Donald Trump during a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadh, a day after announcing that he would allow UN Security Council sanctions to “snap back” on the spot against Iran, August 20.
Photographer: Anna Moneymaker-Pool / Getty Images
Photographer: Anna Moneymaker-Pool / Getty Images
The US transition to UN “snap back” nuclear sanctions on Iran includes legal arcana that are unlikely to be resolved soon. What is clear, however, is that the Trump administration has taken a particular approach to inflicting damage on Iran and relations with the United States’ allies.
For critics and supporters, the controversial US attempt to force the restoration of international sanctions on Tehran was top “America First”, a policy that was carried out with little pretense of diplomacy and without regard to the consequences.
They see a conflict between President Donald Trump’s decision to move away from the nuclear deal reached during the Obama administration, relying solely on the architecture of that 2015 deal to demand strict new sanctions on Iran . And following their inauguration, the US mocked its allies for ‘siding with the ayatollahs.’
“We see how ‘America First’ ultimately means America alone,” said Gerard Araud, a former French ambassador to the US and the United Nations who helped negotiate sanctions on Iran. ‘They do not like their allies. They burn down all the bridges that have been built over years of careful diplomacy because of an obsession to kill the Iran deal. ”
To some observers, the U.S. movement is a distillation of Trump’s style in another sense: It’s trying to blow a deal without having anything to replace it. They draw parallels to the debate over health care in the US, where the Trump team has sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act without any viable alternative on the horizon.
Tracking the escalating conflict between US, Iran: QuickTake
The move came days before Republicans Monday turned down their convention to nominate Trump for the presidency. And the timeline of events – a 30-day window for a United Nations Security Council vote and the October expiration of a UN coat of arms embargo – means that the dispute will be front-and-center in the final weeks of the US election campaign.
European allies express shock and disappointment that the US was so ready to be isolated – first by suffering a humiliating defeat when only one other country, the Dominican Republic, voted with it last week to extend its decaying weapons embargo, and then by calling for snapback about almost universal opposition.
The team led by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo is trying to “turn an international agreement and the international system on its head,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “There’s really nothing wrong with vandalism on a large scale.”
That maximalist strategy risks major consequences. For the past three years, U.S. allies have maintained a public facade that keeps the trans-Atlantic relationship strong, despite all its similarities and criticism of Trump. But that will now be harder to maintain, especially after Pompeo’s crackdown on siding with the ayatollahs and showing a deception of leadership by refusing to support the US
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Opposition to the multinational agreement was a foreign policy shouted for Trump, Republicans and some Democrats shortly after it was negotiated. They said it would lift short-term sanctions on Iran without providing a long-term guarantee that the Islamic Republic was not seeking nuclear weapons. In the meantime, they claimed, Iran used fresh investment and cash flows to fuel conflicts from Syria to Yemen.
The president slammed the president of the 2018 campaign out of the agreement in 2018 and began tightening U.S. sanctions on Tehran. The “maximum pressure” strategy had an impact, adding to inflation and undermining domestic support for the government of President Hassan Rouhani. And yet, the other peoples who joined the agreement refused to leave it altogether. That the US has returned to the UN to argue that it still stood to use its framework to punish Iran.
It’s an argument that few others believe. Opposition from China and Russia was expected, but shortly after Pompeo made the US position official, the United Kingdom, France and Germany issued a joint statement criticizing the move. It has been perhaps the most immediate common denominator of Trump’s teaching “America First” yet.
Read more: Pompeo fights allies over Iran with demand for sanctions
“France, Germany and the United Kingdom are committed to preserving the processes and institutions that form the basis of multilateralism, “the peoples said.
Pompeo dismissed the allies, saying: ‘America will not participate in this failure of leadership. America will not appease. America will lead. ”
Supporters of the strategy argue that it will allow the US to address some of the key shortcomings of the original deal – in particular that many of its most stringent restrictions on Iran will expire in the coming years, or ” sunset “. Trump has repeatedly predicted that Iran will return to the negotiating table after winning a second term, a request officials in Tehran have ruled out.
“If the president wins re-election, he is well placed to tackle the sun’s rays and increase maximum pressure and then the regime will be desperate enough to negotiate,” he said. Richard Goldberg, senior adviser to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who has helped lead the Trump administration’s Iran sanctions policy.
30-day clock
Opponents of the US strategy say that although the nuclear deal was incomplete, it was the best available tool to ensure that Iran never again sought to develop a nuclear weapon.
Pompeo now emphasizes that time is running out on Tehran. He claims that the US notification to the UN starts a 30-day clock that will turn off with the advice needed to restore sanctions.
Other peoples say they will simply ignore the US movement, claiming it means nothing as long as the US continues to give in to the agreement. That could also be a calculated bet that Trump will lose in November and that an administration led by Democrat Joe Biden would take another tack.
However, the U.S. movement this week is stepping up what could happen next if Trump wins a second term: a foreign policy that is even more built on individual transactions instead of on a broader sense of mutual gain.
There was a hint of that approach in the Iran debate, when Pompeo visited the Dominican Republic last Sunday to attend the country’s presidential inauguration. The trip follows the Caribbean nation’s decision to cast its lone voice in support of the failed US effort just days earlier to extend arms. embargo on Iran indefinitely.
Critics say this is an approach historically adopted by China, which has generally been alienated from alliances and pursues foreign policy on more transactional terms.
“China’s preferred way of dealing with the world is in bilateral relations where China is the stronger party,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The United States of America has never been like this before. “
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