WASHINGTON
— President Trump has given full-throated support to the antigovernment
protesters in Iran. But the rising tide of unrest there complicates an
already vexing decision for him: whether he should rip up the nuclear deal struck by President Barack Obama.
Starting
in two weeks, Mr. Trump faces a series of deadlines on whether the
United States should reimpose sanctions on Iran that were lifted as a
result of the agreement. Mr. Trump has already disavowed the deal, and
he warned Congress and European allies in October that if they did not
improve its terms, “the agreement will be terminated.”
With
little progress on that front, and signs of a crackdown in Iran,
analysts worry that Mr. Trump’s patience will run out. But they fear
that if he acts now, it would shift the blame from the Iranian
government, which is besieged by the protests and charges of corruption,
to the United States, which would be seen as forsaking an agreement
with which Iran is complying.
The
White House deflected questions on Tuesday about how the protests would
affect Mr. Trump’s calculus. “He’s going to keep all of his options on
the table,” said the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Mr.
Trump’s ultimate goal, she added, was for the Iranian people to have
“basic human rights” and for Iran to stop backing terrorism.
For
Mr. Trump, the first major eruption of political unrest in Iran since
2009 carries opportunities as well as risks. Ms. Sanders emphasized the
White House’s unyielding support for the demonstrators, which she
contrasted to the more reticent approach taken by Mr. Obama in 2009
during protests that became known as the Green Movement.
The
State Department urged Iran on Tuesday not to restrict access to social
media services like Instagram and messaging platforms like Telegram,
which the protesters are using to spread word about antigovernment
gatherings. It encouraged Iranians to use virtual private networks to
sidestep the government’s efforts to block them.
Mr.
Trump himself sought to link the grievances of the Iranian
demonstrators to his predecessor’s policies, saying that the corruption
of Iran’s leadership had been fueled by the benefits of the nuclear deal
negotiated by the Obama administration.
“The people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime,” he said in an early-morning tweet.
“All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into
terrorism and into their ‘pockets,’” he added, apparently referring to
the Iranian funds that were freed up when Iran agreed to constraints on
its nuclear program.
But
Mr. Trump’s invocation of Mr. Obama and the nuclear deal muddies his
message, analysts said, by turning the spotlight away from the Iranian
government’s economic failures — which have given rise to this powerful,
if inchoate, protest movement — to the lingering debate in Washington
over the nuclear agreement.
Mr.
Trump never fully resolved that debate himself. In October, he refused
to certify the deal, but he left it to Congress to legislate changes to
it. Lawmakers have made little progress and European leaders have
refused to revisit it. Between Jan. 11 and 17, Mr. Trump faces new
deadlines on whether to recertify the deal and to continue to waive
sanctions.
“He
was going to be put on the spot, anyway, explaining why he was keeping
the deal alive without these improvements,” said Philip H. Gordon, a
senior National Security Council official in the Obama administration.
“If the Iranians are killing people in the streets when it comes time
for Trump to extend the sanctions waivers, it is hard to see him doing
it.”
Yet
killing the deal, Mr. Gordon said, could enable the Iranian government
to galvanize domestic support against the United States rather than face
questions about why it has not been able to improve Iran’s economy.
“Right now, they cannot blame us or the international sanctions,” he
said. “This could allow them to make the U.S. the enemy.”
Even critics of the deal said they worried that the protests would tempt Mr. Trump to abandon it rather than try to improve it.
“If
there is a bipartisan bill that is ready for congressional action, that
would go a long way toward persuading the president to issue the
waivers,” said Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies. “If there’s not, what’s happening in Iran will
give the president all the more reason to say, ‘I’ve had it with this
deal.’”
On
Capitol Hill, however, many lawmakers expect Mr. Trump will reluctantly
agree to waive sanctions, leaving the deal in place. In theory, that
would allow the Senate additional time to try to meet Mr. Trump’s
request that the legislature make alterations to the agreement.
Still,
it remained unclear on Tuesday whether Republicans and Democrats would
be able to agree on a path to do so, with Democrats convinced that the
kind of changes Mr. Trump has asked for would prompt either Iran or the
United States’ European allies to withdraw.
Despite
their fears about the fate of the deal, some Obama officials endorsed
Mr. Trump’s vocal support for the protesters, favorably comparing it
with Mr. Obama’s muted response when thousands of Iranians took to the
streets in June 2009 after a rigged presidential election. Mr. Obama
withheld criticism, in part, because dissidents warned them that Tehran
would use that endorsement to discredit the movement.
With
hindsight, some say, that was a mistake because the protesters deserved
the United States’ public backing, and the Iranian government would
have labeled them foreign stooges either way. Hillary Clinton, then the
secretary of state, has described it as one of her greatest regrets from
that period.
“For
a lot of us who were in the administration, there is some regret,” said
Daniel B. Shapiro, a former senior National Security Council official
and ambassador to Israel. “At that moment, it would have been desirable
to be more outspoken on behalf of the rights of the Iranian people.”
“It’s
inspiring to see Iranian citizens going into the streets to protest a
brutal and corrupt regime,” Mr. Shapiro said of the current uprising,
though he cautioned that “there’s a lot we don’t know,” given the lack
of leadership and traditional roots of these protests.
Mr.
Shapiro, now a visiting fellow at the Institute for National Security
Studies at Tel Aviv University, said the United States should impose
targeted sanctions on Iranian officials who order a violent crackdown on
the protests. He said the administration should also redouble its
efforts to push back on Iran’s military adventurism in the region.
Military
commanders and Pentagon officials say they are drafting plans to
counter what they call Iran’s “destabilizing” activities, like
supporting Hezbollah and other militant proxy groups, supplying missile
technology to Houthi rebels in Yemen, and carrying out cyberoperations.
“We’re
not trying to go to war with Iran, but we are trying to hold them
accountable for some of the things they’re doing, and we’re trying to
roll some of that back,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the head of the
Pentagon’s Central Command, said in a recent interview in Bahrain.
There
is another, less likely, course that Mr. Trump could take to show
solidarity with the Iranian people, analysts said: Lift the travel ban
on people from Iran who seek to visit the United States.
“Iranians
took the travel ban very personally because they were the largest group
most directly affected,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert who is
the deputy director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings
Institution.
