Nuclear deal with Iran buys time for new options

Note how much the Middle East has changed in the past decade, and then consider the difficulty of predicting how it will look in 10 to 15 years, the rough time frame for the nuclear accord recently negotiated with Iran.

Without the deal, the near future is easier to predict: conflict, chaos and conditions that will encourage many of the actors, not only Iran, to want — and imagine they need — nuclear weapons.

Opponents of the Iran deal dream of measures that deprive Iran of any access to nuclear power, even for peaceful uses. Their goal is to solve the problem immediately and permanently, with harsher sanctions or, if necessary, military action.

Neither of these options is promising. Sanctions may have brought Iran to the bargaining table, but harsher sanctions — if our allies can be convinced to sustain them — are as likely to be counterproductive and disruptive as they are to be successful.

And a military strike? Experts say that the chances of success would be minimal.

Certainly, Iran’s recent history provides detractors with legitimate cause for concern. But the nuclear accord reached with Iran throws a pragmatic, long-term framework over the conflict, one that buys time and still leaves a number of options open.

One important option is to work toward conditions that convince Iran that it doesn’t need nuclear weapons.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Once a country acquires nuclear weapons, it’s unlikely to relinquish them. But most countries that have the potential to develop nuclear weapons never do. And most countries that start down the path toward nuclear armaments abandon their programs.

In other words, a nuclear-armed Iran isn’t inevitable. This is a point made by Stanford University’s Scott Sagan, a nuclear proliferation expert, in “How to Keep the Bomb from Iran,” published in 2006 in Foreign Affairs.

Sagan argues that nations seek nuclear weapons for rational reasons and that Iran is a classic case of a nation that develops a nuclear weapons program in response to an external security threat.

And, of course, in 2006 Iran had reason to feel threatened. President George W. Bush had lumped Iran together with Iraq and North Korea as part of an “axis of evil.” American troops were stationed in Afghanistan, to Iran’s east, and in Iraq, to Iran’s west. American warships patrolled the Persian Gulf.

Things have changed. Iran’s other goals don’t require nuclear weapons.

Iran hopes to dominate its corner of the world. That evil genie left the bottle when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. A great deal of what is happening in the Middle East — even the loathsome terrorism that Iran supports — reflects the region’s most deep-seated conflicts.

In this struggle, we’re out of our depth. Our ability to control, or even influence, it is limited. But the Iran nuke deal imposes a rational time frame that slows things down and may help constrain the limits of a conflict that seems almost inevitable.

What do we do in the meantime? Monitor and verify. Urge Iran toward international integration. And let’s take Mideast expert and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s 2007 suggestion and issue visas to 50,000 young Iranians to study in American universities. I’m betting that few Iranians who spend much time here will ever shout “Death to America.”