Donald Trump’s choice of the climate science-denying, torture-backing, military-first, xenophobic Mike Pompeo to be the nation’s top diplomat spurred climate science denying, torture-supporting, military-first xenophobe Bret Stephens, the right-wing never-Trumper columnist hired by The New York Times for balance on its Op-ed pages, to write that Pompeo will be good for diplomacy. That’s like saying the Koch Brothers’ and other oligarchs’ dark money is good for democracy.
One of the first diplomatic matters Pompeo will be dealing with is the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). And given both his and his boss’s stances on that subject, the possibility that the multilateral agreement will soon be an historical footnote is quite possible.
At Foreign Policy, Dan De Luce and Keith Johnson write:
“The selection of Mike Pompeo at State should remove any doubt about the president’s intentions,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Two months to go and President Trump will snap back the most powerful economic sanctions against Iran unless there’s a real not a fictional fix to the Iran nuclear deal.”
Omri Ceren, managing director of the Israel Project, a Washington organization that works on Middle East issues, said that with or without Tillerson’s exit, the president had made clear he would not keep sanctions relief in place without concrete improvements to the agreement.
“In recent days the Trump administration has, if anything, been toughening its stance on what it would take to make the Iran deal worth staying in,” Ceren said.
Since January when Trump essentially gave the State Department and Congress until May 12 to work with U.S. allies to fix what he has said since his campaign was a terrible deal with Iran. Otherwise, sanctions could be reimposed on Iran even though everyone agrees Tehran’s leader have complied with the agreement.
So far, that “fix” hasn’t happened although American diplomats keep trying. They have been, in fact, meeting this week with the with UK, France and Germany to see what changes in the agreement could be made that everyone could agree with. On Friday, diplomats from those four nations as well as Russia, China and Iran will meet in Vienna.
Kambiz Foroohar at Bloomberg reports:
In his current job as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Pompeo has made it his mission to roll back Iranian influence in the Middle East. The idea that the nuclear agreement “would curtail Iranian adventurism, the terror threat, or their malignant behavior has proven to be fundamentally false,” he said in October.
The arrival of an Iran hawk at the State Department will likely strengthen the position of Pompeo’s hardline counterparts in Tehran, according to Fouad Izadi, professor of American Studies at the University of Tehran. They’ll view the appointment as another reason not to trust the U.S., and make it more difficult for President Hassan Rouhani to make any concessions on Iran’s ballistic missiles or regional role, Izadi said.
“The North Korean model becomes more attractive for Iranian officials, whereby you negotiate from a position of strength, you don’t give anything to the U.S., and you only talk to them with the language of force,” he said.
The Iran nuclear agreement, which took 20 months to hammer out, was never meant to address other issues regarding Iran, including its ballistic missile development and alleged backing for terrorism. They were not on the table.
As for the idea that the agreement would reduce what Pompeo calls Iranian “adventurism” was undermined by the response of Pompeo, Sen. Tom Cotton, and other elected Republicans and a few Democrats who trashed the deal from the beginning. Cotton went so far as to collect 46 other senators’ names on a letter to Iran’s leaders informing them that the next president after Barack Obama could opt out of the agreement or change it. Thus, Iran’s leaders had no reason to trust that the arrangement would hold. But they’ve held up their end of the bargain anyway.
If Trump-Pompeo decide to break it by unjustly reimposing sanctions despite Iranian compliance, the changes Tehran will develop nuclear weapons will be enhanced. Not exactly an auspicious beginning for a new beginning at the State Department.