The Daily - The Breakdown of the Iran Nuclear Deal

Episode Date: May 9, 2018

President Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, calling it “decaying and rotten.” Why did President Barack Obama sign it in the first place? Guest: Mark Landler, a White House correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, President Trump withdraws from the Iran nuclear deal, calling it decaying and rotten. So why did President Obama sign onto it in the first place? It's Wednesday, May 9th. Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not. A comprehensive, long-term deal

with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Mark Landler, remind me why President Obama signed this nuclear deal with Iran in the first place. When Barack Obama came into office, Iran was getting uncomfortably close to having the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon. And this was unnerving its immediate neighbors, its neighbors in the region like Israel, as well as the Europeans. So what President Obama decided to do was to get Iran to come to the table and agree not to forswear having a nuclear program

for all time, but to agree to a pause in the program, to agree to curb activities related to developing a weapon for some period of 10, 20, 25 years that would buy the world time to deal with the threat of Iran without the specter of them having a bomb in a year or even three months. I strongly believe that our national security interest now depends upon preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, which means that without a diplomatic resolution, either I or a future U.S. president would face a decision about whether or not to allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon or whether to use our military to stop it.

Put simply, no deal means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East. So the United States banded together with its three major European allies, Britain, France, and Germany, as well as China and Russia. And together, this group of five countries sat down with Iran over a period of many months and hammered out the terms of what is known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. And everyone understood at the time it was announced that this was not a perfect deal. It was limited both in scope and limited in how long it would last. Okay, so what specifically does the deal not do that helps explain how we got to where

we are today? Well, several issues were carved out of the negotiation, and that has fueled the argument of critics like President Trump. One of the first and key areas was Iran's ballistic missile program. It is not included in the deal. Iran can continue to develop and test ballistic missiles. It is not restricted in doing so. And those are the missiles that theoretically could carry a nuclear weapon. That's right. And they were left out. They were left out. This was a very fought over point. The Iranians didn't want them to be included. And the West, John Kerry and others agreed to that. We are actually

capitulating to the global superpower of terrorism, which is Iran. The second major area is Iran's behavior in the region. They are the number one sponsor of terrorism around the world. They are sponsoring terrorist activities in Yemen, in Syria. Iran is, of course, a supporter of a number of militant groups across the Middle East, whether it's Hezbollah or Hamas or the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Iran is responsible for a third of our casualties in Iraq. They are the sponsors of Hamas, Hezbollah,

state-sponsored terrorism, courtesy of Iran, which has hegemonic designs on the entire Middle East. And the deal does nothing to curb any of this misconduct or any of this bad behavior. But on top of that, Iran's nuclear program, in the view of critics, was almost bound to restart because this deal has sunset provisions. This deal expires. That was the key thing that the Iranians wanted at the bargaining table, which was the ability to resume what they've always said was a peaceful nuclear energy program. And their argument was simple. We're a member of the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We are entitled, it is our right, to have a peaceful nuclear energy program, as so many other countries have. And so the Iranians simply said, any negotiation has to have an endpoint built into it. And in fact, the heart of the negotiation that John Kerry conducted was setting those sunset clauses.

Now it's true, some of the special additional restrictions that we successfully negotiated, those begin to ease after a period, in some cases 10 or 15, in others 20 or 25. But it would defy logic to vote to kill the whole agreement with all of the permanent NPT restrictions by which Iran has to live for that reason. After all, if your house is on fire, if it's going up in flames, would you refuse to extinguish it because of the chance that it might be another fire in 15 years?

