Trump needs a Plan C for Iran because so far nothing has worked
David E. Sanger
In the days before President Donald Trump signed the preliminary agreement with Iran after a dinner at Versailles, where World War I officially ended, he and his aides announced their strategy: The Strait of Hormuz would be opened to traffic and the United States would turn on the tap so Iran could sell billions of dollars of oil.
The theory, according to Trump, is that after years of sanctions, Iran will quickly become dependent on a flood of revenue and access to dollars in Western banks. In his call for Iran, the president said this was “a really good deal for Iran.” New York Times Reporter three days before the June 17 memorandum of understanding was signed.
“They’re actually proud of it,” he said of Iranian negotiators. “I guess they’re tired of getting shot.”
Apparently not. Less than a month after the agreement, attacks on three ships passing through the strait in a channel outside Iran’s control led Trump to revoke the exemption that allowed Iran to sell oil.
The US bombed more than 170 Iranian military targets in two nights. And no negotiations are planned, at least for now, on the much larger, more complex and seemingly permanent deal, which the two sides have agreed to negotiate within 60 days.
If Trump and his aides now have a Plan C after the bombing and pre-agreement failed, they haven’t announced it. Instead, they appear to be returning to oil sanctions and bombing raids, which Trump has described as devastating, but so far these have only led to the current mess.
“So the deal is very simple,” U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said Wednesday. “If they fire on the ships, we will destroy them,” added the vice president, who opposed the initial attack on February 28 but has since been tasked with defending the war and negotiating a way out of it.
In other words, carrots are out. The sticks are back. But the administration has yet to answer why it believes the combination of economic warfare and bombing will produce a different outcome this time.
“We are at a strategic impasse,” said Richard N. Haass, a longtime diplomat who served at the State Department and National Security Council in several administrations, including George W. Bush’s, in the early days of the Iraq War.
“The dilemma here is that the more we attack, the more the Iranians attack the Gulf oil and energy infrastructure,” he said. “And the administration still hasn’t figured out how to defend these sites.”
Trump “first hoped to bomb them into regime change, then he hoped to bomb them into submission — neither worked,” he said.
It seems that his decision to let Iran reap the benefits of oil sales also marked a complete reversal for Trump: During his first term, and until about a month ago, he appeared to be much more interested in sticks. The granting of oil sales was rooted in the belief, which permeated last year’s negotiations in the Gaza Strip, that even revolutionaries had visions of modern, well-functioning economies that would bring profits to their people.
Trump is also caught in the middle of sharp divisions in Iran. These were on vivid display during the funeral ceremonies of religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening hours of this week’s attack on Tehran.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, one of the chief negotiators, had stones thrown at him during one of the funeral processions and was accused of appeasement. The attackers cursed him and wanted him killed. President Masoud Pezeshkian did not fare well and had to be rescued from the angry crowd by his security team.
But when Trump speaks publicly about Iran, he rarely mentions the divisions crisscrossing society. Instead, he speaks as if it is organized as a top-down government led by Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the slain religious leader and one of an emerging group of leaders whom Trump described just a few weeks ago as more “reasonable” than their predecessors. (He called them “scum” for the NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday.)
On Thursday, fresh off a summit, Trump and his aides said little publicly about their next steps. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration is still committed to finding a peaceful solution and expects what the administration calls “technical talks” to continue.
But even this statement is full of contradictions, because the divisions facing Iran and the United States are not “technical” but political, and lower-level negotiators lack the authority to resolve them.
One example concerns the future of the nuclear program. The June ceasefire agreement is unclear on all key issues, including whether Iran will retain control of its nuclear fuel stockpile. According to the agreement signed by President Barack Obama in 2015, but which Trump later withdrew, Iran transferred 97 percent of its then-current stocks. Trump is extremely sensitive to any suggestion that he might get less than Obama.
But the first political battle may be over the question of who will control the strait, for which the administration paid the price for an ambiguous paragraph in the memorandum of understanding Trump signed in Versailles. This is a prime example of what can happen when Iranian and US officials turn a blind eye to differences in a negotiated document and then interpret it very differently.
Paragraph 5 of the agreement states: “Upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will use its best efforts to make arrangements to ensure the safe passage of commercial ships from the Persian Gulf to and from the Oman Sea for a period of only 60 days.”
Trump and his aides thought this was the key to freeing shipping traffic and put the blame on the Iranians. The Iranians insisted that ships pass through the canal closest to the coast, seizing this as an opening to control the important oil shipping passage. Ultimately, Iran stated that it would charge a fee for passage through the strait.
When the US Navy stopped secretly escorting the ships through a different channel near Oman, Iran’s response was to open fire on some of the ships. According to Lloyd’s of London, there is currently little movement in the strait. This is what frustrated Trump and led him to declare the deal “done.”
Trump aides insist they did not violate the agreement; They say the memorandum of understanding is performance-based and Iran’s actions fail that test.
All of this takes Trump back to his situation in April, when he discovered that military force could not solve the problem, and many in Iran saw any diplomatic solution as a pattern of waiting until the next Israeli-American attack.
This article was first published on: New York Times.
