For those concerned about Iran’s nuclear program, The Washington Post published an unsettling report this week, starting with a factory known as Fordow and the “alarming” changes nuclear inspectors discovered at the facility in February.
In factory chambers that had ceased making enriched uranium under a 2015 nuclear accord, the inspectors now witnessed frenzied activity: newly installed equipment, producing enriched uranium at ever-faster speeds, and an expansion underway that could soon double the plant’s output. More worryingly, Fordow was scaling up production of a more dangerous form of nuclear fuel — a kind of highly enriched uranium, just shy of weapons grade. Iranian officials in charge of the plant, meanwhile, had begun talking openly about achieving “deterrence,” suggesting that Tehran now had everything it needed to build a bomb if it chose.
The same Post report, the details of which have not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that Iran is now “closer to nuclear weapons capability than at any time in the country’s history.” The article went on to note that Iran “now has a supply of highly enriched uranium that could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks.”
As regular readers know, I periodically like to bang my head against this particular wall, but I think the political world should pause periodically to come to terms with just how severe the consequences of Donald Trump’s policy toward Iran have been. Let’s revisit our earlier coverage and take stock.
It was Joe Cirincione, whose expertise in international nuclear diplomacy has few rivals, who wrote a piece for NBC News a few years ago explaining that the international community has been tasked with trying to “undo the damage Donald Trump caused when he left an agreement that had effectively shrunk Iran’s [nuclear] program, froze it for a generation and put it under lock and camera.”
I continue to believe this is an underappreciated truth. The international agreement with Iran did exactly what it set out to do: The policy dramatically curtailed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and established a rigorous system of monitoring and verification. Once the policy took effect, each of the parties agreed that the participants were holding up their end of the bargain, and Iran’s nuclear program was, at the time, on indefinite hold.
And then Trump took office and got to work abandoning the policy for reasons he was never able to explain.
In broad strokes, Barack Obama set out to use economic sanctions to get Iran to the international negotiating table. That worked and a breakthrough agreement eventually followed. Trump came to believe he could duplicate the strategy by abandoning the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), restoring the old sanctions, and adding new ones.
If Obama’s sanctions led to a landmark deal, the argument went, then maybe Trump’s sanctions could produce an even better deal.
Except, that’s not what happened. In reality, once the United States was no longer a part of the agreement, the West lost verification access to Tehran’s program, and Iran almost immediately became more dangerous by starting up advanced centrifuges and ending its commitment to limit enrichment of uranium.
A couple of years ago, Robert Malley, the then-special envoy for Iran, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that after Trump’s decision, Iranian attacks on U.S. personnel in the region got worse, Iranian support for regional proxies got worse, and the pace of the Iranians’ nuclear research program got “much worse.”
A year later, Colin Kahl, the then-under secretary of Defense, explained to the House Armed Services Committee that Iran’s nuclear progress since Trump abandoned the international nuclear agreement has been “remarkable.” Around the same time, the Pentagon told Congress that Iran could make enough fissile for one nuclear bomb in “about 12 days” — a number that is now smaller — as opposed to the year it would’ve taken while the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was in effect.
How Trump arrived at his decision adds insult to injury. One of my favorite stories about the Iran deal came a few months into Trump’s term in the White House, when the then-president held a lengthy meeting with top members of his team: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, White House National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford. Each of the officials told Trump the same thing: It was in the United States’ interest to preserve the existing JCPOA policy.
The Republican expected his team to tell him how to get out of the international agreement, not how to stick with it. When his own foreign policy and national security advisers told him the policy was working, Trump “had a bit of a meltdown.”
Soon after, he abandoned the JCPOA anyway, not because it was failing, but because Trump was indifferent to its success.
The world is now dealing with the consequences.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.