From:
david.j.worrell@gmail.com
Vox
The Iran nuclear deal isn’t dead — yet
http://tinyurl.com/yaxhj9ko
Excerpts:
The best evidence we have suggests Iran was actually complying with the deal. Iran has dismantled a huge portion of its nuclear program and given international inspectors wide latitude to make sure it isn’t cheating; the country is significantly
further from a nuclear weapon than it was when the deal came into force.
Now, American withdrawal doesn’t mean the deal is immediately dead. Technically, the nuclear deal is an agreement between Iran and what’s called the P5+1 (the US, Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany) — which means the US leaving the
agreement doesn’t end it. If the rest of the P5+1 keep their sanctions off, Iran may decide to continue to adhere to the deal’s restrictions even after the US pullout. That’s what Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said his country
would do in a
Monday speech.
But the truth is that nobody actually knows what the Iranians will do. It’s possible they stay in the deal; it’s equally possible that they slowly chip away at the deal’s restrictions or even dash for a nuclear weapon. What’s more, the sanctions
also could precipitate a major crisis with America’s European allies, as some
of the sanctions could affect European companies that do business in Iran.
And that’s what makes this decision of Trump’s so scary. Trump took a major
geopolitical flashpoint that had been contained and blew it wide open.
“Trump’s pullout [makes] this thing an agreement in name only,” says Hussein Banai, an expert on Iran at Indiana University Bloomington. “We don’t even know how to judge anything anymore.”
The Middle East just got a new crisis, and it’s one entirely of Trump’s making.
What Trump just did to the Iran nuclear deal
Prior to the Iran deal, the P5+1 had imposed a dizzying and complex set of international sanctions on Iran as punishment for its nuclear development. The basic gist of the deal was that the sanctions would be lifted in exchange for Iran agreeing to
several serious restrictions on its nuclear development. Among the most important, the deal called for:
Reducing Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium by 97 percent, and banning them
from possessing any uranium potent enough that it could be used to fuel a bomb Capping its number of nuclear centrifuges, devices used to enrich uranium, at roughly 5,000 — and only permitting it to use old, outdated, and slow centrifuges
Stopping Iran from operating its Arak facility used to make plutonium that could fuel a bomb
Permitting wide-ranging and intrusive IAEA inspections designed to verify that Iran isn’t cheating on any portion of the deal
These provisions, taken together, make it functionally impossible for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon so long as they are in place. And the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed that Iran is complying with all of its obligations under the deal.
“With the deal in place, it would be extremely difficult for Iran to build the bomb without being detected — and there would be a time frame that would allow the international community to respond,” James Acton, director of the Carnegie Endowment’
s Nuclear Policy Program, tells me.
But the whole point of the deal is a quid pro quo: Iran agrees to nuclear restrictions in exchange for the financial benefits of sanctions relief, which would amount to billions and billions of dollars. What Trump did today was reimpose a major portion
of the pre-deal sanctions regime — something called “secondary sanctions”
targeting Iran’s oil sector.
Secondary sanctions don’t punish Iran directly, instead targeting international banks that do business with Iran’s oil sector. Hence why they’re “secondary”: Instead of hitting the primary target, Iran, they cut off access to US markets for
third parties that want to work with Iran. In effect, it forces foreign countries into a choice between importing large amounts of Iranian oil or doing
business with the United States. Since America is the world’s largest economy, it’s not exactly a
hard choice — and thus would end up punishing close US allies that want to do
business with Iran.
Reimposing these sanctions puts the US in clear violation of its obligations under the deal, thus effectively withdrawing America as a participant — and significantly reducing Iran’s incentive to stay in.
But the deal isn’t dead, at least not yet.
If the rest of the countries don’t reimpose their own sanctions, Iran may very well end up still having more access to international markets than it had before the deal was inked. It could thus still decide to stay in the deal, rather than kicking out
inspectors or restarting large-scale uranium enrichment, in order to avoid angering these other parties — all of which opposed Trump’s decision.
But we don’t know that the Iranians will do that for sure. They may decide that without the US, the deal isn’t really worth it. As a result, the issue of Iran’s nuclear program — whether or not a rogue regime will attempt to pursue a nuclear bomb
— is now all of a sudden back on the table.
“I think we get into a cycle of death by a thousand cuts,” Acton says. “The US does a step to bring it into noncompliance with the deal. If diplomacy with Iranians fails to keep them in the terms, maybe they take a little step ... and then we go
back and forth until the deal is dead.”
And if the deal does, in fact, fall apart — well, then Donald Trump will face
a stark choice: Either let Iran advance toward the capacity to build a nuclear bomb or go to war to try to stop it.
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