear nonproliferation agreements in recent years had accomplished anything at all.

The first portion of Trump’s speech was a play to the emotions that consisted of a recitation of bad things Iran had done through the years, dating back to the hostage crisis of almost 40 years ago and featuring terrorist attacks by Iranian-supported groups in the 1980s. One need not disagree that there were indeed many reprehensible Iranian deeds during those years to note the misrepresentations in the speech. Trump tried to tie Iran to al-Qaeda (evidently relying on the fact of some al-Qaeda members having been in Iran, in a status that probably was most like house arrest) and its attacks, including the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa. That sort of linkage has as much validity as George W. Bush alleging an “alliance” between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda as one of the selling points for launching the Iraq War.

Missing from Trump’s bill of historical particulars about Iranian conduct was any sense of the possibility or desirability of regimes changing their conduct—partly through an evolution in their own perception of self-interest and partly through inducements, which is what the JCPOA is all about in keeping Iran from building nuclear weapons. Also missing was any reference to the responsibility of other players for much of the mayhem involved (as with the Saudi-led, U.S.-supported war in Yemen).

Missing as well was any genuine connection between all of the recited reasons to dislike Iran and a rationale for Trump undermining the JCPOA. Trump offered the usual assertions about unfrozen assets that Iran “could use to fund terrorism” while offering no reason to believe that the level of what is unfrozen has anything to do with the level of Iran’s activity outside its borders. Trump even used the chestnut about a payment by the Obama administration to Iran in the form of pallets of cash—without mentioning, of course, that this payment was settlement of an old claim involving aircraft that Iran under the shah had ordered but the United States never delivered, and that cash was used because Iran was still frozen out of Western banking systems.

Empty Strategy

Although Trump claimed to be offering an entirely new strategy on Iran and not just making a statement about the JCPOA, something else that was missing was any reason to believe that his administration has new and better ideas to do anything about non-nuclear Iranian actions, whether missiles, terrorism, or anything else. Neither in this speech nor on other occasions has Trump shown any awareness of the need to look at the reasons the other state is doing what it is doing, how this fits in with what other states are doing, and what incentives would be required to elicit any changes.

Trump referred repeatedly in his speech to the “Iranian dictatorship.” There was no hint of recognition that the Iranian regime is currently one of the more democratic ones in the Middle East (and much more so than some other regimes in the region that Trump prefers to associate with). There was no acknowledgement that the JCPOA was negotiated with the government of a popularly elected Iranian president who won re-election over hardline opposition partly because of the promise of better relations, including economic relations, with the West under the JCPOA.

The misrepresentations in the speech were too numerous to catalog entirely, but one of the biggest was Trump’s assertion that “the previous administration lifted sanctions just before what would have been the complete collapse of the regime.” There is no evidence whatsoever that the Iranian regime was on the brink of any such collapse. Piling on more and more sanctions in the absence of engagement and diplomacy had merely seen the spinning of more and more centrifuges enriching uranium. This line in the speech points to the vacuity of what Trump is offering for a policy toward Iran: endless hostility and confrontation, and with it the risk of war, sustained by a baseless hope of regime change—a hope that has brought costs and chaos that the United States knows all too well.

Photo: Donald Trump (by Gage Skidmore via Flickr).

Paul Pillar

Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. He retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the U.S. intelligence community. His senior positions included National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, Deputy Chief of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, and Executive Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence. He is a Vietnam War veteran and a retired officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. Dr. Pillar's degrees are from Dartmouth College, Oxford University, and Princeton University. His books include Negotiating Peace (1983), Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy (2001), Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy (2011), and Why America Misunderstands the World (2016).

SHOW 4 COMMENTS

4 Comments

  1. Absolutely too bad Paul is not on MSM . The lies about Iran are not surprising but the continual duping of the American public is amazing. Iran supports Hamas and always has- it is not a terrorist state. T-Rump says they are not living up to the “spirit” of the treaty ( Not breaking the treaty ). And the so called spirit? They have armed themselves with “defensive” missiles, whoa…how terrible …so the spirit must be to “disarm” and trust Israel. What a joke. No one with a quarter of a brain would fall for this meme.

  2. Trump: “Iran is under the control of a fanatical regime that seized power in 1979 and forced a proud people to submit to its extremist rule.” Balderdash.

    There was a non-violent popular revolution against the dictatorship of the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeini was invited back to Iran, and welcomed by a million people. The people of Iran voted in a referendum for an Islamic government, and for its constitution.

    Trump: “This radical regime has raided the wealth of one of the world’s oldest and most vibrant nations, and spread death, destruction, and chaos all around the globe.” No it hasn’t: that would be the USA.

    Trump: “In Iraq and Afghanistan, groups supported by Iran have killed hundreds of American military personnel.” And in Iraq and Afghanistan American military personal have killed tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of people, armed and unarmed.

    Trump: “The Iranian dictatorship’s aggression continues to this day.” Iran is not a dictatorship. In the presidential election this year, the turnout was over 70% of the electorate. Can the USA say the same?

    Trump: “The regime remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism”. No it doesn’t, that would be Saudi Arabia.

    Trump knows nothing about Iran, or anything else. Impeach him: that is the only way out of this mess.

    By the way, the JCPOA is all about nothing. The religious and political leadership of Iran has always been totally opposed to the development, possession and use of weapons of mass destruction – look up “The Goldberg Predilections”. The “possible military dimension” of the Iranian nuclear program reported by the IAEA in 2011 turned out to be an unauthorized program of research into some dual-use technologies of possible relevance to nuclear weapons, that was closed down by Rouhani when he became nuclear policy chief in 2003.

  3. re: misrepresentations
    When the US accuses Iran of being the world’s major state supporter of terrorism, it means Iran ally Hezbollah, actually Hez’s military arm, Iran-supplied, which defeated Israel’s Lebanon invasion in 2006. That’s bad. Must be labeled “terrorism” and punished.
    Trump has also just spoken of Iran aggression. This is driven by his generals and refers to the recent defeats of US-supported anti-Syria militias by Iran militias. Here, counter-insurgency is “aggression” which has defeated the self-righteous US cause of “toppling a dictator.”
    So here we have two cases where US/Israel has acted against sovereign governments, outlawed under the UN Charter, and failed, and the US is using the failures to blather against Iran which hasn’t attacked anybody.

  4. Missing also is any acknowledgment of the overhrow of a democratically-elected government in Iran by the USG, at the behest of western oil companies upset by the nationalization of Iran’s oil…and the installation of the Shah in power for 25 years of cruelty. Interesting that Israel was an ally of this despot.

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