Obviously not. You'd put out the fire and you'd take advantage of the extra time to prepare for the future. So agreeing to this sunset clause was better than nothing from the point of view of President Obama, the U.S., and our allies who signed the deal. That's right. I think the calculation was that if we give ourselves anywhere from 10 to 20 to 25 years, who knows what could happen inside Iran. President Obama felt that if he could get Iran into this kind of an agreement with the international community, it would set the stage for a potential political evolution inside Iran. This was the more idealistic part of the deal,

that the deal might be a lever to bring Iran into the community of nations and perhaps even encourage the flowering of democracy inside the country. And by the time the deal expires, we wouldn't be dealing with the same set of forces that we're dealing with today. Why was this deal even in the cards from Iran's point of view? Why would Iran be willing to agree to it? Well, remember, Iran had been subject to years of multilateral and very punishing sanctions. Their oil industry was almost completely constrained. They were losing a huge amount of revenue through oil exports. Their central bank was almost totally isolated from the international financial system. The rial, the Iranian currency, had plummeted, and they were a semi-pariah in the international community. So it really hurt them economically.

It put the government at risk politically. And when Hassan Rouhani, who's the current president of Iran, was elected, he went to his people with a basic promise. I will make a deal to get us out from under these sanctions. So for the U.S. and its allies, this is a deal that stops the existential threat of a hostile country like Iran having nuclear weapons. For Iran, this is about reviving a really broken economy.

That's right. It's a very basic trade. So what happens to Iran's nuclear program, the focus of this deal, once this agreement is signed? The program is essentially mothballed. The uranium enrichment facilities are stopped and suspended. The equipment is dismantled. Highly enriched uranium and plutonium is moved out of the country. And essentially, there's a giant pause button put on the entire Iranian program.

So pretty much that plan works, to stall, to pause Iran's nuclear program. Yes. By all accounts, Iran is complying with the terms of the deal up till now. So the program is in fact paused. And what about those vulnerabilities that everyone foresaw and worried about? The fear of Iran's behavior in the region and its ballistic missile program? Well, this is the difficult thing for the proponents of the deal. Iran, in the aftermath of the deal, didn't behave more moderately. If anything, it behaved more provocatively, more aggressively.

Iran continues to support elements within the Taliban. Iran is the principal sponsor of Bashar Assad in Syria. Not a nice guy. It began bankrolling militias in Iraq, in Syria. You can continue to make the case to the international community that this chief sponsor of terror in the world, chief supporter of Syria, another pariah state in the region, that they are ones that need to continue to be contained.

You know, there's no question that this did not lead to a period of greater stability. It actually led to a period of greater unease, of confrontation. Even though it had agreed to pause its nuclear program, it was sort of flexing its muscles in every other way. And what about its ballistic missile program? What's happened to that since the deal was signed? It has continued to develop its ballistic missiles. So that continues to be a recurring threat that were Iran to then have the ability to resume its military nuclear program,

they would have a much more advanced generation of missiles that they could use to deliver these weapons sometime in the future. I've been doing deals for a long time. I've been making lots of wonderful deals, great deals. That's what I do. Never, ever, ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran. And I mean never. The timing on this deal, if I recall, was the final months of the Obama presidency. So it becomes a campaign issue for everyone involved in the 2016 race.

What does Donald Trump, the candidate, have to say about this deal, both what was in the deal and what was left out of the deal? He basically ridicules it, condemns it, derides it, says it's the worst deal he's ever seen. Certainly would never have made that horrible, disgusting, absolutely incompetent deal with Iran. And more or less promises that if elected... My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. He would walk away from it.

Thank you. So why doesn't President Trump, once elected, act on this right away once he becomes president? Well, this is a very interesting part of the story. We've all been involved in lengthy discussions, not just about the Iran deal, but really what to do about Iran's destabilizing behavior broadly. So Donald Trump has a series of senior advisors around him, Secretary of State Tillerson, the National Security Advisor, General McMaster. And these guys are not doves. These are hawkish, tough-minded guys. But they

