Iran Crisis Ignites New Debate About Trump’s Nuclear Deal Exit

Biden government officials are more concerned than ever that the United States could be drawn into an all-out conflict between the two nations while Israel gets ready to react to the ballistic missile launch by Iran last week.

Since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, it is among the most explosive events both for Iran and the United States. And it has sparked a discussion on whether the problem might be less volatile had U.S. policy toward Iran strayed from cautious cooperation to heated hostility some years ago.

That change occurred in May 2018 when President Donald J. Trump suddenly withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, an accord reached by the Obama administration three years prior in an attempt to control the nation’s nuclear development.

Mr. Trump had tagged it as “the worst deal in history.” Critics of his conduct, however, claim that pulling back empowered Iranian hard-liners caused Iran to speed up its nuclear program. Some Israeli officials, who contend that their military should utilize the present time to undermine the program by attacking nuclear sites in Iran, have been disturbed by Iran’s advancement.

Although they believe building a useful device may take six months or more, U.S. officials estimate Iran could be within weeks of having enough homespun nuclear material for a nuclear bomb.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the move to withdraw from the nuclear deal, which Iran was complying with, both removed the guardrails on Iran’s nuclear program and removed any incentive for Iran to move in any direction other than a more confrontational, harder line,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration who was instrumental in supporting the agreement.

Mr. Rhodes said it was clear that since Hamas started the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, they carry main responsibility for the present Middle East situation. However, he continued, the course of U.S.-Iran relations following the collapse of the nuclear agreement indicated “that Iran has no avenue for diplomacy with the United States. You so have only conflict as alternative.

He pointed out that although the US sought unsuccessfully to resurrect the agreement, he attacked the Biden government for not pushing earlier and harder.

A Western diplomat involved in the negotiations noted that, should Iran have been more effectively included into the world economy over the past ten years, it could have sought to stop Hamas, which it supports from launching attacks at Israel. In such case, Iranian officials might have done more to defuse conflicts with Israel in recent months, the official remarked.

Many conservatives, on the other hand, do not apologize for Mr. Trump’s departure from the accord since they contend it was ill-informed from beginning. They claim it gave Iran a cash influx to support regional terrorism and that its temporary ban let Iran to play for time. Similar-minded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel hailed Mr. Trump’s decision to leave as “a historic move.”

Some conservatives also pointed out this week that the agreement lacked significant restrictions on Iran’s further acquisition of the kind of missiles fired on Israel last week.

Designed knowing that Iran was increasing ballistic-missile development, President Barack Obama and then-vice president Joe Biden crafted the agreement; but, with their emphasis on Tehran’s nuclear activity, did not stop it, the conservative legal scholar Andrew McCarthy argued this week for National Review. Iran had started distributing such missiles to its proxy organizations, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and others in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, according to him.

Obama administration have maintained that Iran would not have accepted both nuclear and missile restrictions and that they obtained the best deal available. Neither did Mr. Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions-based approach against Iran work in halting its missile programme.

Mr. Obama claimed he sought to identify a substitute for war. Israeli officials, including Mr. Netanyahu, then serving an earlier term as prime minister, were warning at the time that their nation may bomb Iranian nuclear sites.

Reacting to Iran’s choice of a moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, Mr. Obama started negotiations with Tehran to restrict its nuclear programme in 2013. Iran would obtain reprieve from severe American and European penalties on its economy in return.

The agreement never supposed to be a panacea. Mr. Obama emphasized that its goal was nothing more than to limit Iran’s nuclear research and development to postpone its capacity to create a nuclear bomb by at least a decade.

For many advocates of the agreement, however, the nuclear deal presented something more fascinating: a chance for Iran and the West to start gently coexist and maybe even cooperate past decades of animosity.

Some, like Secretary of State John Kerry, the main American negotiator for the nuclear agreement, anticipated it would empower Tehran’s political moderates and liberalize Iran by letting in more Western investment and influence, so expanding its economy. The Islamic radicals who sprouted up during the 1979 revolution would be replaced with an iPhone in every Iranian hand, not by military might, the theory went.

Republicans in Washington, however, claimed that the agreement should be stricter and that Iran could not be trusted to follow nonetheless.

Ignoring the advise of many of his top national security advisers and the evidence that Iran was in compliance with its terms, Mr. Trump said in May 2018 that the United States would no longer follow the accord. Then he put Iran under a lot of fresh economic restrictions.

It infuriated officials in Iran, particularly conservatives who said it proved their long-held assertion that the United States and its partners were untrustworthy. Iran quickened its nuclear program, stockpiling highly enriched uranium and steadily bringing itself closer to bomb capability. Iran choose Ebrahim Raisi, a significantly more aggressive successor to Mr. Rouhani, in its next presidential contest.

Iran also kept helping Middle Eastern proxy organizations all around.

The Trump administration argued that Iran spent billions of frozen funds from the nuclear deal on investments in those groups, but Mr. Trump’s approach had little obvious impact on Iran’s backing of its proxies either.

Although the Western official engaged in the Obama-era nuclear negotiations agreed that Iran would most likely have directed more money to proxy groups and its missile program if Mr. Trump had stayed in the deal, he added that it was impossible to say with confidence how things might be different today.

Unquestionably, the official said, Iran’s nuclear program developed and its proxies gained more powerful following Mr. Trump’s deal break-off.

Conservatives respond that Mr. Biden mostly shares responsibility since he neglected to aggressively implement limits on Iranian oil sales set by Mr. Trump, especially to China. Under Mr. Biden, those sales have skyrocketed, so strengthening Iran’s authority.

In part to keep limited Iranian cooperation on issues like prisoner exchanges and formally restricting its nuclear activity, Biden administration officials have opposed efforts to crackdown on the black-market trade. Acting would also involve closely examining Chinese imports at a period when Mr. Biden has aimed to maintain diplomatic peace with Beijing.

Expert on Iran and vice president of the Brookings Institution Suzanne Maloney expressed doubts about whether the survival of the nuclear agreement would have rendered the Middle East problem any more under control.

“Had disastrous implications for containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but it had no appreciable impact on Tehran’s regional activities or its approach to Israel and the broader Middle East,” Ms. Maloney said of Mr. Trump’s pull from the agreement.

Strong advocates of the agreement, she said, unintentionally “attached wider ambitions” to it.

Iran was supposed to “find the benefits of cooperation with the West sufficiently attractive to abandon their external troublemaking and that greater integration with the international economy would empower more liberal politicians,” Ms. Maloney said. “That was always flimsy.”

Iran’s battle with Israel ends, but the argument about the nuclear agreement is probably not done here. Another relative moderate in the Rouhani form, Masoud Pezeshkian, the current president of Iran, has shown his openness to restart negotiations to bring the deal back.