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News Analysis

Trump’s Demand to Rewrite Iran Deal Tests a Weakened Diplomatic Corps

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Why Trump Hasn’t Killed the Iran Deal

Despite tough talk on Iran, President Trump announced that he would waive certain sanctions, keeping the nuclear deal in place.

From the campaign trail to the White House, President Trump has long bashed the Iran nuclear deal. “One of the worst deals I’ve ever seen.” But in May 2017, September 2017 and again today, he has opted to waive certain sanctions on Iran. The question is: Why? Theory 1: He’s buying time. Trump wants to figure out how to address what he calls Iran’s destabilizing activities, like its involvement in Syria and its ballistic weapons program. Both are outside the scope of the nuclear deal. Theory 2: The recent protests in Iran about the bad economy altered his thinking. Trump’s advisers think that the protests give the president leverage to continue creating uncertainty about America’s commitment to the deal, rather than killing it altogether. Theory 3: He’s actually killing it behind the scenes. Iran watchers are calling the strategy, “death by 1,000 paper cuts,” where the U.S. is creating uncertainty about the future of the nuclear deal, hoping that Iran backs out first. Theory 4: His advisers are O.K. with the deal, but his base isn’t. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis openly split with Trump on abandoning the deal. But it has long been one of Trump’s red meat appeals to his base.

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Despite tough talk on Iran, President Trump announced that he would waive certain sanctions, keeping the nuclear deal in place.CreditCredit...Virginia Mayo/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Trump, by demanding on Friday that European allies agree to rewrite the Iran nuclear deal within 120 days or he will kill it, set himself a diplomatic challenge that would be formidable even for an administration with a deep bench of experienced negotiators.

For Mr. Trump, who has filled his national security ranks with retired military officers and allowed his State Department to languish, the challenge is even more profound. And it is not limited to Iran: The North Korea crisis has taken a sudden turn toward diplomacy, with the unexpected opening of talks between the North and the South.

On both fronts, current and former officials say, the Trump administration is being forced to rethink strategies that had been driven largely by military considerations. Many say the White House is ill equipped to deal with the prospect of a South Korean détente with the North’s Kim Jong-un or the recent eruption of political unrest in Iran.

The antigovernment protests in Iran have complicated Mr. Trump’s calculations about whether to rip up the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, several officials said. While the unrest has made the president even more determined to punish the Iranian leadership, it has also reinforced the conviction of European leaders that the deal should be preserved.

On Friday, Mr. Trump grudgingly agreed not to reimpose comprehensive sanctions that would have broken apart the deal. But he gave European allies only four months to agree to a stricter “follow on” agreement, warning that he would pull the United States out of it without one.

He also ordered targeted sanctions against the head of Iran’s judiciary, Sadeq Larijani, a powerful figure whom the administration holds culpable for the violent crackdown on the protests, as well as against an Iranian cyberwarfare unit that it accuses of internet censorship.

The nuclear deal, Mr. Trump said, drove Iranians into the streets because the government misused the proceeds from the lifting of sanctions. “It has served as a slush fund for weapons, terror and oppression, and to further line the pockets of corrupt regime leaders,” he said in a statement.

But that is precisely why European leaders argue that keeping the deal in place makes even more sense now: because it keeps a harsh spotlight on Iran’s leaders, and their malfeasance, rather than allowing the Iranians to paint the United States and its allies as the villains.

Diplomats from several European countries said that renegotiating the deal was a nonstarter. The best Mr. Trump could hope for, one official said, would be a commitment from Europe to begin work on a new and separate agreement. Such a step, they said, would require the participation of China and Russia, which are also signatories to the deal, as well as Iran itself — something the White House ruled out.

“If we want seriously to be able to raise the price to the Iranians of what they are doing internally and externally, we need the Europeans,” said Dennis B. Ross, a former adviser to President Barack Obama who helped devise his Iran policy. “But if they think that we are only interested in walking away from the nuclear deal, they won’t join us.”

The administration, other experts said, is locked into a policy that has two major pillars: dismantling Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal and confronting Iran on its aggression in the region, through its support of militant groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and other proxies in Yemen, Syria and Iraq.

