By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Beware of happy talk from, or about, Iran.
All of the parties present seem eager to put a positive
spin on the discussions in Vienna regarding the Iranian nuclear program and
efforts to revive or replace the defunct Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA), the 2015 nuclear-capability deal negotiated by the Obama
administration and scrapped by Donald Trump. Iran’s Financial Tribune calls
the talks “successful,” the Russians are sounding optimistic (for Russians, at
least), and Enrique Mora, the European Union envoy acting as coordinator,
characterizes the proceedings positively. So, the talks are going well.
For whom?
The Chinese, the French, the Germans, and the British are
all in attendance, but the party that matters most — the United States — has
nothing to say about the talks, and is not, in fact, formally participating in
them. Rather, as the BBC puts it, U.S. representatives are “participating
indirectly,” no doubt because the stink of failure will not cling to them quite
as strongly that way.
The Biden administration has said that it is interested
in reinstating the agreement or replacing it with a “more for more” deal,
meaning one in which Iran makes greater concessions in return for wider and
deeper relief from economic sanctions. But that is unlikely to come to pass,
because Tehran’s “more” list begins with three items that the United States is
unlikely or unable to offer up: First, Tehran demands that Washington
acknowledge wrongdoing in abandoning the original JCPOA; as tempting as it might
be for the Biden administration to take the opportunity to twit its
predecessor, adopting an attitude of contrition and supplication vis-à-vis
Tehran would be difficult and unseemly. Second, Tehran wants an immediate end
to all economic sanctions, which the Biden administration would not be inclined
to agree to even if it could, which it can’t, these being a matter of law
rather than one of unilateral executive discretion. Third, Tehran demands that
any U.S. commitment be guaranteed to outlast the Biden administration, which
would mean writing a new deal into a treaty requiring ratification by the
Senate, a project that would almost certainly fail.
Bringing the JCPOA back from the dead is the wrong idea.
It was a defective agreement to start with (for reasons explained at length at the time by my National
Review colleagues) but, even if it hadn’t been, many of its
provisions were supposed to expire in only a few years, and the main part of it
was supposed to expire in 2030. There is not much reason to believe that a
revived JCPOA would actually constrain Tehran in a meaningful way, but even a
very effective implementation of the agreement would buy us only eight years of
relative calm. Not even the fundamentally incompetent Biden administration is
likely to give up very much to buy so little.
As usual, the United States is hobbled by two facts: One,
our foreign policy is hostage to domestic politics, and the JCPOA is at least
as much a culture-war totem as it is a meaningful diplomatic concern; second,
and much more important in the long run, the United States does not seem to
know what it actually wants to achieve in Iran and in the wider Middle East
over the long term. The same two facts distort and hamper our policies toward
China, Mexico, the European Union, Japan, and other critical areas of
geopolitical concern. It is impossible to figure out what price you are willing
to pay when you do not know what it is you actually want.
Presumably, there is a contingency plan in a locked
drawer in some shadowy federal dungeon in which our military brains have
contemplated using force to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat and, if
necessary, impose “regime change,” as we like to call it, on Tehran. But as a
practical political matter, military action in Iran is not currently on the
table, at least not the table at which Joe Biden is sitting.
The view from Naftali Bennett’s table is different: The
Israelis are engaged in a shadow war against Iran and seem to be prepared to at
the very least continue their campaign of sabotage and assassination, and perhaps
also escalate that campaign if doing so becomes necessary to eliminate what
they consider, not without some reason, an existential threat. Israel is both a
critical strategic partner and a liberal-democratic ally to which the United
States owes some moral duty, but Israeli interests are distinct from, rather
than entirely synonymous with, American interests. Washington must take into
account both sides of that equation: that the United States may be obliged to
act in a way that is at odds with Israeli preferences and that Israel will not
subordinate a question of national survival to political calculations
undertaken in Washington. There are more than a few cynics in Washington who
quietly hope that the Israelis take the lead and solve this problem for us —
one indicator, among many, of just how unfit for global leadership today’s
Washington really is.
The problem of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions is a
technological ratchet. Every time Tehran adds a new nuclear capability to its
national arsenal, that advancement is, as a practical matter, permanent. Iran
is not going to give up those new capabilities willingly, and the Iranians
cannot in any meaningful way unlearn what they have learned — the Israelis may
put down a few leading scientists, but the knowledge itself cannot be
assassinated, because it is sufficiently dispersed. We must also consider the
likelihood that China’s support of Iran in the matter of its “reasonable
demands,” as Xi Jinping calls them, may not be only political and financial but
also practical and technological. Assassinating Chinese nuclear scientists is a
different kind of proposition altogether. The technological ratchet, and not
the notional calendar that has Iran x number of months or years away from a
working nuclear weapon, is what should be worrying Washington. Once Iran
reaches a certain level of nuclear development — a level that it is not far
away from right now — then making a meaningful nuclear deal will be impossible.
That is the ticking clock to which we should be paying attention.
And so the Biden administration has three broad options.
The first is the military option, which President Biden is unlikely to pursue.
The second is the diplomatic option, which to succeed will have to be active
and positive — and account for the reality that Tehran’s nuclear position
becomes stronger by the day, that sanctions alone have proved insufficient to
stop the Iranian nuclear advance, and that the Iranians at this moment feel
relatively little compulsion to make big concessions. This means that, absent
some diplomatic finesse that the Biden team has not previously demonstrated, we
might very well end up with something inferior to the JCPOA, which was not very
good to begin with. The third option is accepting that Iran is going to become
a nuclear power — and somehow dealing with the fact that our Israeli allies
will not willingly accept that outcome.
We can fight, we can deal, or we can watch the world go
by. Each of those choices brings risks of its own.
What we can be confident of is that it is foolish to hope
the European Union, the Russians, and the Chinese are going to negotiate
something worthwhile on our behalf while we spare ourselves the indignity of
negotiating a price with Ebrahim Raisi et al. The Americans have to be at the
table if we are going to be in the game.
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