On Friday, the White House released a document outlining a new strategy for dealing with the Islamic Republic; the president also announced that he would not certify the nuclear deal by the October 15 deadline. By declining to certify, Trump has not jettisoned the agreement—known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—but simply given Congress the chance to renew sanctions. Amir Taheri comments:
[The new document] abandons the distinction that Barack Obama and John Kerry tried to make between Tehran’s backing for outright terrorist groups and its support of the so-called “militant” ones such as the Lebanese branch of Hizballah and the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (i.e., Hamas). Without openly saying so, Obama implied that some of the “militant” groups financed and armed by Iran may not be as bad as [others] Tehran supported. President Trump rejects that illusion. . . .
[Furthermore,] the new strategy offers a broader vision of relations with Iran beyond the narrow issue of the nuclear deal, which . . . is presented as no more than a part of a larger jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle also includes “gross violations of human rights” and “the unjust detention of American citizens and other foreigners on spurious charges.” In other words, Tehran must understand that taking foreign hostages is no longer risk-free. . . .
[But President Trump] is not setting himself directly against the JCPOA as such. Instead, he points to Iran’s repeated violation of its pledges, as most recently testified to by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director, Yukio Amano, with regard to inspection of certain military sites. Nor could Europeans ignore the fact that Iran’s testing and deploying of medium- and long-range missiles violates the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which is often cited to give some legal aura to the JCPOA. . . .
Trump’s text [also] makes it hard for the leadership in Tehran to devise a strategy to counter it. Had he renounced the JCPOA in a formal way, Iran’s leaders could have cast themselves as victims of “imperialist bullying” and deployed the Europeans . . . to fight in their corner. Now they cannot do that because all that Trump is demanding is a stricter application of the measures that the EU and others say they mean to defend.
That leaves Tehran with the choice of either unilaterally denouncing the JCPOA, for example by claiming that it cannot allow unrestricted inspection of “suspect sites” in its territory, or trying to open a dialogue with the U.S. through the EU or even regional mediation.
Read more on Asharq al-Awsat: https://english.aawsat.com/amir-taheri/features/trumps-new-strategy-iran-takes-bull-horns