Macron’s pitch to Trump on ‘new’ Iran N-deal surprises EU allies

Bloomberg

French President Emmanuel Macron is pushing the limits of international diplomacy, as his last-ditch appeal to salvage the Iran nuclear deal wrong-footed European allies and was met with intransigence by US President Donald Trump.
Macron, who has sought to cultivate a personal bond with Trump, made his Iran pitch the centerpiece of his visit to the White House. If the US preserved the existing nuclear accord, that could serve as the cornerstone of a new, expanded deal that would address the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile programme and destabilising behaviour across the Middle East.
That case ran headlong into Trump’s competing instincts on foreign policy and caught fellow European powers off guard. Coordination within the European Union took place before Macron left for Washington, but once there the French president introduced elements that hadn’t been discussed in advance, according to two EU officials. The French will need to brief the rest of the EU on those issues, said the officials, who asked not to be named discussing strategy.
A lack of European coordination may be a price worth paying if the US president can be persuaded to stick to the Iran accord. Trump prizes his reputation as a deal maker, and is eager to score major foreign policy wins, yet he remains deeply skeptical of preserving the 2015 agreement with Tehran.
“It sounded to me like he wants to be half-pregnant — that he wants to withdraw from the deal but sustain the deal and add something on top of the deal so that it constrains the Iranians more,” Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said of Trump’s opposition. “The challenge with all of this is the president’s objection to the deal is visceral, not intellectual.”

Macron’s Challenge
Macron’s hope is to stave off an American withdrawal next month from the six-party agreement to freeze Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.
The French leader sought to tempt his American counterpart with the promise of future diplomacy that would not only repair flaws Trump perceives in the original agreement, negotiated by the Obama administration, but resolve a range of security headaches across the Gulf.
Trump seemed at least somewhat interested in Macron’s blueprint, calling it a “new deal” with “solid foundations.” Teams of American negotiators have been working with European allies for weeks on a new accord along the lines of what Macron laid out. Like Macron, their challenge is the absence of any guarantee that Trump will accept the result. But Trump’s desire didn’t appear to overcome his steadfast opposition to the existing agreement, the preservation of which other world leaders and diplomats insist is essential if there is to be further negotiation with Iran. Trump must decide by May 12 whether to continue to waive US sanctions lifted under the accord.