Mark Dubowitz

Just moments before President Trump’s announcement of his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal–formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA–Mark Dubowitz was among the experts featured on Fox News to help viewers understand the situation as it unfolded live. The following are highlights from Mark’s appearance on Fox News’ Outnumbered.

Arthel: I want to start with this idea, Mark, that there is a way to go forward that is much better than where we are—what is it?

Mark: Look, the other way to go forward was to fix the agreement and apply maximum pressure to the Iranian regime, which is already facing an economic crisis and a political crisis of its own making. The U.S. and the Europeans were negotiating a supplemental agreement to address some of the fundamental flaws of this agreement and the severe deficiencies that were negotiated by President Obama and his team. I think they were fairly close and I think a fix plus maximum pressure could have gotten us there. I think the President has decided a nix to a fix. I think he’s going to walk away from the deal in order to build leverage to bring the United States back into the agreement. It’s very ‘Trumpian,’ and it’s very much the ‘art of the deal.’

Arthel: Well, the details that we’re getting into Fox News is that there would be this 90-day window for other countries and, I would imagine, lawmakers on Capitol Hill to come together to try to get to a better deal—a better place.

Mark: Well look, the fundamental problem that Europe has now is that they’re between an Iranian ‘rock’ and a ‘Trumpian’ ‘hard place.’ The Iranians are going to threaten nuclear escalation unless the Europeans put billions of dollars into the Iranian economy to save Iran from collapse, while Donald Trump, I’m sure, is going to threaten to enforce sanctions against European companies and banks. The escape hatch for Europe right now is that they have to come to an agreement with the United States on these last remaining issues. I think the President is going to put pressure on President Macron to bring Iranian leaders back to the table negotiate a comprehensive agreement that addresses the fatal flaws of the original agreement but is more expansive in addressing the full range of Iran’s malign activities.

Watch the full Outnumbered interview on FDD’s website here or on FDD’s YouTube page here. To hear more from Mark on a nuclear Iran, check out this podcast episode of FDD’s Foreign Podicy, “The Future of the Iran Deal.” 

Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made his third visit to Pyongyang, North Korea. This visit marked his first follow-up since the U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore last month. My FDD colleague, senior advisor on science and nonproliferation Olli Heinonen, joined Bloomberg TV to discuss Secretary Pompeo’s consequential visit. Here are the highlights:

Ahn: “We’re seeing evidence of new efforts by Kim to expand his nuclear arsenal. How surprised should we be?”

Heinonen: “Well, first of all, we have to look really the situation on the ground. We have to remember that there’s no agreement yet about what does denuclearization means. There is also no agreement about the freeze or suspension of the program.

And I would like to remind to listeners also that when the people were negotiating the joint plan of action with Iran, all the time Iran was enriching more uranium building its centrifuges, testing centrifuges and making tests with its missiles.

So, we face here a similar situation. But this is I think maybe the most important negotiation with Mr. Pompeo will have in the coming days because this is the real start of the definition what we mean with denuclearization.”

Ahn: “And you worked at the IAEA for almost three decades and you were there when IAEA officials were kicked out of North Korea in 2009. How can this time be different?”

Heinonen: “First of all, it has to be different because now, we tried for the third time to address the North Korean nuclear program. And it’s much more complicated. It’s much more advanced. It’s a bigger challenge than ever before.

How we can make sure that all of those nuclear capabilities have been dismantled in a verifiable matter in such a way that verification is credible. It’s a challenge to the IAEA but not only to the IAEA because we need also to take care of the other weapons of mass destruction as well as the missile program. So, this is not only for the IAEA but we need something much wider to be in place a verification starts.”

Westin: “Olli as I understand it, you understand it better than I. The first step is actually either complete inventory of what that nuclear program is in North Korea. Does that include the people, the scientist who worked on it? How far is that inventory have to go and how difficult is that to verify, just the inventory itself?”

