Iran nuclear deal beats the alternative

There has been a depressing predictability about some of the reaction to Tuesday’s landmark nuclear accord between Iran and the international community.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the agreement as a “historic mistake” before most Americans had had a chance to hear the outlines of the deal over their morning coffee. Politicians seeking the Republican nomination for U.S. president were equally dour, calling the trade-off of sanctions relief for at least a decade of extraordinary nuclear constraints “appeasement” of an authoritarian, terrorist-supporting regime.

{mosads}What the critics have yet to present, as President Barack Obama noted in his press conference on Wednesday, is a “viable alternative” to a hard-negotiated, complex set of arrangements that has been accepted by his administration and the governments of the world’s other major powers.

On a conference call earlier Wednesday for Atlantic Council board members and press, senior fellow Matthew Kroenig insisted that there was still a better deal to be had that would force Iran to choose between possessing no nuclear fuel cycle and a return to sanctions. Iran, however, has made clear that it will not give up uranium enrichment after enduring years of economic punishment to preserve that capability.

Having already expended enormous diplomatic energy over the past 20 months – and in the case of Britain, France and Germany, negotiations with Iran that go back to 2003 – there is no appetite on the part of the Obama administration or the rest of the world to re-litigate the 159-page Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) finalized in the middle of the night in Vienna on Tuesday.

In fact, if the U.S. walks away – as Kroenig suggested might happen if a Republican is elected to succeed Obama in 2016 – the sanctions regime will have already unraveled to such a degree that like Humpty Dumpty, it cannot be put back together again. Only Iranian noncompliance with the JCPOA would cause sanctions to snap back in an effective and multilateral manner.

The alternative to a negotiated outcome is a resort to military force that would split the international community – whose buy-in made the sanctions effective to begin with – and further destabilize the world’s most volatile region while setting back the Iranian nuclear program by only a few years. It makes far more sense to implement the agreement on hand and verifiably retard Iran’s nuclear progress for another decade.

Bolstering the critique against the deal is a fierce insistence that Iran, having agreed to unprecedented constraints on its nuclear activities, will immediately seek to “break out” and race for a bomb once some of those limitations end. It is possible to imagine a set of circumstances by 2025 that would incentivize Iran to try to obtain nuclear weapons, but it is also possible to imagine an Iran that, reopened to international commerce, is reluctant to risk a return to pariah status.

Built into the JCPOA are mechanisms for 24/7 monitoring of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities and for gaining access to suspect sites that do not sunset in 10 or 15 years. And while some U.N. sanctions on Iran’s conventional arms that were imposed as part of the effort to constrain its nuclear program will be lifted in five-eight years, as Obama noted the U.S. and its allies have other legal authorities to continue to interdict Iranian arms shipments and counteract its support for objectionable regimes and groups.

This deal is not prefaced on Iran changing its policies in the region or establishing formal diplomatic relations with the United States, although Obama suggested that it would now be easier to include Iran in discussions about how to resolve the Middle East’s other crises, particularly the civil wars in Syria and Yemen. 

With the deal done, Obama and his top officials obviously have a challenging job ahead of them selling the JCPOA to a Republican-dominated Congress. But it is a job that the president appears to relish.

One of the country’s most respected diplomats – former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns – who dealt with the Iran file under both Republican and Democratic administrations, including secret talks that preceded a 2013 interim agreement, had this reaction to the deal:

“Today’s agreement is a very important step.  Rigorous execution of the agreement, and embedding it in a wider strategy that reassures our friends and pushes back against threatening Iranian behavior in the region, will be very challenging — but a strong verifiable agreement is the best of the available alternatives for preventing and deterring Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” 

Slavin is a non-resident senior fellow of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council.