The Painfully Stupid Hawkish Opposition to the Nuclear Deal

The JCPOA is not a step towards the creation of an authoritarian axis.

It didn’t seem possible, but Iran hawks’ arguments against the nuclear deal are becoming dumber than ever. Here is Bret Stephens peddling false information and drawing the most absurd conclusions about the possible revival of the agreement:

But with or without the deal, Moscow will be able to build nuclear power plants in Iran, irrespective of the sanctions over the war in Ukraine. And Beijing — which in 2021 signed a 25-year, $400 billion strategic partnership with Tehran — will be able to conduct a lucrative business in Iran with little concern for U.S. sanctions.

Combined with February’s “no limits” friendship pact between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, an Iran deal represents another step toward a new antidemocratic Tripartite Pact.

Stephens has been dead-set against any agreement with Iran from the start, and his arguments against it have always been shoddy. When the original interim agreement was reached in 2013, he declared that it was “worse than Munich.” Now here we are almost ten years later and he is still making bizarre Axis references to attack a nonproliferation agreement that was doing exactly what it was meant to do until the U.S. started trying to destroy it.

One of the weirdest and most frustrating aspects of the debate over the nuclear deal is the idea promoted by hawks that an agreement that restricts Iran’s nuclear program is actually a great gift to the Iranian government. Yes, Iran will receive sanctions relief in exchange, but that is an inevitable part of any agreement and it is hardly a gift to permit the resumption of normal commerce and trade. All that it means is that the U.S. would no longer be strangling the Iranian economy.

The fantasy of a new “Tripartite Pact” is just that. For all of the talk of “no limits” in the Sino-Russian relationship, the Chinese government has so far been extremely reluctant to support the Russian invasion. China may not join in punishing or condemning Russia, but it does not seem interested in tying itself too closely to a government that has launched a stupid and illegal war. Iran has been hedging in just the same way. The closeness of the relationship between Iran and China has also been exaggerated. The $400 billion figure connected with the Iran-China deal is a fiction that has been debunked many times. Bill Figueroa has repeatedly explained that this figure seems to have just been pulled out of thin air and has nothing to support it:

First off, nowhere in the text of this or any other official document or pronouncement is any numerical figure mentioned. There are also no provisions whatsoever for the sale of islands, military bases, occupation, or anything that would sustain the other alarmist claims. This has been thoroughly debunked by multiple scholars, and a quick glance at the text will confirm their claims. While the draft itself appears to be genuine, the claims of $400 billion of Chinese investment and massive military concessions can be traced to a poorly sourced Petroleum Economy article from 2019, which has since been taken offline.

The Iran-China deal isn’t as big or significant as it has been made out to be, and Russia and China are not yet the axis that hawks want them to be. The JCPOA is not a step towards the creation of an authoritarian axis. On the contrary, reviving the agreement would create an opening to restore economic ties between Iran and Europe. Letting the deal collapse would ensure that Iran’s ties with the other two increase and deepen. Preserving the JCPOA will help to make war with Iran much less likely, since it will deprive hardliners in the U.S. of the pretext for an attack, and of course it prevents further nuclear proliferation. The only reason why someone would continue to oppose the revival of this agreement is if he wanted to create conditions for a new war.

The nuclear deal is an unusual example of cooperation among all of the major powers to advance the cause of nonproliferation through diplomacy. There are not many other issues one can name where the interests of the U.S., Russia, China, and our major European allies all align, but ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program remains peaceful happens to be one of them. Scrapping the nuclear deal because of Russian and Chinese involvement is utterly idiotic. There is no guarantee that the nuclear deal will be revived, but there should be no doubt that reviving it is in the interests of all parties.