Heinonen: “It will be difficult and this is the way the whole thing what I’m looking needs to have a very different start compared to the start of the equity framework or the monitoring they’re seeing in 2007.

The first step from North Korea is to provide a full declaration on its weapons of mass destruction program. All expected from production on nuclear material where other facilities, where is the infrastructure, what kind of test has been done, where are these locations, which are the institutes, which are the key people, et cetera.

And this will be a litmus test for the international community and U.S. government to see it’s distant to North Korea taking this seriously because they don’t know what the U.S. government knows. So, if they tried to falsify this first step, they might be caught. And then, that will be not the right start for the verification.

And, at the same time, when this declaration is provided, starts to monitoring inspectors and technicians go to all of these facilities, take us stocks what is there and install the verification and monitoring equipment.”

Westin: “Is it realistic to expect them to do that sort of it’s really extensive declaration before we’ve made any specific concessions? Will they do that unilaterally?”

Heinonen: “Well, this is the deal. Certainly, a deal always has other parts and there might be other the certain agreement which we don’t know because we have noticed that there has been no missile test. There has been no nuclear test. They blew up their nuclear test site.

On the other hand, certain activities continue. But, also U.S. has done some concessions like publicly postponing some of the military exercises. So, I think there might be something more behind which we have not yet seen. But I said the taste is in the pudding itself. Let’s see what Mr. Pompeo comes back with from this, I think are most important negotiations at this stage.”

Ahn: “How important is to involve the manufacturing industry because in South Africa, that was the case when you have these firms behind some of the illicit procurement network of nuclear materials. Is this also a concern in a centralized dictatorship in North Korea?”

Heinonen: “It’s also to be addressed because North Korea has got a little technology from abroad both for its missile program and its nuclear program. But, it has also been delivering these things. It has been proliferating. It was building a nuclear research — nuclear reactor put on your products of reactor to Syria.

So, in order to have a full picture on North Korea’s nuclear program, it has to be very forthcoming on these proliferation activities.”

Westin: “So Olli, we’re mindful of the Iranian situation even as President Rouhani has been having meetings in Switzerland. We’ve heard the Trump administration repeatedly say that that system for really enforcing the non-nuclear parts of that agreement was deficient. How good was that system? Was it something that we could replicate in North Korea successfully?”

Heinonen: “I don’t think so honestly. First of all, JCPOA is not a denuclearization agreement. It doesn’t address Iran’s ballistic missile program. It puts our certain restrictions for them but they are not mandatory.

There’s no dismantlement. Actually, there’s no investigation on Iran’s design on nuclear payloads for the ballistic missiles to have three. Also the cachet which Prime Minister Netanyahu presented a couple of months ago which needs still to be address why Iran is going, maintaining such kind of information and then it’s the investment program itself.

It doesn’t stop the uranium enrichment. Uranium enrichment is to stay in the Middle East under the JPOA. And this is therefore a matter of concerns because maybe some other countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia may want to have the same capabilities.

While here, we are aiming to complete denuclearization which if we believe the 1992 joint statement, we’ll not include any uranium enrichment in the Korean peninsula. Not in the North Korea, not in the South Korea. And this is a huge difference.”

Read more about Olli and his work on FDD’s website, the IAEA’s website, and on 38 North’s website — and listen to his NPR interview on the Trump-Kim summit here. For more on how a nuclear North Korea compares to a nuclear Iran, check out this podcast episode of FDD’s Foreign Podicy, “The Future of the Iran Deal,” as well as, “Countering Kim’s Nuclear North.”

Following President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal – formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA – Mark Dubowitz responded to requests from members of various media outlets to help them make sense of the announcement and its ramifications. Here are the key points from a call hosted by The Israel Project. Former Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro was another expert on the call.

Mark: “I’ve been working on Iran issues for 15 years. I supported a nuclear deal, I supported President Obama’s dual track strategy of engagement plus coercion.

