Thirty years ago, when I first studied language in Tehran, my class was a bit bizarre, with students from both Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and Kim Jong-il’s North Korea. The North Koreans were in Iran for a purpose. Across the city, North Koreans would shuttle around in minibuses with their window shades drawn. I never found out what exactly they were doing.
When President George W. Bush coined the term “Axis of Evil” in his first State of the Union address following the Sept. 11 al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., critics pilloried him for lumping the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and North Korea together and suggesting coordination and interplay between them. They might have been correct regarding Hussein and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — though Iraq’s Republican Guards and Khamenei’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would cooperate on smuggling — but the relationship between Tehran and Pyongyang runs deep.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, both Iran and North Korea pursued covert nuclear weapons programs. While the Clinton administration had signed the 1994 Agreed Framework to keep Pyongyang within the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, North Korean scientists almost immediately began violating the commitment. Iran, too, kept its nuclear enrichment secret until public exposure in December 2002. As the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors repeatedly caught Tehran in lies, the organization referred Iran’s case to the United Nations Security Council in 2005. In 2011, the IAEA published a “Possible Military Dimensions” list that catalogued Tehran’s lies and nuclear activities that had nothing to do with a legitimate energy program, including warhead design, trigger work, and mathematical modelling for a nuclear explosion.
Herein lies the problem with Trump’s promise to craft a deal rooted in verification. The problem with every U.S. administration since President George H.W. Bush, on both the North Korea and later Iran nuclear issues, as well as the IAEA and President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, is that they based verification on the assumption that countries did not cooperate.
Yet, North Koreans running around Iran and Iranians in Pyongyang raise questions about whether the countries are playing proliferation Three-Card Monte, where they undertake the activities where inspectors cannot or will not look.
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This is not so likely for enrichment just because of the space needed for cascades, but nuclear and weapons engineers can conduct much of the remaining work in smaller rooms more easily hidden. Trump might claim any agreement he reaches is far better than the loophole-ridden Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Obama embraced, but if Trump falls into the trap set by Turkey, Oman, and the other would-be mediators, he might simply allow Iran to pursue its ambitions with sleight of hand.
So long as the Islamic Republic has any rogue allies, traditional inspections can never work.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.