February 14, 2021
The Tired Old Opposition to the Iran Nuclear
Accord Rears Its Head
Now with a new
administration preparing to bring the United States back into compliance with
the agreement, the opposition machinery is gearing up again.
When the Joint Comprehensive Plan
of Action (JCPOA), known colloquially as the Iran nuclear deal, was under
negotiation several years ago, it faced opposition so virulent that at one
point some U.S. senators who were part of the opposition blatantly tried
to undermine U.S. negotiators with a letter to Iranian
leaders. The broader opposition used a
throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach that warned of
various untoward happenings if the agreement went into effect.
Now with a new administration
preparing to bring the United States back into compliance with the agreement, the opposition
machinery is gearing up again. Many of the same people are voicing many of the
same arguments. They are doing so despite the fact that since the previous time
we heard from them, a rich and highly relevant history has unfolded, including
drastically different policies of two different U.S. administrations, which
provides plenty of hard data about which approaches work and which ones don’t.
It is almost as if the opponents had fallen asleep for the better part of a
decade and, having just awakened, they reach for their old talking points
before learning what had happened in the interim.
The JCPOA closed all possible
paths to an Iranian nuclear weapon by requiring drastic cutbacks in Iran’s
nuclear activities. This included disposing of 97 percent of its low enriched
uranium, disposing of all of its uranium enriched to higher levels, ripping out
two-thirds of its enrichment centrifuges, filling a reactor with cement,
and various other measures. A result was to set back the “breakout time” that would be required to build a nuclear
weapon if Iran chose to do so, from what most experts estimated to be as little
as two or three months before the JCPOA to a year or more after the agreement
went into effect.
For assurance that Iran was
living by its obligations, the JCPOA imposed the most intrusive system of
monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency to which any nation has
ever voluntarily submitted. The IAEA inspections confirmed that Iran did
indeed abide by its obligations, from the entry into force of a
preliminary agreement in January 2014 through a full year after the Trump
administration reneged on all U.S. obligations in May 2018.
The result of that reneging
provided a stark contrast from the earlier favorable results. Trump’s policy of
“maximum pressure” on Iran was a maximum failure. After exercising patience for a year, Iran
responded to the U.S. pressure with counterpressure of its own. This mainly
took the form of incrementally exceeding the JCPOA limits regarding uranium
enrichment (which Iran was no longer obliged to observe, given that the United
States was now in violation of the agreement). As a result, Iran has
acquired twelve times the low enriched uranium that it did when
the JCPOA was fully in effect, as well as beginning to enrich to higher
concentrations of fissile material than it did under the agreement. This
heightened activity represents a bargaining chip that Iran has repeatedly
emphasized it can, and will, quickly reverse if the United States comes back
into compliance. But in the meantime, Iran’s nuclear program is bigger than it
was when the United States was complying with the JCPOA, and breakout time has
decreased (though not down to where it was before the agreement was
negotiated).
It was not just on the nuclear
front that the maximum pressure policy failed. Notwithstanding Trump
administration rhetoric about how the economic warfare it waged on Iran
supposedly would deprive it of resources to conduct other undesirable activity
in its region, that activity increased, not decreased, after the U.S. reneging.
Previously Iran was deterred from going after other nations’ oil industries,
lest its own oil industry be harmed in reprisal. The Trump administration, by
doing everything it could to destroy Iran’s oil trade anyway, changed that
calculation. A result was seen in the missile and drone attack against critical Saudi oil
facilities in September 2019.
Politically, the prospects for
any new agreement with Iran, be it a “better deal” on nuclear matters or
anything else, decreased under the Trump policies. Iranian hardliners who had
voiced skepticism about negotiating with the Americans could now credibly say
to others in Tehran, “we told you so,” and the hardliners’ political power
grew.
Objectives of the
Opposition
In light of this history, and
insofar as the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon as well as other Iranian
activity in the Middle East is the prime concern, the case for coming back into
compliance with the JCPOA is so strong as to be almost a no-brainer. In this
regard, the opposition to returning to compliance does not make sense. The
opposition becomes more comprehensible if one recognizes that such concern is
not necessarily the main motivator for the oppositionists. For many of them,
the objective is not a “better deal” but rather no deal with Iran. Their goal
is for no one to do any business, diplomatic or commercial, with the
Iranians.
One of the original motivators
for Republicans in Congress and then for Trump was to knock down anything that
could be described as an accomplishment for Barack Obama. Trashing the JCPOA
became one more step in Trump’s efforts to destroy, or do the opposite of,
whatever Obama did.
For many other vocal opponents of
the JCPOA, as Matthew Petti points out, the main goal is regime change in Tehran. That’s a
lot different from seeking a “better deal.” Reaching deals, better or
otherwise, with another government is not a step toward overthrowing that
government, but instead an alternative to it.
