Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will begin a procedure at the United Nations in New York on Thursday afternoon to lift sanctions lifted by the 2015 nuclear deal Iran – known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA). If he succeeds, the Iran deal will be essentially dead.
The mechanism known as “snapback” was negotiated and included in Security Council Resolution 2231, which allows immediate sanctions and other restrictions to be imposed on Iran once it is seen to be compact. It was that resolution that endorsed the JCPoA – and the mechanism was long demanded by U.S. lawmakers to be included in every deal.
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Following last week’s decisive defeat of a US resolution drafting a new arms embargo on Iran, which expires in October as part of the deal, Pompeo announced he would travel to New York to officially process it. to begin with sanctions. Six resolutions would have to be re-enacted and would include a ban on all missile testing and development, with travel bans and release of assets on government officials previously sanctioned.
“Today, I urge Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to report to the UN Security Council that the United States intends to restore almost all of the previously imposed United Nations sanctions on Iran,” President Trump said at a news conference on Wednesday. “It’s a snapback.”
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While Russia, China and other members of the JCPoA are struggling to find ways to stop snapbacks, it looks like they are fighting a losing battle.
But how will the whole process work and can the US succeed? Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a think tank in Washington DC, was from 2019/2020 the Director of Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction for the White House National Security Council. He was also a senior policy adviser to former U.S. Republican sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois. During his time in the Senate, Goldberg was the leading architect of the heaviest sanctions imposed on the regime in Tehran.
Goldberg, who has written extensively about the process of how snapback, including a recent Q&A on how the process will work, spoke to Fox News about the complexities of how snapback could happen in the coming days.
1. What is the difference between JCPoA and UN Resolution 2231?
UNSCR 2231 supported the JCPoA, but never instructed members to implement it. However, it imposes restrictions on Iran for a limited period and mandates the snapback to prevent these restrictions from expiring if Iran does not behave properly.
Why is it so built? Well, it makes sense when you think about it. The Security Council has imposed restrictions on Iran for several years and those restrictions simply cannot go away simply because eight parties sign some political side agreement. You will need to amend Security Council resolutions to change international restrictions. And so the Security Council rejected the request to help the parties get a deal, but built it in the snapback as an institutional guarantee – because no political agreement of the site can ever replace the authority of the Council.
The JCPoA binds the few states that are part of the political agreement, while a UNSCR binds all UN members
The US may have lost its rights to use the mechanisms of the JCPoA’s political agreement, but who cares – you can not deprive the US of its permanent membership rights, granted by a binding Security Council resolution, which replaces the authority of the JCPoA.
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2. What happens once the FS snapback trigger?
The Security Council has 30 days to adopt a resolution to prevent snapback from happening. If no member of the Council advances such a resolution within 10 days of the US notification, the President of the Council shall. We can expect China and Russia to play all kinds of games, but in the end, if a resolution to stop the American snapback in 30 days does not fit, America wins.
3. Critics say that since the US left the JCPoA, it can not legally call for snapback? Is there anyone stopping it? And if so, who can stop it?
China and Russia will do or say something to stop the snapback for one simple reason: they want to sell arms to Iran; they want the arms embargo to expire. The Europeans, meanwhile, are suffering from a split personality disorder – and said they want to extend the arms embargo, but also said they do not want to end the Iran deal.
The correct reading of the UN Security Council resolution makes it undisputed that the United States has the right to trigger the snapback. Everyone from Barack Obama to Joe Biden to John Kerry told the American people that we can snapback at any moment, even if any other country was against it. They were correct. Other countries may challenge that fact for their own political agendas, but unless they are ready to blow up the Security Council, the United States as a permanent member has the procedural power to force the snapback.
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4. What is the ability of other peoples to simply say “No” when the US says snapback?
If the process is followed as described in UNSCR 2231, those states that oppose the snapback are welcome to vote for the resolution to ignore the U.S. complaint, but if the U.S. vetoes the resolution, snapback is a done deal.
The question is whether states will deliberately ignore the text of a Security Council binding resolution and try to ignore the US complaint. This would lead to a number of nuanced procedural battles that, if followed 75 years prior to Security Council, would still result in a U.S. gain. If states decide not only to violate UNSCR 2231, but to deny the US its rights as a permanent member, we would be entering an unchartered territory where the future usefulness of the Council is in doubt.
5. Once we understand it, the JCPoA will die if sanctions on Iran are put back in place. Is that the case?
The JCPoA is effectively already dead; we have not had the funeral yet. It is important to note that, as we have this debate, Iran international inspectors have denied access to suspected unexplained nuclear sites in Iran and will not explain why it is hiding unexplained nuclear material – these are sites and materials that Iran apparently hid in the whole world the JCPoA – these nuclear intrusions have nothing to do with the US maximum pressure campaign – instead they prove that Iran left all the time, that we should never plan restrictions for Iran to decay and that snapback is appropriate to hold Iran accountable for the breach of trust. Snapback will restore Security Council resolutions prior to Iran so that any long-term restrictions, such as the arms embargo, remain indefinitely in place.