But I became a critic of the Iran deal in 2013, of both the interim agreement and the final agreement because many of the superior deficiencies that we have been talking about for a couple of years now, including the sunset provisions, the lack of access to military sites, the failure to address the missile program, and advanced centrifuge R and D allowance that Iran can use to build an industrial size nuclear program.

I’ve always been deeply skeptical that you can actually deal with this issue in 10 years when Iran is much stronger, on the cusp of a breakout, their economy’s more powerful, and their regional presence is more dominant. I was a big believer that we had to address these issues today and not in 10 years’ time.  I agree that we really had an opportunity here to strengthen the JCPOA, to fix some of these fundamental flaws, by reaching an agreement with the E-3 – that agreement was well on it’s way.

Most of the issues had been resolved, the supplemental text which I saw had very few remaining issues of negotiation. I always thought that fixing this, keeping the Europeans on board, remaining in the deal, and then putting maximum pressure against the Iranian regime using all instruments of American national power – as the president had articulated in his October speech, when he first rolled out the Iran strategy – was a better way to go.

And I also believed you could do exactly what you did today, which was impose sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran, not for nuclear reasons, but because the Central Bank of Iran is involved in financing Bashar al Assad’s slaughter in Syria, as well as the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds Force.

So you really could have launched the maximum economic pressure campaign, stayed in the deal, fixed some of the fundamental flaws in the agreement, kept the Europeans on board, and then given the Iranians a painful choice between further pressure or coming back to the table. That was not the decision President Trump made. I think part of the reason is that he may never have been interested in a fix, he may have always been a nixer. He certainly brought John Bolton into one of the highest positions in the land, and John is a very well-known and clearly very influential nixer.

A little bit of backstory on this: I mentioned that the Europeans and Americans have come pretty close. There was one outstanding issue which revolved around the sunset provisions and how quickly you could automatically snap back nuclear sanctions if Iran were to lower its nuclear breakout time below one year.

There was still a gap on that and the Europeans had committed that they would seek those sanctions in the future if Iran were to lower its breakout time. I think unfortunately the experience of the E-3 in trying to get sanctions, 15 designations of the IRGC and other entities through the European Union over the past month was not very positive and certainly did not auger well for what the future would look like. The Italians ended up blocking that, so they failed to get 15 very minor designations through the European Union.

So, I think faced with that, Bolton and the president himself were deeply skeptical that the Europeans in the future would ever snap back the most powerful nuclear sanctions should Iran lower its breakout time. So just a bit of a backstory on the supplemental agreement.

But, nevertheless, I thought that was the way to go. But the president has decided that instead of fixing, he’s decided to nix a fix. The idea is that by putting maximum pressure on Iran, financial and other, you can create a situation where you can intensify the political and economic crisis that the regime is already under and really get a more comprehensive deal.

The Europeans are, as Dan said, a central player here, but the Europeans are really between what I call an Iranian rock and a “Trump-ian” hard place. The Iranians are already threatening that they’ll escalate their nuclear program unless the Europeans pour in tens of billions of dollars to save the Iranian economy.

On the other hand, if the Europeans do that, they’ll face the full might of U.S. secondary sanctions. Make no mistake, those secondary sanctions are incredibly powerful in forcing companies and banks to make a choice between a 19 trillion dollar U.S. market and 400 billion dollar Iranian market. Between the U.S. dollar and the Iranian riyal, most banks and companies are going to make the obvious choice, which is they’ll stay out of Iran. If they do that, the Europeans again are going to be in this dilemma of how do they actually keep the Iranians in the deal by giving them the economic goodies but at the same time not risking their company’s access to the U.S. market.

I think the escape hatch for the Europeans is a comprehensive deal. I’ll read a quote from Emmanuel Macron, the French President that came out two hours ago in response to the president’s speech. He said “we will work collectively on a broader framework covering nuclear activity, the post 2025 period, ballistic activity, and stability in the Mid-East, notably Syria, Yemen, and Iraqi.”

