There Is Still an Opening for Negotiating with Iran
There is nothing inevitable about proliferation in Iran.
Henry Sokolski cites some irresponsible Congressional threat inflation and adds some of his own:
Last week, the House Intelligence Committee chairman volunteered that Iran could declare itself a nuclear weapons state by the end of the year. And earlier this month, the U.S. intelligence community warned that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.’’ How quickly? Experts now say 12 weeks or less.
The mullahs might alert us or stay mum. Either way, the next president’s challenge won’t be how to prevent Iran from going nuclear but deciding what to do after it gets nuclear weapons.
The debate over Iran’s nuclear program is often marred by sloppy and sensationalist hawkish claims, and this is more the same*. If Iran were going to declare itself a nuclear weapons state, it would at least need to have a nuclear weapons program. Iran hasn’t had anything like a nuclear weapons program for more than twenty years. While Iran’s nuclear program has expanded significantly in recent years following the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal and Israeli attacks on its facilities and scientists, there is no evidence that the Iranian leadership has changed its position on pursuing nuclear weapons.
Sokolski doesn’t have any evidence to back up such an extraordinary claim about Iran’s plans. He links to a report of an interview with Rep. Mike Turner, who engaged in some unfounded speculation about Iran’s intentions as he was bashing Biden’s record. Turner “volunteered” (i.e., made up) this information as part of his defense of Trump’s abysmal Iran policy, but he conveniently left out the bit where Trump reneged on the nuclear deal and spurred Iran to expand its nuclear program with his disastrous “maximum pressure” campaign. Turner praised Trump’s economic war against Iran as “the most pressure on Iran that they have had in any administration,” but the reality is that all this pressure backfired and made the problem worse. In short, Turner took the standard position of a pro-Trump Iran hawk and he exaggerated how bad the problem was under Biden to score partisan points in an election year.
One of many errors that Turner makes is in claiming that Iran has had “flexibility and freedom that they've had under the Biden administration” when Biden’s Iran policy is practically identical to Trump’s. One of the main reasons why Biden’s Iran policy has been such a failure is that it closely follows the path laid out by Trump. Republicans are desperate to paint the advances of Iran’s nuclear program in the last few years as the result of Biden’s supposed weakness rather than the predictable result of U.S. sanctions and Israeli sabotage attacks.
Turner’s sniping is the extremely weak foundation for the rest of Sokolski’s argument about Iran. Sokolski assumes without evidence that Iranian proliferation is inevitable, and then jumps ahead to making recommendations for what the U.S. and its allies should do “once Iran goes nuclear.” He spins out various scenarios of what the next administration might have to confront, but all of it is based on the existence of an Iranian drive for nuclear weapons that isn’t happening.
Taking Iranian nukes as a given is ridiculous when there have been several encouraging signs that the Iranian government remains open to finding a diplomatic compromise. The new Iranian president campaigned and won on pursuing sanctions relief through new negotiations on the nuclear issue. He appointed a foreign policy team with experience in the negotiations that led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), including the new foreign minister Abbas Araghchi. Iran’s Supreme Leader publicly opened the door to negotiating with the U.S. last week.
There is an opportunity for the U.S. to negotiate a new agreement to replace the old one that Trump wrecked. There is nothing inevitable about proliferation in Iran. The U.S. shouldn’t give up on diplomacy to resolve the nuclear issue, and it shouldn’t listen to Iran hawks that have been wrong about every important question in the region for decades.
*Sokolski’s piece is another confirmation that an argument related to Iran policy is always analytically worthless if the author unironically uses “the mullahs” as a shorthand to refer to Iran’s government.
Nobody of influence and authority wants to negotiate, and any talk of negotiation is in bad faith, much like how the Bush Administration piously proclaimed that it sought a peaceful resolution with Iraq, even as it sought war on pretexts so laughable they would have embarrassed Nazi Germany or the Mongol Empire.
Surely this is by now obvious.