Buried in paragraph 29 of the recently concluded 159-page nuclear agreement with Iran (officially designated the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”), as part of Section C titled “Sanctions” is a potentially very important statement:
The EU and its Member States and the United States, consistent with their respective laws, will refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalization of trade and economic relations with Iran inconsistent with their commitments not to undermine the successful implementation of this JCPOA.
This appears to be a strong and binding commitment, not conditioned on anything more than Iran’s complying with the terms of the overall agreement. While lawyers may argue that the ambiguous language about “consistent with their respective [i.e. US] laws” carves out an exception for the designation of countries on the US’s so-called “terrorism list” of state sponsors of terrorism, it would seem almost certain that continuing to maintain that designation for Iran (along with Syria and Sudan, the only two other countries that still remain on the official list) would be inconsistent with “the normalization of trade and economic relations with Iran.”
Moreover, as a practical political matter, it seems almost certain that the US will remove Iran from the terrorism list as soon as the Iranians insist on that as a condition for moving forward to implement their obligations under the agreement. The history of US dealings with North Korea under the previous administration is instructive in that regard, although not encouraging.
In June of 2008, in an effort to get North Korea to comply with the commitments it had made under the 1994 nuclear framework agreement, President George W. Bush announced that he was lifting provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act as applied to North Korea and providing Congress with the required 45-day notice of his intention to take North Korea off the terrorism list.
In apparent response, North Korea made the dramatic move, in front of TV cameras, of blowing up the cooling tower of the Yongbyon reactor. However, when Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said that the US would not delist North Korea at the end of the 45-day period without a verification plan from North Korea for its nuclear programs, Pyongyang responded shortly afterwards that it was halting the disablement of the nuclear facility and would consider restoring the plant if the US continued to drag its feet on the promise of delisting. Although the US proceeded to delist North Korea on October 11, the North Koreans followed by starting to limit the scope of IAEA inspections and prohibiting inspectors from taking soil or nuclear waste samples from the site. In May of 2009, they tested a second nuclear weapon. In November 2010 they unveiled a uranium enrichment plant at Yongbyon with 2,000 gas centrifuges and by February 2011 Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was telling Congress that:
Based on the scale of the facility and the progress the DPRK has made in construction, it is likely that North Korea has been pursuing enrichment for an extended period of time. If so, there is clear prospect that DPRK has built other uranium enrichment related facilities in its territory, including likely R&D and centrifuge fabrication facilities, and other enrichment facilities.
Yet, despite all of that, North Korea remains off the terrorism list. A similar outcome is very much to be expected with Iran, as part of the effort to persuade it to fulfill its obligations under the “historic” Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, even though last year’s State Department report made clear that Iran remains a major state sponsor of terrorism, including facilitating the movement of al Qaeda (AQ) fighters and facilitators to South Asia and Syria.
Iran continued its terrorist-related activity in 2014, including support for Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, Lebanese Hezbollah, and various groups in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. This year, Iran increased its assistance to Iraqi Shia militias, one of which is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), in response to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) incursion into Iraq, and has continued to support other militia groups in the region. Iran also attempted to smuggle weapons to Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza. While its main effort focused on supporting goals in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, Iran and its proxies also continued subtle efforts at growing influence elsewhere including in Africa, Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Latin America. Iran used the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) to implement foreign policy goals, provide cover for intelligence operations, and create instability in the Middle East. The IRGC-QF is the regime’s primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad.
Since the end of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, Iran has also assisted in rearming Lebanese Hezbollah, in direct violation of UNSCR 1701. General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the IRGC Aerospace Force stated in November that “The IRGC and Hezbollah are a single apparatus jointed together,” and Lebanese Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassem boasted that Iran had provided his organization with missiles that had “pinpoint accuracy” in separate November public remarks. Iran has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in support of Lebanese Hezbollah in Lebanon and has trained thousands of its fighters at camps in Iran. These trained fighters have used these skills in direct support of the Asad regime in Syria and, to a lesser extent, in support of operations against ISIL in Iraq. They have also continued to carry out attacks along the Lebanese border with Israel.
Iran remained unwilling to bring to justice senior al Qaeda members it continued to detain, and refused to publicly identify those senior members in its custody. Also, the regime in Tehran previously allowed AQ facilitators to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran since at least 2009, enabling AQ to move funds and fighters to South Asia and Syria.
Unfortunately, this problem of the terrorism list illustrates a difficulty that the nuclear agreement will pose for any use of economic pressure to confront Iran’s destabilizing actions throughout the Middle East and around the world, or any effort to press the regime to treat its own subjects better. The potential threat by Iran to withdraw from the agreement, as well as the commitment by the EU and the US to refrain from any actions that would adversely affect the normalization of trade and economic relations with Iran, will effectively disable the use of economic leverage to respond to Iranian provocations. In short, by subordinating all other issues to the effort to get a temporary delay in Iran’s acquiring a nuclear weapon capability, the agreement disables the principal soft power instrument of US-Iranian policy. It is particularly ironic, when President Obama is presenting the agreement as the only alternative to military action, that future presidents will find themselves effectively deprived of non-military instruments for dealing with Iran.
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