The emerging agreement with Iran that President Donald Trump is touting does not appear to achieve several of the key goals he stated at the outset of the military conflict over three months ago.
For one, it’s unclear whether the president’s core objective of permanently preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb will be achieved. Experts say that based on the limited information provided by the administration so far, Iran offered Trump’s envoys a better nuclear deal before the war than the one Tehran is apparently offering now.
The killing of the country’s top leaders by the U.S. and Israel appears to have strengthened and emboldened the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is more radical than his late father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Having demonstrated their ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and absorb U.S. and Israeli air attacks, Iran’s new hardline leaders, experts say, are likely determined to maintain its nuclear program in some form and wield greater influence in the Middle East.
“A war meant to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons will be the war that pushed them over the Rubicon,” Danny Citrinowicz, a retired Israeli military intelligence officer, told The New York Times.
There appear to be several key holes in the draft memorandum of understanding as it was outlined by a senior Trump administration official to reporters on Friday.
It is unclear whether both sides have agreed to the final wording of the memorandum.
Trump said on Saturday that he expected the “deal,” as he called it, to be signed on Sunday. But a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry reportedly said any signing of a memorandum of understanding “will not be tomorrow.”
No limits on missiles
The senior administration official did not describe to reporters that any specific limits on Iran’s missile stockpile had been agreed to as part of the memorandum. When Trump announced the war on Feb. 28, he said one of the administration’s core goals was to “destroy their missiles.” Recent U.S. intelligence assessments found that 70% of Iran’s missile stockpile remains intact.
Future funding of Iran’s proxies
There are also apparently no clear references to another goal Trump described at the outset of the war, to “ensure that the regime’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region.” The senior administration official only said the agreement would end fighting across the region and, as a result, Iran would apparently no longer fund its proxies.
“We feel confident that the Israelis, that the Gulf Coast partners, that the Americans and the Iranians are all going to get behind this thing,” the official said. “And we can make it enforceable, and we can make it stick.”
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Few details about nuclear program
The senior administration official said Iran will be allowed to have a civilian nuclear power program, a key demand from the Iranians that hardliners in the U.S. and Israel have long opposed.
And the most important question about a civilian nuclear program — whether Iranian officials would be allowed to enrich uranium on its own inside Iran — was not clearly answered on the call. For years, Iran has insisted it must be allowed to enrich uranium to a low level inside Iran for civilian energy purposes.
The official said Iran’s enriched uranium will be down-blended, which was also part of the Obama-era agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. One element of the draft memorandum as described that is potentially better than the JCPOA is that all of Iran’s enriched uranium would be removed from the country after it is down-blended, according to the administration official. Under the JCPOA, 300 kilograms of enriched uranium was allowed to remain in Iran.
Palettes of cash
Iran will not receive any funding until it has implemented each element of the deal, the senior administration official said. If it does implement the agreement, the official said Iran will be relieved of “a lot of the economic pressures,” be “reintegrated into the world economy,” and get “rewarded for acting like a normal country.” If the deal is implemented as the senior official described, it appears that Iran will receive vastly more money than it did under Obama’s JCPOA.
Israel and Lebanon
The senior Trump official also said the deal includes an end to fighting in Lebanon, one of Iran’s goals but a step that Israeli officials may oppose. Israeli officials have said they reserve the right to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon if it threatens Israel.
The official said the agreement was a “broad regional peace agreement.” He added that “it includes Lebanon, it includes Iran, it includes the Gulf Coast countries, it includes Israel. And we feel quite confident that all of our allies, the Israelis and the Gulf Coast Coalition, will get on board.”
Clarissa-Jan Lim contributed to this report, excerpts of which appeared in MS NOW’s live Iran war coverage on Friday.
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.