By Yochi Dreazen from
Geneva
The historic nuclear deal Iran signed with the United
States and five other world powers early Sunday morning represents the biggest
gamble of President Barack Obama's presidency, and the success or failure of
that bet will have serious repercussions for the administration's standing on
Capitol Hill, Washington's relationships with Israel and other Middle Eastern
allies, and the national security of the United States itself.
The deal painstakingly assembled
during four days of marathon negotiations at a luxury hotel here calls for Iran
to halt most of its uranium enrichment efforts, eliminate its stockpiles of
uranium already purified to near weapons grade quality, open its facilities to
daily monitoring by international inspectors and significantly slow the
construction of the Arak plutonium reactor. Nuclear weapons can be assembled
using either enriched uranium or plutonium, and the new pact is designed to
make it difficult, if not impossible, for Iran to gain enough of either
material for a bomb.
In exchange, Iran would gain some
relief from the punishing economic sanctions that had been leveled by
Washington and its allies in recent years, freeing up roughly $6 billion.
Tehran also won a commitment that the so-called P5+1 nations - the United
States, Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain - wouldn't impose any new
sanctions for the next six months. That was an important win for the Iranians
since the existing measures have cut its oil exports in half and driven the
price of its currency down to a historic low.
The negotiations between the two sides have been going on in
stops and starts for nearly a decade, but the actual unveiling of the deal was
strangely muted. The text of the agreement itself was signed at roughly 3:30 AM
in Geneva's Palais des Nations in a quiet ceremony open to only a small number
of reporters and not televised or otherwise broadcast electronically. Lady
Catherine Ashton, the European Union's chief diplomat and one of the prime architects of
the deal, didn't participate in the public rollout of the agreement or take any
questions from reporters.
President Obama, speaking from the
White House, said the deal "halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear
program" and "cut off Iran's most likely paths to a bomb." He
also stressed that the agreement was an interim measure designed to give
negotiators from both sides six months to work towards a broader, permanent
nuclear agreement. If a deal couldn't be reached - or if the United States
found evidence that Iran was trying to secretly continue work on its nuclear
weapons program - Obama promised to restore the sanctions that had been lifted
and impose harsh new ones.
The White House moved quickly to try
to preempt criticism that the deal gave Iran too much. A senior
administration official in Washington said the primary U.S. sanctions against
Iran's oil and banking sectors would remain fully intact, which means that Iran
would lose roughly $30 billion in oil revenue over the next six months, far
more than it stands to gain as part of the agreement. "Iran will
actually be worse off at the end of this six month deal than it is today,"
the official said.
With the agreement in place, the
administration is now gambling that it can overcome three distinct challenges.
First, the White House has to
persuade skeptical lawmakers to hold off on imposing new sanctions on Iran
during the next six months. That may be a hard sell given the number of
lawmakers from both parties who want to increase the sanctions on Iran rather
than softening or relieving any of the existing measures. Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a close White House ally, has said he's prepared
to take up a tough new sanctions bill when the Senate comes back into session
next month. The bill would almost certainly pass if it was put to a full vote.
Secretary of State John Kerry said Obama was prepared to veto new sanctions
legislation, but that's a battle the White House would dearly love to avoid.
Next, the administration faces the
tough task of convincing Israel that the deal does enough to constrain Iran's
nuclear program that Israel should give the administration more time to work
out a permanent pact with Tehran rather than resorting to unilateral military
strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was harshly critical of
earlier iterations of the nuclear deal and has promised to do whatever is
necessary to protect his country. Administration officials said Obama would
speak to Netanyahu Sunday to brief him on the details of the deal. One official
said in an interview that the White House felt that Netanyahu, no matter how
angry he was about the agreement, would reluctantly give the administration six
months to test Tehran's intentions. With the P5+1 countries committed to
ongoing negotiations with Iran, the official said that Netanyahu knows any
military action would risk rupturing Israel's relationships with the U.S.,
China and most of Europe. "Bibi will hold his nose, but he'll let us have
six months," the official said.
The third and final unknown is what
the deal will ultimately mean for American national security. The
agreement imposes an unprecedented number of new restrictions on Iran's nuclear
program and, if fully implemented, would make it extraordinarily difficult for
Tehran to obtain a bomb. Still, the deal doesn't require Iran to disassemble
any of its roughly 19,000 centrifuges or to destroy all of its uranium
enrichment equipment. Netanyahu and other critics argue that leaving the core
infrastructure of Iran's nuclear program intact means that Tehran could restart
its weapons push anytime it wants, particularly if it senses that the West has
lost its appetite for further sanctions or the potential use of military force.
Even if the deal succeeds in freezing
Iran's nuclear program, meanwhile, Washington and Tehran still remain on
opposite sides of the Syrian civil war and face lingerng disputes over Iran's
support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, a network of heavily-armed Shiite militias in
Iraq, and Shiite activist groups in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states.
The nuclear deal could clear the way for further pacts down the road devoted
specifically to issues like reducing Tehran's support for the regime of Syrian
strongman Bashar al-Assad. For the moment, though, those disputes serve
as reminders of just how enormous a bet Obama has made by inking this new
nuclear deal with Tehran.
-This report was first published in Foreign Policy on 24/11/2013
