Sure, I'd be happy to.
Before the election, I said there were three primary challenges to the JCPOA: politics in Washington, politics in Iran, and then the practical issues of implementation. I think with Trump's election, we've seen one of those issues brought immediately to the fore. Ultimately, Trump was more measured than a number of other Republican candidates for president in how they spoke about this issue. He implied on the one hand that he felt the deal was a disaster because Iran was left with too much nuclear capability. On the other hand he was upset that the United States wasn't in the market to sell surface-to-air missiles the way Russia was, and that perhaps there were economic benefits that weren't tapped by the United States.
I think it's pretty clear that the advisers he's assembling are hostile to the Islamic Republic of Iran and hostile to JCPOA. I think that very soon, in 2017, there will be an effort to renegotiate the JCPOA or to threaten U.S. withdrawal from it. I think that would be very complicated, to say the least, because of politics in Tehran.
Ultimately, the presidential elections coming up in May in Iran may be the final nail in the coffin. A lot of folks in Washington don't believe that Iran has politics. I can assure you they do. Those politics are going to be hostile to any attempt by the United States to force changes, especially the sorts of very severe changes that I would imagine Trump would demand.
We might not get to the third issue, which is the practical implementation issue. There have already been some technical problems on both sanctions relief and the nuclear side. I think those have been managed thus far, but they require a sense of trust and co-operation among the parties. They have that with Obama and Rouhani. I don't think they have that necessarily with Trump and his replacement.
I think the JCPOA is in for a very serious test in the next six months. My hope, candidly, is that Trump listens to some other outside experts who are going to tell him, as I have, that renegotiation, I think, is a mirage, and that you have to accept the benefits you have with the deal, rather than chase after that mirage. But I'm not confident that this is going to be the choice taken.