make a case to him, not once, but three times, that the moment is not right to pull the plug on the deal. Do we want to tear it up and walk away? Do we want to make the point to Iran that we expect you to get back in line with the spirit of the agreement and we're going to stay here and hold you accountable to it? There are a lot of, I think there are a lot of alternative means with which we use the agreement to advance our policies and the relationship with Iran. And instead, what they propose to him is let us go to the Europeans and try to address the things about this deal that dissatisfy you and see if we can tweak the deal and make it acceptable. And that's what most of the story of the last 14 months has

been about. The president's not walking away from the deal yet. So if he sees some real change, if he sees the ability of the Congress within U.S. law to address some of these problems associated with the deal. And what is the argument that they make to President Trump about why he shouldn't scrap it right away? Well, for one thing, there's no evidence that Iran is not complying with the deal. So if the United States scraps the deal, we're opening ourselves up to the charge that we're the ones that are violating the deal. And I think the advisors at the time made the case to the president, better to let us see whether we can fix the existing deal rather than be the ones who breach it first. Did the president

try to fix the deal along these lines? Well, the State Department spent months involved in this highly technical negotiation with the Europeans about addressing these three areas. And they actually made a fair amount of progress. The Europeans agreed that ballistic missiles needed to be addressed, and they agreed that the West, the major powers, needed to push back harder on Iran's conduct in the region. The area where the talks broke down

was on the sunset clause. Because the Trump administration essentially said, we want a mechanism where when these expiration dates come up, if the Iranians don't continue to abide by the restrictions, we will automatically reimpose sanctions. And the Europeans said, you can't do that because you're violating

the terms of the deal itself. So there was this unbridgeable gap over what to do about the sunset clauses. The president says he'll be announcing his Iran deal decision at 2 p.m. here at the White House. So some major news there. President Trump says he will announce his decision on the Iran nuclear agreement later today. 2 p.m. today, President Trump expected to make that announcement. Right now, we're just waiting to see what he decides to do and if he decides to leave, how he does it. So then what happens on Tuesday? Well, the day starts with President Trump making phone calls to foreign leaders, among them Emmanuel Macron of France. We should not abandon it without having something substantial and more substantial instead.

Who visited Washington two weeks ago and made this very impassioned plea to the president not to pull out of the deal. We signed it at the initiative of the United States. He calls Macron and he tells him, I'm going to go ahead and do it. Then at two o'clock, he walks out to the podium in the diplomatic reception room, somewhat ironic given what he's about to announce. My fellow Americans, today I want to update the world on our efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. And delivers this 12-minute, strongly worded speech. The fact is, this was a horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made. It didn't bring calm, it didn't bring peace, and it never will.

And then he declares today. Therefore, I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. So what exactly happens as a result of this? What does it mean for the U.S. to withdraw from this agreement? Well, the key issue here is not a piece of paper that the U.S. signed. The key issue is the re-imposition of the sanctions. There are layers and layers of American sanctions that the president has to waive every few months. And what the president essentially did today is said, I am not going to waive these sanctions, which means they are automatically reinstated. These are sanctions on the Iranian oil industry, on the Iranian central bank, and they're potentially sanctions against European companies that do business in Iran.

So a powerful incentive for Iran to curb its nuclear weapons program is now gone. That is absolutely right. President Trump has said he doesn't like this deal and that it can be made better. Does he have a plan for actually getting a better deal with Iran? What the president has said is that he believes that the maximum pressure campaign that he carried out against North Korea had the effect of bringing North Korea to the bargaining table. And that if he can run that play again, in effect, if he can mount a maximum pressure campaign against Iran, it will have the same effect. It will bring the

