The only Iran deal Trump can get is no better than Obama’s ‘horrible’ JCPOA

The US president pulled out of his predecessor’s 2015 agreement, saying it didn’t address Tehran’s ballistic missiles or proxies. Neither will any conceivable deal, even after weeks of bombing and a month of threats

In May 2018, US President Donald Trump shocked European allies — while exhilarating many Israelis — when he announced that he was withdrawing from predecessor Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which also included Germany, France, Russia, China and Britain, was a “horrible one-sided deal that should never ever have been made,” the president insisted.

“The deal lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime’s nuclear activity, and no limits at all on its other malign behavior, including its sinister activities in Syria, Yemen, and other places all around the world,” he said from the White House.

And he blasted the JCPOA for failing to “address the regime’s development of ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads.”

Eight years later, after a massive bombing campaign against Iran that the US carried out alongside Israel, Trump appears to be chasing a deal along the same contours he once complained about.

Even that problematic outcome seems beyond his reach, as Iran appears singularly unbothered by the president’s increasingly stale threats of destruction if the Islamic Republic doesn’t make a deal.

More threats

On Sunday, Trump took to his Truth Social site to warn Iran of the consequences of not making a deal.

“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!” he wrote in a social media post.

It was the latest of a series of threats — some verbal, some on social media, and many rather bizarre or cryptic — that Trump has issued since he declared a ceasefire on April 8.

The same day, after returning from China, he shared an AI-generated graphic of himself and a US Navy admiral sailing on stormy waters and surrounded by several ships flying the Iranian flag. The caption read, “It was the calm before the storm.”

After over a month of insults, threats, and wildly unrealistic demands from the Iranians, Trump is somehow still telling reporters that Tehran wants to make a deal.

“We want to make a deal,” he told Axios news on Sunday. “They are not where we want them to be. They will have to get there or they will be hit badly, and they don’t want that.”

He can threaten all he wants, but it’s doubtful any of his bombast will push Iran into giving in to US demands. If it didn’t fold during the fighting, it’s not going to suddenly throw up its hands to avoid the resumption of a military campaign it already proved it can weather.

Not on its nuclear program, and certainly not on ballistic missiles or support for proxies.

“There is no alternative but to accept the rights of the Iranian people as laid out in the 14-point proposal,” said Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the country’s pointman in talks with the US.

Tehran’s 14-point proposal reportedly calls for an end to the fighting and an opening of the Strait of Hormuz before talks even begin on the nuclear program. The offer also reportedly floats a freeze on nuclear enrichment for up to 15 years.

Iran is perhaps willing to make some other limited concessions on enrichment. It reportedly offered to dilute some of its highly enriched uranium and send the rest out of the country. It did not agree to dismantle its program or stop enrichment permanently, however.

Even that modest compromise was denied by the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

Trump claims that Iranian negotiators told their American counterparts that they were prepared for the US to retrieve Tehran’s buried stockpile of highly enriched uranium, a key demand, but then refrained from putting that concession in the response paper submitted earlier this month. Iran has shown no public indication that it is prepared to trade away one of its main pieces of leverage.

Nor has it shown any openness to talking about support for proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, or its ballistic missile program, both of which are absent from the proposal.

On the nuclear file, at least, Trump seems to be seeking a deal that could be marginally better than the JCPOA. A Trump deal would ostensibly last longer than the 2015 deal’s 10-year sunset, and the administration is reportedly demanding more intrusive inspections and a total freeze on enrichment for its duration, whereas the JCPOA allowed Iran to continue some enrichment to 3.67 percent.

But unlike eight years ago, Trump now seems unbothered by a deal that focuses almost entirely on the nuclear issue, with Tehran still unwilling to give an inch on proxies or missiles.

Like negotiator Wendy Sherman and other Obama administration officials whose negotiating skills he once pilloried, Trump has apparently accepted that clinching a nuclear deal means dropping demands for limits on missiles or backing for terror groups.

“I think about one thing,” the president said before flying to China last week. “We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”

“The most important thing by far is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump continued.

On the rare occasions he does talk about ballistic missiles or support for proxies, he downplays them.

“Look, missiles are bad, but yeah, and they do have to cap it, but this is about they cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said earlier this month.

He refused to say in the same interview that Iran would be stopped from funding proxies, only saying that they wouldn’t be in a position economically to do so, given the damage that was done to Iran’s energy infrastructure.

Yet any deal will mean massive sanctions relief by the US, pouring tens of billions of dollars into the struggling economy. The same country that was willing to kill 40,000 of its own citizens to stay in power earlier this year will have no problem using that money to rebuild its own military and its proxy forces before it does anything for the Iranian public.

Few options

Trump clearly wants an agreement, and unless he is willing to make good on his threats of military action, expanding the campaign significantly, there is no conceivable scenario in which Iran agrees to a deal significantly more comprehensive than the JCPOA.

“The result of this will be something that looks very similar to the JCPOA,” former US ambassador to Israel Tom Nides told The Times of Israel. “It won’t be called that. But it’s going to have a lot of elements that we had in 2015.”

With Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz holding the world’s economy hostage, there is even the chance that Trump will agree to a deal that is worse than the JCPOA just to get it open again.

Trump’s attempt to change the dynamic in the Strait of Hormuz by using the US Navy to assist ships trying to leave the Persian Gulf did nothing to increase his credibility or deterrence in the eyes of the Iranians. He paused it less than two days after it began, either because of a lack of cooperation by the Saudis or in order to pursue yet another fruitless round of talks with Iran.

Meanwhile, Iranian leaders continue to taunt Trump on social media. Tehran even announced the formation of a new body to manage the Strait of Hormuz. It’s not about to back down.

That leaves Trump with limited options.

He could let the new reality harden without a deal and without going back to war, but with mutual blockades of Hormuz. Global economic pain — including in the US — would continue to be felt until new means of delivering Gulf oil and developing fields elsewhere are completed.

Or he could opt for a return to fighting, either hitting targets across Iran as the US and Israel did in March, or focusing on the Strait of Hormuz. Either way, the Iranians are sure to fire at all of their Arab neighbors and Israel once again.

And that leaves Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waiting for Trump’s decision, while attempting to sell the war’s achievements, and the benefits of his strategic subordination to Trump, to the Israeli public.