For still other vocal opponents,
and especially the right-wing government of Israel, the main goal may be not so
much regime change but rather the perpetuation of Iran as a despised,
sanctioned, and isolated bête noire that can be blamed for
every malady in the region. Keeping Iran in this role serves Benjamin
Netanyahu’s government by weakening a regional rival, blocking it from any
rapprochement with the United States, deflecting blame and international
scrutiny from Israel’s own activities, and diverting attention from other troubles. Similar considerations may apply to those who
habitually line up with Netanyahu’s government, such as the loudly
anti-JCPOA Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
FDD on Sunset
Clauses
FDD’s latest treatment of
the subject, written by Behnam Ben Taleblu and Andrea Stricker, has the
aforementioned flavor of talking points that were composed six or seven years
ago. There is no mention of what the JCPOA accomplished in tearing down what
had been a far larger Iranian nuclear program. There is no acknowledgment of
how miserably the more than two and a half years of the Trump administration’s
“maximum pressure” approach failed.
When some of Iran’s more recent
actions do get mentioned, the FDD essay tries to blame on the JCPOA what was
actually a consequence of abandoning the JCPOA. It says that
Iran’s ramping back up of some of its enrichment activities shows that the
JCPOA “did not actually resolve” the Iranian nuclear question, without noting
that this Iranian action was a direct result of, and solely due to, the Trump
administration’s reneging on the agreement.
The FDD piece has many of the
tendentious touches that became familiar during the first round of opposition
to the JCPOA. For example, crippling another nation’s economy, as the Trump
administration endeavored to do with its unrestricted economic warfare despite
Iran’s compliance with its obligations, is tacitly taken as just a normal way
of doing business. But what Iran has done to counter the pressure with pressure
of its own is labeled as “blackmail” and “nuclear extortion.”
To be fair, not every essay about
the JCPOA can be expected to cover every facet of the topic, and the FDD
authors focus in their recent piece on the “sunset” provisions that attach
expiration dates to some of the provisions of the agreement. This topic was
also a focus of oppositionists several years ago, and their treatment of the
subject now exhibits most of the same deficiencies that the opposition rhetoric
back then exhibited.
The FDD authors make no mention
of the important provisions of the JCPOA that never expire. The basic
prohibition on developing or owning nuclear weapons—a prohibition that
reinforces Iran’s obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty—is
permanent.
Perhaps the most important
provision of all in the JCPOA—the unprecedented, intrusive monitoring and
inspection by the IAEA—also is permanent. There is no substitute for
on-the-ground monitoring in keeping the world informed about what is going on
inside a suspect country. Any doubt about this ought to be removed by recalling
how gaps in such monitoring next door in Iraq led at different times to
serious underestimation or overestimation of Iraqi development of nuclear and other
unconventional weapons, with that lack of understanding sometimes leading to
tragic consequences.
The FDD authors do not explain
the reasoning underlying some of the provisions that do expire, such as the
already-expired conventional arms embargo. Such an embargo has no self-evident place in an
agreement that is about nuclear matters. The embargo was imposed in the first
place as just another of the multilateral sanctions designed to induce Iran to
negotiate restrictions on its nuclear program. Iran did negotiate such
restrictions, so logically the embargo should have been lifted when the JCPOA
entered into force. Far from the lifting of the embargo being a concession to
Iran, the fact that the embargo was extended for another five years was a
concession reluctantly made by Iran.
JCPOA Versus the
Alternative
The most fundamental error in
FDD’s entire discussion of the sunset clauses, however, is the same error that
has pervaded much other criticism of the JCPOA: it never considers the
alternative to the JCPOA. And when the alternative is not considered, it goes
unmentioned that the very same things that the FDD depicts as problems with the
JCPOA would be bigger problems without the JCPOA.
The alternative to the JCPOA is
not a mythical “better deal”; it is no deal at all. It is the situation that
prevailed before the first preliminary nuclear agreement was reached with Iran
in 2013. It is the situation that partly returned as a result of the Trump
administration’s abandonment of the JCPOA.
Under this alternative, rather
than having restrictions on Iran that would expire after ten, fifteen, or some
other number of years, there are no restrictions at all. You say you don’t like
how, under the JCPOA, the 300-kilogram limit on Iran’s stockpile of
low-enriched uranium will expire in 2031? Then how do you like that limit being
gone right now, which is what the Trump administration accomplished by reneging
on the U.S. obligations and thus releasing the Iranians from theirs? That
uranium stockpile will grow more, well before 2031, as long as the United
States remains non-compliant with the JCPOA.ghter
The FDD authors use the hoary
term “better deal” in a subhead of their piece, but the subsequent text does
not describe any deal at all. Instead, the authors say the United States should
stick with more of the already-failed policy of nothing but pressure and should
“continuously consult” with the Israeli government of Netanyahu, who can be
counted on to try to sabotage U.S. diplomacy as much in the future as he has
in the past.
FDD and the other opponents might
actually contribute to the debate on policy toward Iran if they were honest
about their objectives. If the objective is regime change, then the debate
could consider whether such an approach would be any more fruitful than the
unhappy record of previous U.S. efforts at regime change in the
Middle East, and whether the perennial mistaken belief that the Iranian regime is on the brink
of collapse is any more true now than in the past.
If the objective is indefinite
confrontation with the Iranian bête noire—with all of the
accompanying risks of escalated conflict—the debate can consider what good such
confrontation would do on behalf of nuclear nonproliferation, peace and
stability in the Middle East, and U.S. interests generally.
Paul R. Pillar is a
contributing editor at the National Interest and the author of Why America Misunderstands the World.
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