That is not surprising, given that the defense secretary, Jim Mattis, and the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, are former commanders who served in Iraq and blame Iran for the death of American soldiers there.

Even below that level, the administration’s Iran policy is heavily influenced by the military. Joel Rayburn, the top Iran policymaker at the National Security Council, is a former military intelligence officer, as is Andrew L. Peek, a senior Iran policymaker at the State Department. Several of the department’s nonmilitary Iran experts have been pushed out in recent months.

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President Trump’s action, which was widely expected, is the third time he has given a reprieve to the agreement.Credit...Abedin Taherkenareh/European Pressphoto Agency

Now, the administration is suddenly grappling with an Iranian government that is weakened and divided by the protests — a political development that the Americans did not anticipate.

“When you’re dealing with Iran’s regional affairs, you’re dealing with how it supplies proxies and militias,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked in the Obama administration. “If you’re thinking about Iran’s internal problems, that is a more difficult problem. You’re thinking about fissures, and how to exploit them.”

Mr. Takeyh said Mr. Obama was similarly caught off guard in 2009 by the protests that became known as the Green Movement. At the time, he was trying to entice Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, into talks. That is one reason he reacted so little to those protests — a reaction that Mr. Trump criticized in his statement on Friday.

Ideally, Mr. Ross said, policy toward Iran would be a mix of coercive measures and diplomatic inducements. “With Obama, one could argue that the coercive part of the equation was not believable,” he said. “With Trump, the diplomatic side of the equation may prove not to be believable.”

The White House appears to recognize the weakness in its diplomatic ranks. It is considering the appointment of a special envoy for Iran, who could negotiate with the Europeans on the nuclear deal, as well as marshal a stronger response to Iran’s behavior in the region.

Any envoy would face a tough task: Administration officials said Mr. Trump was demanding an agreement that would eliminate all “sunset clauses,” under which Iran can resume activities like enriching uranium, and would explicitly link its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Iran fought against both of these demands in the negotiations that led to the 2015 deal.

With North Korea, the administration’s policy has been more balanced between diplomacy and military planning. But the talks between the Koreas have undermined Mr. Trump’s strategy, which is to impose maximum pressure on Pyongyang — including the threat of a military strike — to pressure Mr. Kim into giving up his nuclear arsenal.

The White House has sent General McMaster and the N.S.C.’s top Asia policymaker, Matthew Pottinger, to San Francisco, where they will meet with their counterparts from South Korea and Japan to discuss the implications of the North-South dialogue.

General McMaster has spoken publicly about the need to prepare for a “preventive war” against North Korea. Mr. Pottinger, a retired Marine, also has a background in military intelligence, though at other times, he worked as a journalist and for a hedge fund.

White House officials are deeply skeptical of the overture from Mr. Kim to South Korea. They say he is trying to drive a wedge between South Korea and the United States. And they have urged the South Koreans to keep the exchanges limited to narrow issues, like security at the coming Winter Olympics in the South Korean town of Pyeongchang.

Mr. Trump, however, appears caught between continuing to heap ridicule on Mr. Kim and taking credit for the diplomatic opening. At Camp David last weekend, the president said he hoped the talks ranged far beyond the Olympics, and he backed them in a call with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in.

The trajectory of the talks may be out of Mr. Trump’s control anyway, according to experts on the region. Mr. Moon was elected on a platform of reducing tensions with the North. Young South Koreans, in particular, view Mr. Trump’s threats of war on North Korea with alarm — sometimes even more than the danger posed by Mr. Kim.

“The North Korea issue may be entering a new phase,” said Evan S. Medeiros, the top Asia adviser in Mr. Obama’s N.S.C. “Moon’s agenda and perceptions seem to be evolving, and, as cynical as we all are about North Korea, it is worth asking the question: Is Kim actually looking for a negotiated off-ramp, and what would such behavior look like?”

“Is the Trump administration, which has understandably focused on coercive tools to date, nimble enough to respond to this evolution?” he said.

Thomas Erdbrink contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Demand on Iran Deal Tests Diplomatic Corps. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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