Will Donald Trump let the Secretary of State do his job?
One afternoon in late September, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called a meeting of the six countries that came together in 2015 to limit Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. They gathered on the main floor of the United Nations headquarters, in Manhattan, in the “consultations room,” a private chamber where diplomats can speak confidentially before stepping onto the floor of the Security Council. Tillerson, who was the head of ExxonMobil before becoming President Trump’s top diplomat, had not previously met Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, who negotiated the agreement with the Obama Administration. Tillerson’s career had been spent making deals for oil, and his views on such topics as Iran’s nuclear weapons were little known. Even more obscure were his skills as a diplomat.
Sitting at a U-shaped table, Tillerson let the other diplomats—representatives of Germany, France, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Iran—speak first. When Zarif’s turn came, he read a list of complaints about the Trump Administration and its European partners. The nuclear deal had called for the removal of economic sanctions against Iranian banks, but, he said, the United States had not yet lifted them. “We still cannot open a bank account in the U.K.,” he said.
Gatherings of diplomats are usually dull affairs, with the participants restricting themselves to bromides in order to avoid open disagreements. Tillerson, peering down over his reading glasses, spoke in a deep Texas drawl that evoked a frontier sheriff about to lose his patience. “No one can credibly claim that Iran has positively contributed to regional peace and security,” he said.
Tillerson is an imposing man; he is stocky, and has a head of swept-back gray hair and a wide mouth that often droops in a scowl. Turning to Zarif, he went on to say that Iran had funded groups like Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist militia; it had backed Bashar al-Assad, the murderous Syrian dictator; and it had sent its Navy into the Persian Gulf to harass American ships. The fault for all this, Tillerson said, lay in the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which curtailed Iran’s nuclear-weapons program but not its aggressive actions in the region. For Tillerson, it was an emblem of the previous Administration’s overly lenient foreign policy, which sought to promote America’s priorities through consensus, rather than through the frank display of power. “Lifting the sanctions as required under the terms of the J.C.P.O.A. has enabled Iran’s unacceptable behavior,” he said.
The room went silent, until Zarif took the microphone. In the West, Zarif is an enigma; he was educated in the United States and speaks nearly perfect English, but he remains loyal to the revolutionary regime in Iran. In the course of the negotiations over the J.C.P.O.A., the Obama Administration came to regard Zarif as a moderate among hard-liners, trying to make a deal to avert a war.
Zarif began by telling Tillerson that, in reaching the nuclear deal, Iran and the U.S. had agreed to set aside other points of contention. In a professorial tone, he noted that for Iranians this meant relinquishing a long list of historical grievances. “The U.S.A. is used to punishing Iran, and Iran is used to resisting,” Zarif said. He accused the Trump Administration of violating the terms of the nuclear deal, by, among other things, holding up export licenses that Boeing and Airbus required in order to do business in Iran. “We’re not going to argue over this,” he snapped. “Had I wanted to look for excuses to violate this agreement, we would have had plenty.”
