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About a year ago, Biden administration officials held a closed-door briefing with senators on Iran’s nuclear program. Politico reported soon after that members exited the briefing feeling rattled, with one senator describing the information as “sobering and shocking.”
While the discussion was held behind closed doors, the Politico report added that officials warned lawmakers that Iran “could produce enough material for a nuclear bomb in as little as two months.”
As Reuters reported yesterday, federal lawmakers received an even more unsettling timeline yesterday.
Iran could make enough fissile for one nuclear bomb in “about 12 days,” a top U.S. Defense Department official said on Tuesday, down from the estimated one year it would have taken while the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was in effect. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl made the comment to a House of Representatives hearing when pressed by a Republican lawmaker why the Biden administration had sought to revive the deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
As part of his testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, Kahl explained that Iran’s nuclear progress since Donald Trump abandoned the international nuclear agreement has been “remarkable.” The Pentagon official added, “Back in 2018, when the previous administration decided to leave the JCPOA it would have taken Iran about 12 months to produce one bomb’s worth of fissile material. Now it would take about 12 days.”
The testimony coincided with a Wall Street Journal report, which added that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded after a recent inspection that it had “found traces of near weapons-grade nuclear material at Iran’s underground Fordow facility.”
As regular readers know, I periodically like to bang my head against this particular wall, but I think the political world should pause periodically to come to terms with just how severe the consequences of Donald Trump’s policy toward Iran have been. Let’s revisit our earlier coverage and take stock.
It was Joe Cirincione, whose expertise in international nuclear diplomacy has few rivals, who wrote a piece for NBC News two years ago explaining that the international community has been tasked with trying to “undo the damage Donald Trump caused when he left an agreement that had effectively shrunk Iran’s [nuclear] program, froze it for a generation and put it under lock and camera.”
I continue to believe this is an underappreciated truth. The international agreement with Iran did exactly what it set out to do: The policy dramatically curtailed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and established a rigorous system of monitoring and verification. Once the policy took effect, each of the parties agreed that the participants were holding up their end of the bargain, and Iran’s nuclear program was, at the time, on indefinite hold.
And then Trump took office and got to work abandoning the policy for reasons he was never able to explain.
The West lost verification access to Tehran’s program, and Iran almost immediately became more dangerous by starting up advanced centrifuges and ending its commitment to limit enrichment of uranium.
What’s more, Robert Malley, the then-special envoy for Iran, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year that after Trump’s decision, Iranian attacks on U.S. personnel in the region got worse, Iranian support for regional proxies got worse, and the pace of the Iranians’ nuclear research program got “much worse.”
This week, according to information from the Defense Department and the IAEA, the picture is even more alarming. There is no ambiguity here: Trump’s decision made us less safe.
The fact that the Republican did this for no reason adds insult to injury. One of my favorite stories about the Iran deal came a few months into Trump’s term in the White House, when the then-president held a lengthy meeting with top members of his team: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, White House National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford. Each of the officials told Trump the same thing: It was in the United States’ interest to preserve the existing JCPOA policy.
The Republican expected his team to tell him how to get out of the international agreement, not how to stick with it. When his own foreign policy and national security advisers told him the policy was working, Trump “had a bit of a meltdown.”
Soon after, he abandoned the JCPOA anyway, not because it was failing, but because Trump was indifferent to its success.
The Biden administration has tried to undo Trump’s mistake and strike a new international agreement, though those talks have faltered, and the process appears to be effectively dead.
Nevertheless, a basic truth appears unavoidable: Had Trump not failed so spectacularly, the increasingly serious international security problem almost certainly would not exist.
This post is a revised version of our related earlier coverage.