President Trump’s decision not to recertify the nuclear agreement with Tehran, known formally as the JCPOA, presents an opportunity to correct some of its many flaws. To Robert Satloff, the most important modifications include changing its sunset clauses so that Iran won’t be free to build a bomb eight years from now, limiting the Islamic Republic’s ballistic-missile program (deliberately ignored by the original deal), and instituting an effective set of penalties. On the last two points, he writes:
Given that the Iranians are exploiting a loophole that the Obama administration permitted in the relevant UN Security Council resolution to plow ahead with developing missiles potentially capable of delivering nuclear weapons, it is wholly false for advocates of the deal to argue that the JCPOA has halted, frozen, or suspended Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. Such a program has three main parts—development, weaponization, and delivery—and ballistic missiles are an integral part of that. In other words, critical aspects of the program are moving ahead, deal or no deal.
To address these problems, the [Trump] administration could seek understandings now with European and other international partners about penalties to be imposed on Iran for continued investment in its ballistic-missile program and for its provocative regional activities. To be effective, these new multilateral sanctions should impose disproportionate penalties on Iran for every dollar spent on ballistic missiles, Hizballah, the Houthis [in Yemen], or other [harmful] actors. Since these sanctions are outside the bounds of the JCPOA, their implementation does not violate any promise made to Iran. . . .
[Another problem is that] the JCPOA has no agreed-upon penalties for Iranian violations of the deal’s terms, short of the last-resort punishment of a “snapback” of UN sanctions. This is akin to having a legal code with only one punishment—the death penalty—for every crime; the result is that virtually all crimes will go unpunished.
Again, as the record of the past two years shows, this has been the case. Contrary to press reports, there have been numerous violations of the terms of the deal, but on each occasion, Iran has been given the opportunity to correct its error. That’s a logical outcome of a situation in which there are no agreed-upon penalties for violations other than the threat to scrap the deal altogether. The solution is for the Trump administration to reach understandings now with America’s European partners, the core elements of which should be made public, on the appropriate penalties to be imposed for a broad spectrum of Iranian violations.
Read more on Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/iran-nuclear-deal-trump-nix-to-fix/542562/