{"id":19708,"date":"2015-04-14T09:25:56","date_gmt":"2015-04-13T23:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=19708"},"modified":"2015-04-14T09:26:13","modified_gmt":"2015-04-13T23:26:13","slug":"iran-cutting-a-deal-with-the-great-satan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/iran-cutting-a-deal-with-the-great-satan\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran: cutting a deal with the Great Satan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In 2003, a \u2018perfect storm\u2019 of intersecting developments saw Tehran caught with one hand in the nuclear weapon cookie jar (secretly enriching uranium), despite having joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and given assurances that it would do no such thing. The Iranian regime was humiliated.<\/p>\n

India and Pakistan had endured sustained condemnation when they declared their nuclear-armed status via a blizzard of tests in 1998, but they were known proliferation risks and had declined to join the NPT. Even the DPRK\u2014not a state that anyone wants to be compared to\u2014had gone through the formality of withdrawing from the NPT in April 2003, to (redundantly) signal its intent to pursue a nuclear weapon capability.<\/p>\n

Iran opted to bluff its way through. Tehran steadfastly denied that it had an obligation to restore confidence in its compliance with the NPT. It insisted that everything the IAEA could discover was consistent with its intention to build a substantial network of nuclear power stations. It maintained that it was also exercising its rights under the NPT to acquire its own capacities to fuel its future reactors with enriched uranium and (potentially) plutonium. For its part, the US insisted that Iran had to get out of the enrichment business.<\/p>\n

Twelve years later, on 2 April 2015, negotiators from China, France, Germany, Russian, America and Iran announced agreement on a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) concerning special arrangements to bolster confidence that Iran\u2019s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful in intent and that it has no aspirations to acquire nuclear weapons. The JCPOA\u2014details of which can be found here<\/a>\u2014is commendably comprehensive, addressing both the enriched uranium and plutonium paths to the fissile core of a nuclear weapon.<\/p>\n

Enrichment capacity will be cut by two-thirds and technological development precluded for 10 years; stocks of low-enriched uranium are set to be reduced to token levels for 15 years; the IAEA will have enhanced visibility of and access to Iranian nuclear facilities to verify compliance with the new agreement.<\/p>\n

The central bargain may well have been Iran\u2019s acceptance of the need for \u2018special arrangements\u2019 with the US conceding retention of an enrichment capacity, albeit on that\u2019s circumscribed. If one looks at the key players, the regional context over recent decades and the broader global developments on the nuclear weapon front, easily the most surprising thing about this agreement is that it happened at all.<\/p>\n

Support for the agreement, generally on arms control grounds, has been qualified while opposition to it has been markedly more absolute and trenchant. The Australian\u2019s Greg Sheridan\u00a0 called the deal<\/a> \u2018a dismal outcome for the world\u2019 as the restraints on Iran\u2019s nuclear activities are either reversible or expire after 10\u201315 years while economic sanctions, once lifted, are unlikely to be re-imposed if Iran misbehaves.<\/p>\n

Henry Kissinger and George Shultz share Sheridan\u2019s disappointment, contending that the deal won\u2019t stop Iran\u2019s nuclear potential from stoking anxieties in the Arab world that, in the final analysis, Washington will have to deal with. They stress that Iranian\u2013Arab rivalries have been shaped over millennia, making a decade of restraint of little consequence to Arab states.<\/p>\n

Coming to a comfortable judgement on the utility of this deal is not easy. But most criticisms fail to consider what alternative courses of action were both feasible and likely to deliver better outcomes. If abandoning enrichment had been made non-negotiable, the options might have been continual intensification of economic sanctions,- with the mounting risk that Russia and China would trigger either a break in the ranks,- or the use of force.<\/p>\n

America still has unique capacities to attract support and make things happen, but it\u2019s relative power and room for manoeuvre, including on the home front, isn\u2019t what it used to be. Even the use of force could only delay an Iran determined to acquire nuclear weapons. The fact is that the character of the non-proliferation challenge has been transformed.<\/p>\n

Acquiring nuclear weapons is not a trivial undertaking but neither is it any longer a massive, complex challenge fraught with uncertainty and the risk of failure. The decision of whether Iran becomes a nuclear-armed state rests entirely in their hands, just as it does for a significant number of other countries around the world, including Australia.<\/p>\n

If Iran remains a non-nuclear weapons state indefinitely, it\u2019ll be because that\u2019s its preference. Many factors (and states) will shape the outcome on this question, not just Washington and not just this agreement.<\/p>\n

The JCPOA is an interim agreement. Many crucial details\u2014not least concerning the verification arrangements and the lifting of sanctions\u2014still have to be thought through, agreed, and expressed in clear language before 30 June 2015.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s supreme leader has already tried to pre-empt the process, signalling that he\u2019s prepared to walk away from the deal if any agreement on 30 June doesn\u2019t provide for the immediate and complete lifting of sanctions. But if a deal can be finalised without distorting the integrity of the package, it should make a positive difference. Certainly, it is hard to see how it would make things worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2003, a \u2018perfect storm\u2019 of intersecting developments saw Tehran caught with one hand in the nuclear weapon cookie jar (secretly enriching uranium), despite having joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and given assurances that it …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":113,"featured_media":19713,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[247,206,172,31],"class_list":["post-19708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-iran","tag-non-proliferation","tag-nuclear-security","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIran: cutting a deal with the Great Satan | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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