So, the French President is clearly understanding that he needs to take that escape hatch and try to get the Iranians back to the table. Clearly, this is a high-risk, potentially high-reward strategy. It is very “Trump-ian” in its makeup. It’s very much Trump’s art of the Deal, where “I’m going to exit these agreements” or “I’m going to threaten to exit these agreements unless I get better terms and if I get better terms I’ll come back in”. Again, high-risk, potentially high-reward.

It’s going to be very important that the president marry this with a maximum pressure campaign that is not just sanctions-based. Clearly, one of our closest allies, Israel, is already engaged in war with Iran.

It would obviously be a huge mistake if the president did what he said he was threatened to do, which was to withdraw U.S. troops in Syria, isolating and leaving the Israelis alone to fight the Iranians as well as creating a sense in Tehran that this presence is a paper tiger or perhaps better put, a Twitter tiger.

The history of Iranian escalation over 40 years is that the Iranians back down when they feel American steel and they push forward when they feel American mush. So the question is: will Trump be steel or will he be mush? And his moves in Syria are, I think, going to be very telling about how serious he is about a maximum pressure campaign, and that could have serious consequences for Israel, for the Jordanians, and others.

The Iranian people are on the streets. They’ve been on the streets actually for years, but those protests really intensified in December and January. They continue to this day.

Clearly, the majority of Iranians despise this regime. This regime has lost its legitimacy and there’s an opportunity to continue to use political, economic, diplomatic and other forms of warfare against this regime in a sort of “battle Rial” in order to continue to intensify the collapse of the currency, the hyperinflation, and all the things that Iranians are on the streets protesting about.

There is a risk of a rally around the flag, though I’m deeply skeptical of Iranians. I think if they’re going to rally around the flag, that it’s the flag of the Shah era – not the Islamic Republic flag. I think they’ve given up on this regime, but that remains to be seen, of course.

The most important thing I believe, is to continue to support those brave Iranians that are on the streets, targeting the corruption of the regime, the 200 billion dollar corporate conglomerate controlled by the Supreme Leader, which includes a number of these religious foundations that have all of the elite money, targeting human rights abuses, and the abuse of Iranian civil liberties, facilitating the use of telegram and other social media platforms, which are really fueling these protests in which the Iranian regime has closed down, targeting the Islamic Republic of Iran broadcasting, which has been airing forced confessions and is very much a tool of the regime and really focusing in on those kinds of sanctions, and not just economic in nature but are very much focused on human rights and corruption and some of the elements that speak to the brutal oppression of the regime. I’ll conclude with that and just say that I would have preferred to see a fix. Thank you.

Listen to audio of the conference call on The Israel Project’s website, and find more of Mark’s post-JCPOA media on his website and on FDD’s website. 

• Mark quoted by The Atlantic on May 18, 2018:
  Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who is a critic of the JCPOA, told me the Trump administration is going to pursue a maximum pressure campaign against the Iranian regime. “And, of course, that only works if you also use financial and economic coercion, and that only works if you deter European and other companies from returning to Iran because if Iran ends up with tens of billions of dollars from international companies, then your maximum pressure campaign is a failure,” he said.
  Read the article here.
• Mark quoted by Huffington Post on May 12, 2018:
  Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, said the war in Iraq resulted partly from a perception that economic sanctions on Saddam, imposed after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, were rapidly losing effectiveness. “I think the opposite is true now,” Dubowitz said, noting that Trump appeared to favor tougher economic pressure on Iran, not military action.
  Read the article here.
• Mark quoted by The New York Times on May 12, 2018:
  “Pompeo was not a nixer,” said Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an outspoken critic of the deal. “He had a very high threshold for fixing it, but he also had credibility to present that to the president.”
  Read the article here.
• Mark on Fox News discussing the upcoming U.S.-North Korea summit:

Eric: Mark, is this a meaningful step or is it symbolic considering so much of the site is collapsed from explosions?

