In 1974, the Ford Administration conducted nuclear talks with Iran. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, heir to the Peacock Throne and an American ally, had asserted his country’s right to build nuclear power plants. Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft sought a deal to reduce the risk that Iran could ever make an atomic bomb. They had to manage a restive Congress. A secret White House memo summarizing the problem noted that “special safeguards [that] might be satisfactory to Congress . . . are proving unacceptable to Iran.”
Ford’s talks failed, as did negotiations undertaken by the Carter Administration. In 1979, the Shah fell to the Iranian Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini, believing that nuclear weapons were un-Islamic, initially put Iran’s program on ice. After Khomeini’s death, in 1989, his successors bargained, smuggled, and dissembled, and by 2009 they had installed enough equipment to make a bomb within a few years. This was President Obama’s inheritance. After six years of diplomacy, capped by energetic negotiations led by Secretary of State John Kerry—who seems on some days to be the only man in Washington enjoying his job—the Administration may at last have a deal in sight, judging from recent statements made by Kerry and by his Iranian counterparts.
The precise details of Obama’s offer are unknown. Broadly, Iran would freeze its program in such a way that, if it broke the agreement, it would need at least another year to make a bomb, and it would accept special inspections. In return, the U.S., the European Union, Russia, and China would agree to the lifting of economic sanctions. Republicans positioning themselves for 2016 have denounced any deal. Their opportunism, abetted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s divisive address to Congress earlier this month, has made it hard for Obama to clarify his argument: the bargain may carry risks, but it is better than any practical alternative.
One risk of any deal is that Iran will cheat successfully, as it has before. Between 2004 and 2009, it built a huge centrifuge facility under a mountain south of Tehran before Western intelligence agencies found out about the deception. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran still hasn’t come clean about its long history of secret weapons work. Yet Republican fear-mongering is overblown. The technology for detecting secret nuclear activity through atmospheric and water sampling, among other methods, isn’t foolproof, but it is very good. Large-scale cheating of the sort necessary to finish a bomb, which would require enriching uranium isotopes, would carry a significant risk of detection. If caught, Iran would likely face harsher economic sanctions, if not war.
A greater dilemma is that, by easing economic sanctions, a deal might empower Iran at a time when collapsing oil prices could reduce its ability to fund violent militias around the Middle East. The latest chapter of the Sunni-Shiite conflict is descending into a Thirty Years’ War of grotesquery—mass abductions, sexual slavery, tweeted beheadings. There are few innocents under arms, but Iran’s aggression is catalytic.
The Revolutionary Guards have trained Hezbollah’s fighters in Lebanon and Syria and provided the group with hundreds of millions of dollars. There is evidence that officers from Iran’s Quds Force, the hardcore Special Forces of the Guards, are fighting alongside the barrel-bombing military of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Iran’s proxy violence does not cut entirely against American interests. Some of its enemies are also American enemies: the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. But many more Iranian foes are American allies, including Israel. Last week, a fragmented Yemen saw its civil war deepen further as Saudi Arabian warplanes intervened to bomb Shiite rebels backed by Iran.
These days, however, Iran looks overextended. Sanctions have cut the country’s oil exports by half, and the economy is contracting. The apparent willingness of the radical wing of Tehran’s regime to consider the nuclear freeze offered by the Obama Administration—a deal similar to ones that have failed previously—might be explained by the need to replenish the Revolutionary Guards’ sectarian war chest.
How would lifting sanctions not simply revitalize Iran’s expansionism? If the Administration doesn’t have a plan, it should devise one. Last week, in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home town, American warplanes, in tacit alliance with Iranian-backed Shiite militias, bombed Islamic State positions, only to have several of the militias withdraw in protest. Obama has committed the U.S. to what looks to be a long war in Iraq, with Iran’s help; an attack on the large city of Mosul is due soon. The Islamic State has thrived because it has captured the grievances and bitter desperation of Iraq’s Sunni minority. Attacking the Sunnis with Shiite fighters is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. If Iran’s proxies in Iraq gain more access to guns and money because of a nuclear deal with the West, that may only make things worse.
The record of Washington’s interventions in the sectarian landscape of Iran and Iraq is so abysmal that the case for restraint should be obvious. The Reagan Administration carried out a morally debased effort to foster mutual destruction between the two countries during the war that they fought from 1980 to 1988. (At the war’s inconclusive end, as Saddam Hussein gassed Iranian positions, the head of the Revolutionary Guards wrote to Khomeini suggesting that, if Iran wanted to prevail, it needed nukes.) The Bush Administration invaded Iraq to topple Saddam, only to reignite sectarian fighting and, while disenfranchising Sunnis, open a pathway for Iranian aggression.
One aim of Kerry’s dealmaking in Switzerland is to help stabilize the region by reducing the chance that Iran’s bomb program could set off a local atomic arms race. That is an objective worthy of considerable risk-taking. But a deal might achieve more stability—and go down better in Congress—if it was accompanied by a broader political strategy designed to separate Shiite and Sunni fighters, promote autonomy and self-governance for Sunnis opposed to the Islamic State, reduce violence, and stop Iran from intervening in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Gaza.
For four decades, American Presidents of both parties have recognized that it is unacceptable for Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb, and that the only rational way to prevent this is to negotiate. After six years in office, and after repeatedly following the advice of his generals, only to see their predictions fail, Obama is choosing the risks of nuclear diplomacy over yet more war. It is the best of bad options, but it could be better still. ♦
