US president Donald Trump has refused to recertify the 2015 multilateral agreement freezing Iran’s nuclear programme. The impact of the decision – which was opposed by party to the deal, Trump’s , and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – won’t be immediate. But it could be very bad – North Korea bad, if history is anything to go by.
The 2015 deal was heralded as a major success. At the time, Iran had the capability to make enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for 10 bombs in a few months. Under the (JCPOA), agreed that year between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus the EU and Germany, it drastically cut its production capacity and stockpile, and gave up making plutonium in return for the lifting of sanctions.
This was backed by what Yukiya Amano, head of the IAEA, on 13 October “the world’s most robust nuclear verification regime”. Those inspections, he said, verified that Iran is in compliance with the JCPOA.
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But the US required its president to certify that the pact remained in US interests every 90 days, or Congress could re-impose sanctions. In a detailed statement on 13 October, .
He didn’t pull the US out of the JCPOA, but said it should be strengthened. He complained that the pact, which took 13 years to negotiate despite focusing only on nuclear weapons, didn’t also address Iran’s missile development or sponsorship of foreign insurgencies.
Frozen funds
He claimed the Iranian regime would have collapsed if the US hadn’t given it billions of dollars under the JCPOA. There was little suggestion at the time that the Iranian regime was near collapse, however. The money was Iran’s to begin with, frozen in foreign accounts under sanctions – and much of it is still there, despite the pact lifting sanctions.
Trump also claimed Iran had broken the pact’s requirements by making too much heavy water and low-enriched uranium – though both were tiny infractions swiftly caught by IAEA monitoring, despite Trump labelling them “weak inspections”.
His most substantive complaint, which was also raised by critics in 2015, was that the pact has time limits. “In just a few years, as key restrictions disappear,” he said, “Iran can sprint towards a rapid nuclear weapons breakout.”
In fact, Iran pledged not make any more HEU for at least 15 years and to accept inspections to ensure there was no secret enrichment for 25 years – some inspections continue indefinitely. The that by then, Iran would be too involved in the global community to want nuclear weapons.
The US Congress now has 60 days to decide whether to re-impose sanctions. If it does, and perhaps even if it doesn’t, the pact could collapse, despite Europe’s . The spectre of needing to have the same debate in another 90 days could stop foreign companies risking their money in Iran – leading the country to question the advantages of the existing pact, never mind the more demanding one Trump wants.
There is a precedent for what happens next. In 1994, North Korea and the US signed a similar deal in which North Korea froze its nuclear development in exchange for the lifting of foreign trade sanctions. In 2002, the deal collapsed, after another Republican president, George W. Bush, re-imposed sanctions, citing similar complaints. The result, says Jeffrey Lewis at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, was a nuclear-armed North Korea. Abandoning the JPCOA could, he fears, have a similar result: a nuclear-armed Iran.
