This morning’s Wall Street Journal has an excellent op-ed from Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — an advocacy organization that has been central to imposing strong sanctions on Iran. Mark is a smart and sober guy, and his joint op-ed dismantles the fallacy that this “Iranian nuclear deal” is anything but a win for Tehran. For details on the deal, I encourage a read.
While reading the piece, I noticed an accompanying photo — a picture of Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif shaking the hand of Secretary of State John Kerry after the deal was signed. In a plain and powerful way, the seemingly innocuous photo tells the entire story of this deal. Check out the photo here.
Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. The Americans, posturing tough. The Iranians, smiling. Secretary Kerry glaring at Foreign Minister Zarif, as if to say “We mean business mister, can’t you tell? You’d better keep your word.” But Zarif is not glaring back, he’s looking right past Kerry and the Americans. He sees Iran’s nuclear future, and likes what he sees.
The photo neatly sums up the result of the deal. The administration desperately wanted a diplomatic deal with Iran, because it’s never actually been serious about doing what is necessary to prevent an Iranian bomb. This short-term deal is a chance to look tough, without actually preventing the capacity Iran needs to eventually get a bomb.
The administration will laud the details of this temporary plan – no additional centrifuges, no more enrichment above 5 percent, partial halts to nuclear construction, and daily inspections; but the devil is not in the details on this deal. Like naïve, yet supremely arrogant, technocrats, the Obama administration believes a four-page, six-month agreement will alter Iranian nuclear ambitions. Instead, this agreement sends one unambiguous signal to the Iranians: The era of American containment, not prevention, has officially begun.
And Iran knows this, hence the smile (and celebratory comments from their “moderate” president Hassan Rouhani and the real powerbroker, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei). The Iranians not only brokered a deal that did not suspend current uranium enrichment, but more significantly, they got the Americans to effectively recognize the right to Iranian uranium enrichment. Even the usually feckless United Nations is unwilling to make these concessions.
Iran’s willingness to hit the pause button for six months on a program they’ve been developing for decades — first in secret, and then through deliberate deception — is a no-brainer for them. They get relief from economic sanctions (they’ll also drive a truck through new sanctions loopholes) but don’t need to give up centrifuges, stop enrichment, give up control of their stockpiles, or shut down reactors. Most important, America has codified the ability for Iran to possess and keep nuclear capacity. It’s a win-win-win-win-win-win for Tehran.
Six months might seem like eternity in Washington, but it’s a blink of an eye for the ayatollahs in Tehran. They’re playing the long-game, content to buy some temporary economic breathing room in order to continue development of their program, while gaining some level of international legitimacy in the process. They are using this deal to limit future American options, while they look right past us to their nuclear future.
That leaves Israel, alone. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly calls this deal a “historic mistake.” With America off the chess board, Israel stands alone in doing what might be necessary to prevent an Iranian bomb — an existential threat to Israel, and a strategic game-changer for America that we seem content to accept. Talk about turning your back on your allies, not to mention your interests.
No matter how this administration spins it, this deal will not make Israel safer. It only backs them further into a geo-political corner, forced into an impossible series of choices. Everyone would like a diplomatic solution to the Iranian bomb; but no clear-eyed analysis of the contours of this diplomatic deal, or the possibility of a subsequent deal that dismantles Iranian nuclear capacity, provides a realistic path to preventing Iranian nuclear ambitions.
Only the combination of crippling sanctions (which were just loosened) and the credible threat of military action (which America just took off the table) could create future conditions for a diplomatic prevention of an Iranian bomb. This deal lessens both sources of leverage, and leaves Israel standing alone. Our adversaries are smiling, and our most staunch democratic ally left shrugging its shoulders — shame on us for creating these conditions.
This deal, and the years of negotiations that Iran will happily exploit, will not bring “peace in our time.” Instead, 75 years after Winston Churchill decried the Munich Agreement and warned of a similar threat emerging in Europe, this Geneva Agreement only slow walks America and the world toward another self-delusional “peace” that will mean more confrontation, more conflict, and less American influence.