Walking away from the deal with Tehran could leave us with a nuclear crisis on two fronts.
If, as he has clearly signaled, President Donald Trump chooses in the coming months to hold Iran in noncompliance of the nuclear accord, the impact will be felt in Tehran and the already volatile Middle East.
But the more serious casualty could be both more widespread and more distant—thousands of miles away, on the Korean peninsula. And the Trump administration needs to begin connecting the dots now.
The United States has few options for dealing with the North Korean nuclear challenge, and no good ones. A pre-emptive strike risks an unspeakable catastrophe. Sanctions have not worked, and tightening them further is no more likely to. Diplomatic talks will be difficult for the United States because an agreement would involve a compromise that would allow North Korea to keep its nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, if the goal is to prevent Pyongyang from developing an accurate nuclear-tipped ICBM, then negotiating with Pyongyang may well be the only way to try to defuse a looming crisis.
Even under current conditions, such talks would be fraught, the odds tilted against success. But if the U. S. thrusts aside the nuclear deal with Iran—and uses contrived evidence to do so—the message to North Korea and others will be that America’s word is disposable and the U. S. cannot be trusted to honor its commitments. This would deal a possibly fatal blow to any chance of a diplomatic effort to, if not halt or reverse, at a minimum slow down North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
Indeed, walking away from the Iran deal, or contriving circumstances that force Iran to do so, will not only open up a now dormant nuclear crisis with Tehran, it will also close down perhaps the only option that might prevent a far more dangerous crisis with North Korea.
North Korea already harbors heightened suspicion and mistrust of Washington’s motives, fearing that the U. S.’s real objective is removal of the Kim regime and reunification of the Korean peninsula under South Korean leadership. U. S. abandonment, without just cause, of the Iran deal would both validate and exacerbate those beliefs; to Pyongyang, the lesson would be that Washington saw diplomacy merely as a prelude to efforts to isolate, pressure and seek to remove the Iranian regime.
