WASHINGTON, May 8, 2018 — Citing Iran’s President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the United States’ withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — better known as the Iran nuclear deal — over protests from his predecessor and a key member of the previous administration.
“The fact is this was a horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” Trump said during remarks delivered from the Diplomatic Room of the White House. “It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.
The agreement, which was adopted in October of 2015 and went into effect three months later, requires Tehran to adhere to strict limits and prohibitions on practices and technologies that would enable development of a nuclear weapon, including a regime of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In exchange, the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union — including signatory nations Germany and the United Kingdom — agreed to lift the economic sanctions that had been leveled against Tehran in recent years as a result of that country’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
But despite certifications by officials from both the International Atomic Energy Agency and his own government, Trump complained that the limits of the agreement placed on Iran’s use of other nuclear technologies were “very weak,” and that it did not cover what he called Iran’s “other malign behavior,” specifically its involvement in Syria, Yemen, and its support for Hezbollah. The President also condemned the deal for allowing an influx of cash into Iran’s economy, once again referring to the Obama administration’s transfer of approximately $1.7 billion in cash to Iran, which he called “a great embarrassment to me as a citizen and to all citizens of the United States.”
Infamous ‘pallets of cash’ were of Iran’s money, not America’s
Trump has mentioned the $1.7 billion on a number of occasions before and since taking office, and has repeatedly linked the cash transfer to the nuclear deal, citing the fact that the transfer was made in cash form as evidence of some sort of shady deal.
But Trump’s suggestion that the two have ever been connected is completely false. Those funds represent money owed to Iran by the United States for undelivered military equipment. The U.S. incurred the debt after it suspended delivery of such equipment to the newly-declared Islamic Republic of Iran, even though previous Pahlavi government had paid approximately $600 for the equipment before Iran’s 1979 revolution.
While the Carter administration had originally agreed to repay the money, those plans were shelved when Iranian assets were frozen as a result of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The unpaid funds remained a source of tension between Washington and Tehran, which filed a claim with the Iran-US Claims Tribunal charged with adjudicating such cases.
The funds were finally returned — with interest — by the Obama administration in order to avoid that tribunal returning an even larger judgment against the United States, and the reason for the cash transfer was that it took place before the deal when Iran did not have access to the international banking system.
A senior State Department official affirmed that one reason for pulling out of the deal was to hurt Iran’s economy, which the official said was largely infiltrated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the Trump administration recently declared a terrorist organization.
“We do think that, given the IRGC’s penetration of the Iranian economy and Iran’s behavior in the region, as well as its other nefarious activities, that companies should not do business in Iran,” said the official.
Following his remarks, Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum withdrawing the U.S. from the agreement with immediate effect.
Bolton says sanctions to return immediately, denies interest in regime change
As a result, National Security Adviser John Bolton explained that the same sanctions that existed at the time the agreement was signed will go back into effect immediately.
For companies that have been doing business in Iran, Bolton said the Treasury Department would be announcing the specifics of a “wind-down period” during which they would be permitted to wrap up any business they might have. The length of that period would vary depending on the circumstances of the contract, Bolton said.
Bolton added that while the withdrawal from the deal means the U.S. will not be making use of the provisions in U.N. Resolution 2231, the “wind-down period” would follow the pattern suggested by the resolution.
“But the fact of the sanctions coming back in is effective right now,” he said. “We’re out of the deal.”
On the subject of what today’s announcement would mean to North Korea, Bolton said the message Pyongyang should glean from it is that Trump “wants a real deal.” But the notoriously hawkish former ambassador — who once penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” denied that the Trump administration’s end goal is regime change.
“What the President said was, following his discussion with his counterparts in many European countries…is that one of the fundamental criticisms that the President and others have made to the deal is that it sought to address only a limited aspect of Iran’s unacceptable behavior — certainly a critical aspect — but not taking into account the fact this is, and has been for many years, the central banker of international terrorism. ”
Lifting the sanctions, Bolton said, enabled Iran to increase funding for its military activities across the region. “To really deal with this threat and to try to bring peace and stability to the Middle East, and to relieve the world of the nuclear threat, you have to go after the whole thing,” he explained.
As for specifics, Bolton said that when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrives in North Korea for talks in preparation for Trump’s upcoming summit with Kim Jong-un , he will explain that a “real deal” includes “what North Korea itself agreed to going back to the 1992 joint North-South denuclearization declaration: the elimination of both the front and the backend of the nuclear fuel cycle; no uranium enrichment; no plutonium reprocessing.”
America not keeping its word on Iran doesn’t mean it can’t be trusted on North Korea, Bolton says
When asked if Trump’s decision — which some observers have noted might not inspire confidence that he can be trusted to keep his word when he meets with Kim — could be taken as evidence that any deal made by the U.S. might be thrown out when political winds shift, Bolton said that shouldn’t be inferred from Trump’s decision at all.
“The issue here is whether the United States will accept the deal that’s not in its strategic interest,” he said, noting that the U.S. withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty under then-President George W. Bush in 2001 “because the global strategic environment had changed.”
Obama and Kerry weigh in with strong rebukes
But in a rare statement on current events, former President Barack Obama strongly rebuked Bolton and Trump’s reasoning, calling the announcement “misguided” while noting that the JCPOA is in American’s interest because it has “significantly rolled back Iran’s nuclear program.”
The reality is clear. The JCPOA is working – that is a view shared by our European allies, independent experts, and the current U.S. Secretary of Defense,” Obama wrote, noting that the agreement is “a model for what diplomacy can accomplish,” and that leaving the agreement just when there is hope for diplomacy to succeed with North Korea “risks losing a deal that accomplishes – with Iran – the very outcome that we are pursuing with the North Koreans.”
“Walking away from the JCPOA turns our back on America’s closest allies and an agreement that our country’s leading diplomats, scientists, and intelligence professionals negotiated. In a democracy, there will always be changes in policies and priorities from one Administration to the next. But the consistent flouting of agreements that our country is a party to risks eroding America’s credibility, and puts us at odds with the world’s major powers.”
Obama added that without the deal in place, the U.S. “could eventually be left with a losing choice between a nuclear-armed Iran or another war in the Middle East.”
The other figure most closely connected with the deal — former Secretary of State John Kerry — also reacted to Trump’s announcement with a strong statement of condemnation, in which he, too warned that pulling out of the deal means risking a new war in the middle east.
“Today’s announcement weakens our security, breaks America’s word, isolates us from our European allies, puts Israel at greater risk, empowers Iran’s hardliners, and reduces our global leverage to address Tehran’s misbehavior while damaging the ability of future Administrations to make international agreements,” said Kerry. “The facts speak for themselves — Instead of building on unprecedented nonproliferation verification measures, this decision risks throwing them away and dragging the world back to the brink we faced a few years ago.”
An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed the op-ed written by National Security Adviser John Bolton as having appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Bolton’s op-ed appeared in The New York Times. We regret the error.