Iranians back to the table and force them to accept a better deal for the West, for the United States. I think what the president doesn't really acknowledge in this is that in fact, the Iran negotiation was the product of a sustained pressure campaign. Sanctions levied by the Europeans, by the US, by the United Nations. That is what brought the Iranians back to the table. So what the president is now saying he's going to do

is resurrect that program, but make it even more punishing and force the Iranians back to the table. You sound skeptical. I'm very skeptical for the following reason. The Europeans have said they're staying in the deal. The Chinese have said that they're going to stay in the deal, as have the Russians. So the kind of unanimity that the U.S. marshaled during the Obama administration to put these sanctions together, that's simply not going to exist. They will not, at least as things stand today, be able to put together that kind of international coalition to go in and not just put tough sanctions on Iran, but sanctions that are measurably tougher than the ones that were

put on by the Obama administration. So in leaving this deal, you're saying that the U.S. is effectively giving up the multilateral leverage it would need to successfully renegotiate this. That's what I'm saying. And not only is it giving up the leverage, it's giving up the moral and legal high ground because we will be branded as the country that violated the deal. Iran will be able to say, we're in the deal. The United States is the country that violated the deal. Iran will be able to say, we're in the deal. The United States is the party that breached it. So it really isolates us and deprives us of the leverage that we have with North Korea and that we had the last time with Iran. If the other countries that signed the deal remain in the deal and Iran remains in the deal, does the deal remain?

I think the reality is it doesn't for the following reason. If you're a European investor and you're thinking about investing in Iran and you're facing the prospect of being blacklisted by the United States, you're not going to do business in Iran. So the practical matter is even if France and Germany and Britain remain in the deal, French, British, and German companies are probably going to steer clear of Iran. So now, by all accounts, most of these countries will walk away, and the deal, in effect, will not be doing what it was meant to accomplish. So Trump has not just pulled the U.S. out of this deal. It has effectively killed the deal

entirely for everybody. I think that's right. I mean, the deal exists on paper. Every country involved in it, except us, will say that they're abiding by its terms. But as a practical matter, the deal is over as of today. We have been talking about the shortcomings of this deal and how Iran's behavior has exposed and clarified those weaknesses and given the president a rationale for scrapping this agreement. But if the president doesn't seem to have a replacement deal in mind that's really viable right now, do you think that that suggests another motivation for wanting to pull out of this deal, something that hasn't been described in this speech and in these negotiations? Well, the obvious question is, if you don't have a plan B,

are you putting the world on a course toward an inevitable military conflict? Does this inevitably lead to war? Now, the administration flatly rejects that. John Bolton rejected that today. But it's a little bit difficult at this moment to see how the diplomatic channel is revived. So we're left in this vacuum where there's no plan B, and the only alternative that some people see is an alternative that, by all accounts, nobody wants, including the White House, which is to

have some kind of a military confrontation. Is what you're saying that this is setting us on a course of war with Iran? Well, I certainly hope it's not, and the Trump administration says they hope it's not. It's just difficult to see at this moment, in

this day of confusion, what the other possible outcomes would be. Mark, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times reports that a shell company used by President Trump's longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pay hush money to an adult film actress, received $500,000 from a firm linked to a Russian oligarch,

and hundreds of thousands of dollars more from corporations with business before the Trump administration. from corporations with business before the Trump administration. The Shell Company, Essential Consultants, received one of its biggest payments from a company tied to Victor Vekselberg, a Russian businessman who was questioned earlier this year by investigators for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The revelations raise new questions about the business practices of Cohen, who is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud and election law violations. And... My advisers tell me that it's time to concede, so we're conceding the election.

In a closely watched Republican Senate primary, a convicted coal mine operator, Don Blankenship, was soundly defeated in West Virginia in a race viewed as a test of the party's willingness to embrace controversial candidates ahead of this year's midterm elections. Again, the only thing I can tell you is I did what I could do to try to help the state. It didn't work out. can tell you is I did what I could do to try to help the state. It didn't work out. Blankenship spent a year in federal prison for his role in a deadly mining explosion, prompting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Trump to take the rare step of urging voters not to elect him. I think if there was any single factor, it was probably more likely President Trump's, I don't know, lack of endorsement, I don't know what to call it, but don't vote for Don tweet. I don't know what else it would have been that unless the polls were just way off. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.