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Here’s How to Fix, Not Nix, the Iran Deal

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Robert Satloff

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wo years ago, I urged sena-
tors to vote “no” on the Iran
nuclear deal. My goal was
not to have them scrap the accord,
which had numerous positive ben-
efits, but to give President Barack
Obama leverage to repair its serious
flaws. “No,” I argued, “doesn’t neces-
sarily mean ‘no, never.’ It can also
mean ‘not now, not this way.’ It may
be the best way to get to ‘yes.’”
The idea of “nix to fix”— not
to be confused with Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
“nix or fix” slogan — didn’t win a
lot of support in 2015 but it’s back,
thanks to President Donald Trump’s
decision not to certify the deal
under the terms of the Iran Nuclear
Agreement Review Act and to seek
INARA’s revision by Congress.
Now, his administration may have
the standing to win from other sig-
natories, especially the Europeans,
support for correcting many of its
faults. Such improvements would
give the president a strong rationale
to recertify the agreement down the
road.
Achieving this outcome won’t
be easy but it’s doable. Here are
three core problems of the origi-
nal Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA), and how President
Trump could correct them, without
requiring Iran to renegotiate any
terms of the deal.
Deterrence: The JCPOA was
sold, in part, as a way for Iran to
recoup billions of dollars in lost
sanction revenue and win billions
more in new commercial invest-
ments to improve its economy and
thereby increase the standard of liv-
ing of its people. All of this would,
so the theory went, tie the Iranians
to global norms and institutions
and make them more moderate
actors.
From the beginning, how-
ever, there was a real fear that the
Iranians would divert large sums to
their destabilizing regional ambi-
tions and their terrorist proxies.
Over the past two years, that has
certainly been the case, with Tehran
expanding its provocative ballistic-
missile program and extending its
regional influence by channeling
funds and weapons to Hezbollah,
the Houthis in Yemen and thou-
sands of Shia militiamen traveling

October 26 • 2017

jn

from as far away as Afghanistan to
fight in Syria and Iraq.
The ballistic-missile program is
particularly problematic. Given that
the Iranians are exploiting a loop-
hole that the Obama administra-
tion permitted in the relevant U.N.
Security Council resolution to plow
ahead with developing missiles
potentially capable of delivering
nuclear weapons, it is wholly false
for advocates of the deal to argue
that the JCPOA has halted, frozen
or suspended Iran’s nuclear-weap-
ons program. Such a program has
three main parts — development,
weaponization and delivery— and
ballistic missiles are an integral
part of that. In other words, critical
aspects of the program are moving
ahead, deal or no deal.
To address these problems, the
administration could seek under-
standings now with European and
other international partners about
penalties to be imposed on Iran
for continued investment in its
ballistic-missile program and for its
provocative regional activities. To
be effective, these new multilateral
sanctions should impose dispropor-
tionate penalties on Iran for every
dollar spent on ballistic missiles,
Hezbollah, the Houthis or other
negative actors. Since these sanc-
tions are outside the bounds of the
JCPOA, their implementation does
not violate any promise made to
Iran. Pursuing this path would also
begin to repair the Obama admin-
istration’s error of having an “Iran
nuclear policy” but no broader
“Iran policy.”
Consequences: The JCPOA
has no agreed-upon penalties for
Iranian violations of the deal’s
terms, short of the last-resort pun-
ishment of a “snapback” of U.N.
sanctions. This is akin to having a
legal code with only one punish-
ment — the death penalty — for
every crime; the result is that virtu-
ally all crimes will go unpunished.
Again, as the record of the past
two years shows, this has been the
case. Contrary to press reports,
there have been numerous viola-
tions of the terms of the deal, but
on each occasion, Iran has been
given the opportunity to correct its
error. That’s a logical outcome of
a situation in which there are no

agreed-upon penalties for violations
other than the threat to scrap the
deal altogether.
The solution is for the Trump
administration to reach under-
standings now with America’s
European partners, the core ele-
ments of which should be made
public, on the appropriate penalties
to be imposed for a broad spectrum
of Iranian violations. The Iran deal
gives the U.N. Security Council wide
berth to define such penalties at a
later date, but the penalties have no
value in deterring Iran from violat-
ing the accord unless they are clari-
fied now.
Sunset: One of the biggest flaws
in the JCPOA was the expiration of
all restrictions on Iran’s enrichment
of nuclear material 15 years into the
agreement. To be sure, Iran argues
that it remains forever bound by
its commitment not to produce a
nuclear weapon under the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty. But if any-
one believed that promise, there
would have been little reason to
negotiate the JCPOA in the first
place.
As the leader who negotiated
the Iran nuclear deal, President
Obama would have helped cor-
rect this problem if he had issued
a declaration making it the policy
of the United States, then and in
the future, to use all means neces-
sary to prevent Iran’s accumulation
of fissile material (highly enriched
uranium), given that its sole useful
purpose is for a nuclear weapon.
Such a statement, to be endorsed by
a congressional resolution, would
have gone beyond the “all options
are on the table” formulation that,
regrettably, has lost so much of its
credibility in the Middle East.
Two years into the agreement,
Iran’s relentless pursuit of more
effective ballistic missiles — one
leg of a nuclear-weapons program
— underscores its strategic deci-
sion to pursue the weapons option.
Repairing the sunset clause is,
therefore, more urgent than ever.
President Trump could achieve
this by reaching an agreement with
the five other JCPOA signatories —
or, if Russia and China balked, at
least the three European countries
who negotiated the deal, Britain,
France and Germany — on a joint

declaration binding themselves to
a promise to take whatever action
is necessary to prevent Iran’s accu-
mulation of fissile material. To give
that declaration real weight, signa-
tories could begin a joint-planning
process for executing their commit-
ment, if necessary. America’s allies
may even welcome this declaratory
approach, since it might assuage
private concerns some of them
have about Iran’s rapidly expanding
nuclear program down the road.
And President Trump could repair
a major drawback in the original
JCPOA negotiations by bringing
into those consultations the parties
most directly threatened by Iran’s
pursuit of nuclear weapons: Israel
and the Arab states of the Gulf,
especially Saudi Arabia.
None of this will be easy. Even
in the hands of an agile, well-oiled
administration, one that had
invested in partnerships with U.S.
allies and had a track record of
adroit, creative diplomacy, winning
agreement to this lengthy “fix Iran
deal” agenda would be heavy-lifting,
especially with the North Korea
crisis looming. And whatever one’s
view of the Trump team’s achieve-
ments, it’s fair to say that it has
been far from an agile, well-oiled
administration.
But if the president does go down
this path, working in his favor is the
simple argument that “the alterna-
tive is worse”— namely the imme-
diate collapse of the Iran nuclear
deal and with it all constraints on
Iran’s nuclear program. While I
don’t believe this alternative leads
to war, as the Obama administra-
tion argued when it made the case
for the JCPOA, many in Berlin, Paris
and London may think so, which
the administration can use to its
advantage.
It is not often that governments
get a second chance to do the right
thing. If handled properly — with
purposeful leadership and adroit
diplomacy, admittedly very big
“ifs”— the Trump administration
has the opportunity to correct its
predecessor’s flawed deal. In my
view, better late than never. •

Robert Satloff is the executive director of the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy.