Donald Trump described the nuclear agreement Barack Obama signed with Iran in 2015 as “horrible”, “one-sided” and the “worst in history”.
But the US president is considering a weaker deal as he seeks an exit from the Iran war, according to the former British foreign secretary who helped secure Mr Obama’s pact.
“Unless [Trump] can dramatically turn the tables in the next couple of weeks … he has massively weakened the US’s credibility,” said Lord Hammond, the Conservative foreign secretary from 2014-16 who was later chancellor.
He warned that Mr Trump risked looking “very, very stupid” if he failed to translate the US’s military superiority into a tangible victory.
The reported outlines of the agreement to end the war were “not that different” from the JCPOA, the multinational deal signed in 2015 by Iran, the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany and the UK, Lord Hammond said.
According to the Axios news website, American negotiators are proposing the release of $20bn (£15bn) in frozen Iranian assets in return for a temporary suspension of uranium enrichment.
Tehran would also have to hand over or dilute its 450kg stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon.
Trump threatens to restart war
Mr Trump denied the reports on Friday night, saying he was seeking an “unlimited” end to Iranian enrichment and would not release any frozen assets.
The president threatened to relaunch the war if Tehran did not agree to his terms.
In 2018, he tore up the JCPOA, arguing that it provided funds to a terror-sponsoring regime without permanently ending its nuclear programme.
However, any eventual deal would “look not that different from the JCPOA, only worse, because the Iranians are in a stronger bargaining position now than they were then”, Lord Hammond told The Telegraph.
That was because Tehran’s regime had proved its ability to exert control over the Strait of Hormuz and had survived a joint US-Israeli bombing campaign of more than 17,000 strikes, he said.
“If you go into a negotiation saying ‘I’ve got a big stick, and I’m going to use it’, then it better work, because otherwise you look very, very stupid,” Lord Hammond said.
“Go back to Trump’s mocking comment that Russia is not really a great power, because if it was, it would have walked through Ukraine in six days. Apply that same logic to Iran.
“Iran is a middle-sized power that has been under sanctions for the best part of 40 years, and the world’s most powerful military have been literally unable to suppress it, to stop it – not to destroy it, but even to stop it – from humiliating its own master.”
Hormuz closed
On Saturday, the Strait of Hormuz remained closed to maritime traffic despite Mr Trump’s claim the day before that it had been reopened.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, accused the US president of issuing “seven lies” about a peace deal, and said the waterway would be closed while a US naval blockade remained in place.
Mr Ghalibaf also insisted that “Iran’s enriched uranium is not going to be transferred anywhere”, despite Mr Trump’s claim that the US would work with Iran to retrieve it.
Analysts echoed Lord Hammond’s concern about the shape of a peace deal.
“I think a lot of this is ringing alarm bells in terms of what had already been addressed in the JCPOA,” said Darya Dolzvika, a senior research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank.
“It seems the Trump administration is figuring out that you’re not going to get a permanent solution. It’s just unfortunate that it’s taken us years of diplomacy and an all-out war for them to essentially end up debating over the same things that we were debating in 2015.”
Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran agreed to cap uranium enrichment at 3.67 per cent, enough for power stations but far below the threshold for a nuclear weapon.
Investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were granted continuous, intrusive monitoring rights across the country.
In exchange, the US, EU and UN lifted nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, unfroze billions of dollars and assets, and allowed Tehran to sell its oil in international markets.
The IAEA and Western intelligence agencies had assessed that Iran was in compliance with the deal when Mr Trump pulled out in 2018.
‘It was a good deal’
“The JCPOA was a good deal,” Lord Hammond said. “It effectively ensured that Iran could not make a nuclear weapon.
“What it didn’t do was stop Iran producing or developing ballistic missiles, and it didn’t stop Iran supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.
“That is the reason that various people opposed it, and Trump eventually tore it up.”
Announcing the US withdrawal on May 8, 2018, Mr Trump accused the JCPOA negotiators of lifting “crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime’s nuclear activity, and no limits at all on its other malign behaviour”.
According to the New York Times and Axios, the US is now proposing a 20-year embargo on uranium enrichment. Tehran has offered a three to five-year limit in response.
It was unclear whether the three-page memorandum currently being developed would discuss Tehran’s support for regional proxies or its ballistic missile arsenal, Axios reported.
Tehran’s leaders claim never to have sought a nuclear weapon. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader killed on the first day of the war, issued a fatwa against any development programme.
But Western leaders doubt the commitment and entirely dismiss Iran’s claim that, after the JCPOA’s collapse, it has enriched uranium to near weapons-grade for the purposes of naval propulsion.
Tehran may choose to come to terms to ensure its survival, Lord Hammond said.
“I’m sure there’s a deal to be done, because the Iranian regime is only really interested in one thing, and that is ensuring its own survival and the survival of the regime depends on being able to crush internal dissent.
“They’ve got quite a lot of overseas assets, which could give them quite a lot of cash, and maybe there’s a deal to be done there.”
Two-month timetable
Reuters reported on Friday that a framework agreement could be struck in the coming days, followed by a 60-day period to secure a wider agreement.
It would be “very brave” to try and negotiate a broad agreement in a timeframe as short as two months, Lord Hammond said.
The JCPOA, which ran to 150 pages, took two years to negotiate and the Iranian side would only talk at night, which made life “much more difficult for all of us”, he added.
Analysts have expressed concern that a rushed deal could be exploited by the Iranian side, who could secretly restart the nuclear programme without cast-iron monitoring guarantees.
“My experience is that the Iranians are anything but chaotic. They’re very methodical in the way they do things,” Lord Hammond said. Mr Trump is “more chaotic and seat of the pants”, he added.
In order to secure the best deal possible, Lord Hammond said, the president should rehire the same team of cross-government officials that struck the JCPOA in 2015.
The Trump negotiation team was likely to encounter a similar split between hardliners and moderates in Iran’s delegation, Lord Hammond said.
He added: “I mean, the Iranian delegation clearly wasn’t a single delegation.
“It represented delegates from different parts of the system, and although they were watching us across the table, they were also watching each other, and there was tension within the Iranian delegation.
“There were some people there whose roles we never really had explained to us, who were almost certainly IRGC sort of enforcers.
“There were people like the then foreign minister [Javad Zarif] who was a moderate in Iranian terms, a liberal, who compensated for that reputation by banging the table and delivering sort of Khrushchev-length speeches about how terrible the US, Britain and Israel were.”