The incoming Trump administration will confront a Middle East in turmoil

As the Obama presidency fades from the scene, its most consequential and catastrophic legacy in foreign affairs is its Iran policy. Iran’s clerical leaders today possess a nuclear infrastructure that is gradually expanding and is blessed by the international community. For the first time in its modern history, Tehran is in a commanding position from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Iran’s leaders continue to castigate the United States from their platforms while their Revolutionary Guards taunt the American armada patrolling international waters. The incoming Trump administration should not just tinker with this legacy but cast it aside altogether. President Barack Obama was the architect of his own Iran strategy, and brought to it his own peculiar concerns. For Obama, the success of the policy was measured not by the traditional benchmark of whether it arrested Iran’s ambitions, but by the extent to which it propitiated a nation he thought had been abused for too long by the United States. His historical illiteracy was nowhere more on display than in Iran, as he reduced complex events to bumper-sticker slogans: America had overthrown a legitimately elected government of Iran in 1953 and then buttressed a cruel despot for nearly three decades. The clerical leaders are not hardened anti-Western ideologues but mere nationalists whose legitimate prerogatives have been trampled upon by arrogant Americans. And the Islamic Republic’s imperial surge is a legitimate expression of a regional stakeholder. If a little history is a dangerous thing, in the hands of Obama it was absolutely toxic. The sum total of his achievements was the worst nuclear agreement in the history of U.S. arms-control diplomacy and an emboldened Iran rampaging across the Middle East. The starting point of any sensible Iran policy will be to revisit key aspects of the Iran deal, which is formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The agreement’s rapidly expiring sunset clauses ensure that Iran will soon embark on developing advanced centrifuges that operate efficiently at high velocity. Its research-and-development concessions are already allowing Iran to modernize its nuclear infrastructure. And its economic concessions have damaged the once-formidable sanctions architecture that effectively hemmed in the mullahs’ ambitions. All these core aspects of the accord must be reconsidered. Although the proponents of the agreement insist that its international support makes it inviolable, it is important to note that the JCPOA was rejected by the House of Representatives and that 58 senators went on the record opposing it. An agreement rejected by a majority of legislators has no credibility. The sovereignty of the U.S. Congress outweighs any international body’s embrace of an agreement damaging to American national interests. Should the Trump team wish to revisit or even abrogate the JCPOA, they have sufficient domestic political authority to justify their moves. The question then becomes: To what type of civilian nuclear program is Iran entitled? At the moment, Iran is on the path of not just enriching uranium domestically but industrializing that capacity once the JCPOA’s restrictions expire. The United States should set aside the agreement’s sunset clauses and insist that Iran is entitled only to a modest and largely symbolic program. Whatever uranium Iran enriches must be permanently shipped abroad for processing into fuel rods that are difficult to convert for military purposes. And Iran may never have advanced centrifuges but must limit itself to small cascades of primitive machines. An oil-rich Iran does not require an elaborate nuclear network operating thousands of advanced centrifuges while accumulating tons of enriched uranium. In attempting to persuade the Europeans to join the United States in strengthening the JCPOA, the new administration has some important cards to play. President Donald Trump will have a period of honeymoon in the alliance: The European leaders will initially be eager to get along with him. All these states have higher priorities than a flawed arms-control agreement with an unsavory theocracy. If setting a new Iran policy is one of the most important issues to the new president, they will be inclined to help. Given Trump’s nascent relationship with Vladimir Putin, Russia might be more forthcoming on this issue than it has been. And should the Russians and the Europeans prove receptive, China will not wish to remain the sole and lonely obstacle to sensible revisions. Still, the manner in which the case is presented will be crucial. In challenging some of the most problematic aspects of the agreement, the U.S. will merely be asking its partners in the so-called 5+1 (the U.S. plus Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China) to return to the principles that they accepted up to 2013. It was the official 5+1 position until then that Iran would be entitled only to a small cascade of primitive centrifuge machines and that it could expand its program only after it satisfied the international community that the program was strictly for peaceful purposes. The reelected Obama administration, eager for an agreement and a legacy, cajoled other members of the coalition to abandon these positions for the sake of a deal; the new Trump administration would be asking the alliance to return to positions that it very recently considered prudent.