The Wall Street
Journal
He issues a red line to rewrite the nuclear deal or reimpose sanctions.
By The Editorial Board
President Trump said Friday that he’s waiving sanctions
related to the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal—for the last time. In essence he
issued an ultimatum to Congress and Europe to revise the agreement or the U.S.
will reimpose sanctions and walk away. His distaste for the nuclear deal is
right, but the risk is that Mr. Trump is boxing himself in more than he is the
Iranians.
Mr. Trump said
in a statement that he is waving sanctions, “but only in order to secure our
European allies’ agreement to fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal.”
He added: “This is a last chance. In the absence of such an agreement, the
United States will not again waive sanctions in order to stay in the Iran
nuclear deal. And if at any time I judge that such an agreement is not within
reach, I will withdraw from the deal immediately. No one should doubt my word.”
That’s called
a red line, and it means that if his terms aren’t met within 120 days, Mr.
Trump will have to follow through or damage his global credibility. Presidents
should be careful about putting themselves in box canyons unless they have a
clear idea of a way out and what his next steps are.
Does Mr. Trump
know? It isn’t obvious. Mr. Trump rightly focuses on the core faults of the
accord: major provisions start sunsetting after 2023; the failure to include
Iran’s ballistic-missile programs; and inadequate inspections. He wants the
European allies that also negotiated the deal—France, Germany and the United
Kingdom—to rewrite it with the U.S.
But Iran is
sure to resist, and so will China and Russia. French, British and German
companies already have billions in business deals invested or being negotiated
with Iran, and their political leaders will be loathe to jeopardize them.
European leaders have been embarrassingly quiet amid the anti-regime protests
in Iran. European Union foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini hosted the
foreign ministers of Britain, Germany, France and Iran this week. They
expressed support for the deal and said little about Tehran’s protest crackdown.
If the
Europeans resist a nuclear renegotiation, Mr. Trump would then have to act
alone with U.S. sanctions. While those are potent, to be effective they will
have to target non-U.S. companies that do business with Iran, including our
friends in Europe.
Some fear Iran
would use reimposed U.S. sanctions as an excuse to walk away from the deal and
rush to build a bomb, but we doubt it. The more likely scenario is that Iran
will continue to court European business and try to divide the U.S. from its
allies and block a new antinuclear coalition. The mullahs will claim to be
abiding by the deal even as the U.S. has walked away.
On Friday Mr.
Trump also challenged Congress to strengthen the nuclear deal’s terms under
U.S. law, most likely by amending the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act.
This will require 60 votes in the Senate, which means Democratic support. This
will test the sincerity of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who opposed the deal.
But in today’s polarized Washington, partisanship no longer stops at the
water’s edge. Mr. Trump won’t persuade Europe if he can’t persuade Congress.
The question
all of this raises, as British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson put it Thursday,
is what is the policy alternative policy to the nuclear deal. The answer is
containment with a goal of regime change. The people of Iran have again showed
their displeasure with the regime, and the world should support them. We’d back
such a strategy, but it isn’t clear that this is Mr. Trump’s emerging policy,
or that he and his advisers know how to go about it.
The Treasury
Department is moving ahead with sanctions against Iran for its ballistic
missiles, including 14 more individuals and entities “in connection with
serious human rights abuses and censorship in Iran.” The targets include the
head of Iran’s judiciary and the cyber units trying to prevent protesters from
organizing and accessing reliable news. But Mr. Trump has been reluctant to
counteract Iran’s adventurism in Syria or Iraq, and a policy of regime change
can’t be half-baked.
All of this is an enormous undertaking for an Administration already coping
with the nuclear and ballistic threat from North Korea. The safer strategy
would have been to keep waiving sanctions and let the nuclear deal continue
while building support to contain and undermine Iran on other fronts. Mr. Trump
can now say he has followed through on his campaign vow on Iran, but building a
better strategy will take discipline and much harder work.