Mark: Well, Eric, I think it’s both symbolic and meaningful. The last nuclear test in September reportedly has collapsed that site anyway. The North Koreans have already developed nuclear weapons on their way to developing intercontinental ballistic missiles – so I don’t think there’s much new, or anything meaningful substantively in this decision. But, symbolically, I think Kim Jong Un is certainly trying to signal to the United States that he may be prepared to do a deal.

Eric: Yeah, who thought after all these years that they would ever want to actually close that? What else should we see? You know they’ve got ballistic missile development, for example. He’s pausing it, but he hasn’t stopped it. He hasn’t moved to dismantle that capability.

Mark: We have to be very careful. The Kim regime has been out-playing U.S. negotiators for decades. They promised in 1992 that they would stop their nuclear program. They promised in ’94. They promised in 2005. They’ve been gaming us for many, many years. We’ve got to be very, very cautious. We have to absolutely insist that they denuclearize and that it be rapid and complete and verifiable and irreversible.

Eric: You’re right – they pulled the wool over the eyes of several administrations – the Clinton administration. President George W. Bush took them off the state-sponsor of terrorism list. That’s a carrot, and all they did is take a baseball bat to us. And now they’ve met President Trump – you know rocket man – and with the president’s threats, do you think that has really gotten in Kim Jong Un’s head where he’s looked up and gone, “uh-oh, I better do something.” – because we were actually giving him a concession just by having the president meet with him one-on-one.

Mark: I think it’s a big concession. I mean, this meeting on June 12 in Singapore between President Trump and Kim Jong Un could end up being one of the greatest reality shows we’ve had in decades. I think the U.S. government should charge $39.95 for it, and we could probably pay off our national debt. It’ll be a fascinating summit. But I think the president has been right and the maximum pressure campaign really squeezing the regime economically, trying to bring the Chinese on board to join that economic squeeze, and also making it very clear that all options are on the table. So the real question that Kim Jong Un will have to assess is if President Trump is serious or is he a paper tiger – or, probably more accurately – a Twitter tiger.

Eric: As for that meeting, what has to happen there? Let me play a soundbite for you from John Bolton who was with us for 15 years at the Fox News Channel on Sundays. He predicted that there’s one thing to talk about and that is denuclearize. And if Kim doesn’t say yes, then no meeting or end of meeting and the president walks out. Here’s what Ambassador – now National Security Advisor – John Bolton told me in March.

John Bolton: That’s talking about denuclearization. Anything else is just a waste of time. It’s a short meeting.

Eric: What do they say?

John: “Okay, fine.”

Eric: What are the chances of Kim saying, “okay, fine – I’m going to give up my nuclear capability”? Most people don’t see that happening at all.

Mark: I think if past is prologue, there is very little chance. Unless Kim Jong Un assesses that President Trump is serious about squeezing his regime and potentially taking him to the brink of regime collapse, I think Ambassador Bolton was exactly right: There’s only one thing to talk about, which is permanent, verifiable, complete, and rapid denuclearization. No more games. This isn’t Barack Obama negotiating with the Iranians where he gives massive concessions up front and gives the Iranians patient pathways to nuclear weapons and ICBMs. This has got to be denuclearization so that this brutal regime is not left with the capacity or the materials to produce nuclear weapons and affix them to ICBMs to hold our cities hostage.

Eric: Okay, so finally – Mark, what’s your prediction? Do we get a big announcement after the meeting, or is it a big announcement of future announcements? What do you think is going to happen?

Mark: It’s hard to say, Eric. This is really unprecedented – sitting down like this. They haven’t prepared the groundwork, I think, sufficiently to have any sort of detailed sense of where we’re going to come out on this. But, again, it’s really going to have to be Kim’s assessment of whether this President is serious, unlike previous presidents in using all instruments of American power to stop the Kim regime from holding our cities hostage. So, I expect an announcement, and hopefully it’s an announcement of denuclearization. If it’s not, Ambassador Bolton was right: short meeting. Walk away from the table. Continue the maximum pressure squeezed.

Watch the full America’s News HQ interview on FDD’s website here or on our YouTube page here.