The next deadline for the president to certify — or not certify — that Iran is in compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the “Iran Nuclear Deal,” is May 12. National security analysts have been predicting that Israel would make a full-court press to convince the president to kill the deal. While Trump has twice declined to certify Iranian compliance, he hasn’t moved to reimpose sanctions.
Trump has insisted that Congress and America’s allies work to fix the deal before he works to withdraw the U.S. from it completely. Foreign policy wonks are split between those who think the deal is as good as we’re going to get, those who want to “fix, not nix” the deal, and those who are wishing it a quick death. In the past week, leaders of two of the other parties to the agreement, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel, have visited the White House to try to convince Trump to keep the deal in place.
In his address to Congress, Macron planted his country’s flag firmly in the “fix, don’t nix” camp. “It is true to say this agreement may not address all concerns and every important concerns, this is true,” Macron said. “But we should not abandon it without having something substantial and more substantial instead.” So far, Trump has gone along with this reasoning, and Macron has pledged to work with Iran to strengthen the provisions.
But Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, never a fan of the deal, has long been working to kill it. Monday evening in Tel Aviv, he unveiled his latest attempt.
55,000 Iranian documents
Newly minted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will be in his office in “Main State” for the first time Tuesday. After his Senate confirmation last week, he swore his oath of office in the Supreme Court, then went directly to Andrews Air Force Base for an overseas trip that included stops at in Belgium, where he participated in a summit meeting at NATO headquarters, then Jordan, and Israel.
An anonymous Israeli official told the New York Times that Netanyahu shared information about the raid with Trump. It would be hard to believe that Netanyahu didn’t share the information he unveiled last night with Pompeo during the visit.
Describing an intelligence operation straight out of Hollywood, Netanyahu appeared on Israeli television, but spoke largely in English, making clear that his real audience was in Washington. Israeli officials claim that their operatives raided a Tehran warehouse in January, seizing documents they say demonstrate Iran’s ability to resume its nuclear program at any moment.
Netanyahu painted a portrait of an Iranian nuclear program that was far more advanced than anyone has acknowledged publicly before. He claims that, contrary to Iran’s continued insistence that its nuclear program was for completely peaceful purposes, “Project Amad” was actively seeking “to design, produce and test five warheads with 10 kiloton of TNT yield for integration on missiles.”
Nothing in Netanyahu’s presentation is really all that revealing. He didn’t present any evidence that Iran is currently in violation of the agreement. But the documents, which Pompeo has confirmed the U.S. intelligence community believes are legitimate, do confirm what everyone already knew: Iran lied about the nature of its program, and has maintained an archive of its research.
Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran was supposed to surrender all but a tiny fraction of its fissionable material. It’s reminiscent of Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons which were supposed to be removed from Syria in 2014. The world, of course, has learned that Assad’s “declared stockpiles” were not all he had.
For that reason alone, Russia, Germany, Britain, France, and China should be joining the U.S. in insisting that Iran, at the very least, open more of its sites to international inspectors so they can verify it possesses no more nuclear fuel than we believe they do, and that they are not operating the centrifuges necessary to refine more.
Since the current deal has a fixed end date, Iran could eventually restart its program without automatically triggering renewed sanctions. We must insist that they verify they don’t have the materials they’d need to do so.
