Deal or No Deal?

B eware 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.