A sub-optimal deal

Most everyone involved in the heated debate over the deal reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries agrees that a nucleararmed Iran would be a major threat to world peace and stability. But depending on which side you’re on, the deal will either “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven,” as Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee recently said, or it is “the best way to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon (and) the only durable and viable option for achieving this goal,” as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Earnest Moniz wrote in a recent op-ed, published in the National Post.

As we have written in the past, there are many ways in which this agreement is worrisome. Kerry and Moniz argue convincingly, however, that the arrangement will stymie Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon in the short term, which is ultimately better than nothing.

But there are holes in the arguments being put forward by Kerry and his colleagues, who appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday. Indeed, Kerry and Moniz wrote that, “If Iran fails to meet its responsibilities, sanctions will snap back into place, and no country can stop that from happening.” But with China and Russia both keen to forge new business relationships with Iran, it’s unclear whether reinstating the current level of sanctions will be possible in the future. And unless the U.S. is able to reimpose sanctions with the support of all its partners in the deal, such a threat will be much less potent.

There are also serious questions about Iran’s ability to hide its nuclear-weapons program from inspectors. Kerry and Moniz say the deal will give inspectors “unprecedented access to Iran’s declared nuclear fa- cilities, any other sites of concern and its entire nuclear supply chain.” Yet they acknowledge that, even after adopting this guarantee, the regime could stall for up to 24 days. Furthermore, they claim that forensic testing will be able to catch even microscopic traces of a clean-up job. But this won’t be able to catch any testing of illegal centrifuges involving conventional materials. And again, these testing abilities will be fruitless unless the U.S. can get cooperation from other countries to penalize violations.

Nor do we accept the idea that “anytime, anywhere” inspections should have been off the table. There’s little question that international sanctions were hurting the Iranian regime, which should have given the international community the upper hand at the negotiating table. It is also not clear that the sanctions regime, alleged by Kerry and Moniz to be crumbling, was collapsing so quickly as to force the P5+1 into agreement. After all, if they weren’t having the desired effect, it would have made little sense for the Iranians to agree to terms that will significantly set back their nuclear program, at least in the short term.

And contrary to the Obama administration’s position, this deal does not take nuclear weapons off the table, thus allowing the U.S. and the international community to deal more directly with other regional issues; it merely kicks the can down the road for another decade or so and does little to alleviate the fears of other countries in the region, which could spark a nuclear arms race.

So the deal as defended by Kerry and Moniz remains a bad one, even if they are right that diplomacy was a better alternative to military confrontation. Still, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, the alternative was not no deal, but a better deal. Quite right.