On Iran, Obama Gets His Breakthrough

By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker

03 April 15

If a nuclear deal with Iran succeeds, it will be in large part because the President avoided the temptations of resentment and self-pity.

ALSO SEE: Iran Agrees to Framework of Nuclear Deal

t is a good deal,” President Barack Obama said on Thursday, after the framework of an agreement to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb was announced. If it is good—and that will depend on getting the final settlement done and signed between now and June—it will be in large part because the President avoided the temptations of resentment and self-pity. And Republicans in Congress will have failed to thwart it because they embraced them. The G.O.P. did everything that it could to scuttle this deal. Forty-seven Republican senators sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader that will go down in the annals of diplomatic sabotage, and made it harder for American negotiators to demand a deal that the White House itself would find acceptable. They did so even though their ostensible goal—keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear power—was the same as the President’s. It would have been easy, on Tuesday, when the original deadline for the talks expired, for the American negotiators to walk away—and for Obama to blame it all on the Republicans and just say that they had made it too difficult to reach an agreement. He’s done that in the past. (Guantánamo.) But the President told John Kerry—whose efforts he referred to in his statement on Thursday as “tireless, and I mean tireless”—to keep going, and Kerry and his fellow diplomats seem to have come up with something that, while not perfect, does look pretty good.

“Found solutions. Ready to start drafting immediately,” Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, tweeted just before noon. In the past few days, when it looked like things might not work out, there was talk of something that would be less than a success but not quite a failure: a vague outline, a commitment to getting it right, and the hope that, somehow, it would all fall into place by June. As Zarif suggested, that is not what this deal is. It has more detail than most observers expected, which will hopefully mean that the drafting of the actual accord will truly be a technical process and not a deferred round of diplomacy. The deal, which is between Iran and the P5+1 (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany) covers all the life stages of a bomb. For example, during the next twenty-five years, inspectors will be able to enter mines known to contain raw uranium ore. One sticking point had been Iran’s unwillingness to completely do away with any of its existing facilities; the negotiators had talked about this as a matter of national pride. But the Arak nuclear plant, which was designed with the sort of reactor that could produce plutonium for bombs, was not one whose operations could simply be slowed down—there’d still be plutonium. So under the deal, according to the White House’s fact sheet, the “original core of the reactor” would be “destroyed or removed from the country.” A different, safer sort of reactor would be put in its place. There would still be an Arak facility but, from a proliferation perspective, it would be a shell of itself; this is the sort of middle territory that diplomacy can find. Arak was one of the targets that John Bolton, the U.S. representative to the U.N. under George W. Bush, suggested bombing in an Op-Ed in the Times last week.

Centrifuges can be used to produce highly enriched uranium for bombs. The deal will reduce the number of centrifuges that Iran has, from close to twenty thousand now to just over six thousand—keeping only its oldest models, rather than the newest and best ones—and for the next ten years it will only be able to operate five thousand of them. Stockpiles of enriched uranium that Iran already has will be reduced—with the excess sent abroad—and kept at the lower level for fifteen years.

Iran gets something for all this: the removal of American and international sanctions when it becomes clear—and inspectors verify—that it is keeping its side of the bargain. How to ascertain exactly when this happens may be a point still to be negotiated. But a robust part of the deal, from an American perspective, is its “snap-back” provisions. Sanctions will not actually be removed but suspended, and what the fact-sheet refers to as their “architecture” will remain in place for quick reactivation if necessary. (“And while it is always a possibility that Iran may try to cheat on the deal in the future, this framework of inspections and transparency makes it far more likely that we’ll know about it if they try to cheat,” Obama said.) Also, the non-nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, for things like its support of terrorism, will remain.

That raises an objection to the deal: Iran will still be Iran. Twenty minutes after Zarif’s tweet signalled a breakthrough, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted, “Any deal must significantly roll back Iran’s nuclear capabilities and stop its terrorism and aggression.” It was never likely, as desirable as it would be, that Kerry was going to get the Iranians to sign something saying that they would no longer be aggressive. It would have been a little like demanding that there could be no missile-reduction deal with the Soviet Union until the Russians stopped quoting Lenin all the time. Having this deal needn’t, shouldn’t, and surely won’t mean never challenging Iran about anything else again.

There are multiple time frames in the deal: no enrichment research at the Fordow facility for fifteen years; no inspections at bellows-production facilities for twenty years; adherence to certain enhanced nonproliferation protocols forever. One of the criticisms of the deal, in the past few months, has been that it would “sunset” in ten years—that Iran would get a free decade without sanctions, grow rich and strong, and then start building a bomb the moment that the time was up. Kerry, speaking in Switzerland, said that there was “no sunset.” That was somewhat a matter of semantics; there are, at least, mini-eclipses at certain intervals. But it is true that significant aspects of the deal have an indefinite life. (And that may be more than can be said about the Iranian regime itself, which could change in less time than it takes to get inspectors out of the uranium mines.)

Obama said on Thursday that the current estimates indicated that Iran could have the materials for a bomb, if it wanted to, in two to three months. Under the deal, that “break out” time—the minimum post-cheating bomb-acquisition interval—would be at least a year, for the next decade. He continued, “So when you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question: Do you really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented, backed by the world’s major powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East? Is it worse than doing what we’ve done for almost two decades with Iran moving forward with its nuclear program and without robust inspections? I think the answer will be clear.” Those critics talk as though it’s just as clear that he’s wrong. John Boehner, on Thursday, said that the deal appeared to be “an alarming departure” from what Obama had said his goals were. Obama didn’t agree.

“Iran is not going to simply dismantle its program because we demand it to do so,” the President said. “That’s not how the world works. And that’s not what history shows us.” Is that cynicism or optimism? The world is not a place where you can simply look tough and your enemies will crumble; but it is a place where, with some work and some luck, you can try to get something done.