The Iran endgame

By Philip Gordon

If Iran—or more accurately, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei —decide they cannot meet the international community’s bottom lines, a deal will not happen.

As Secretary of State John Kerry and other foreign ministers head to Vienna for what is supposed to be the final week of talks before a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran, it is still far from clear that such an agreement will be reached. Both sides clearly have a strong interest in getting to yes.
By agreeing in the April 2015 Lausanne framework to difficult points like reducing the size of their fissile material stockpile by 97 percent, cutting by two-thirds their number of installed centrifuges and dismantling their plutonium producing heavy water nuclear reactor at Arak, the Iranians have shown they are willing to make painful concessions in the name of a deal, and President Hassan Rouhani—who campaigned on a platform of fixing the economy—would have trouble explaining to Iranians why he walked away from sanctions relief if he overplays his hand this week and the deal falls apart.
Similarly, the United States and its international partners in the P5+1 know that while the deal on the table is far from perfect, the absence of an agreement could leave them in the unenviable position of having to make a choice between acquiescing to an Iranian nuclear weapon or using military force to prevent one.
On the other hand, while real progress has been made and the Lausanne framework resolved perhaps 90 percent of the issues necessary for a deal, the issues that were too difficult to resolve on the last few days of March during the last “endgame” will be just as difficult on the last few days of June during this one. The United States and its partners have made clear there is a limit to how far they can go, and if Iran—or more accurately, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei—decide they cannot meet the international community’s bottom lines, a deal will not happen.
The June 30 target date for a comprehensive deal, after all, is no more a hard “deadline” than were the deadlines of July 2014 (six months after the interim Joint Plan of Action was signed), November 2014 (the one-year anniversary), or March 2015 (by which time negotiators had promised a “political framework”). The reality is that with the JPOA in place—an agreement that froze and partially rolled back the Iranian program in exchange for modest sanctions relief—neither side is desperate for an immediate deal and both are willing to continue to hold out until their demands to be met. The only real action-forcing event on the horizon would be new congressional sanctions that might lead the Iranians to pull out of the talks, but Congress has so far been reluctant to take action that would make it responsible for the collapse of the talks.
The United States is in a fairly strong position and, having gotten the main elements of a solid deal in place in the April framework—long-term limits on enrichment, elimination of a reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium and basic commitments on transparency—should now hold the line on key outstanding issues. Perhaps the most important issue still to decided is the question of effective verification. Beyond the agreement to regular access to all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, including enrichment sites, centrifuge production sites, uranium mines and mills and the nuclear supply chain, one of best things in the current framework is Iran’s agreement to sign and implement—forever—the International Atomic Energy Agency’s “Additional Protocol,” which guarantees inspectors access to sites or information it suspects might be related to a nuclear weapons program.
The problem is that while the AP requires a signatory to provide access, it provides no mechanism for timely and effective resolution of inevitable disputes. A comprehensive nuclear agreement must provide for such a mechanism. This need not meet the “anytime, anywhere” standard cherished by critics, but that standard is a difficult one and one which no country—except perhaps after wartime defeat and occupation—ever has or ever will accept. (On the National Security Council’s Iran team we referred to this as “Ayatollah’s bathroom” problem—an example of a site to which Iran was unlikely, and understandably, unwilling to grant unfettered access.) But Iran will have to accept that while frivolous or non-nuclear related inspections are out of bounds, the refusal to provide inspectors access to a suspected site (such as the enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow that Iran, after all, tried to build in secret) will be considered a violation of the agreement, and sanctions will be re-imposed.
The timing of lifting those sanctions in the first place, and the process for re-imposing them, remains another critical issue to be resolved. Iran wants all sanctions lifted “immediately when a deal is signed,” a condition reiterated by the Supreme Leader on June 24. The P5+1 must reject this demand and continue to insist that substantial sanctions relief can only come when Iran actually implements the “nuclear steps” that are part of the deal—lowering its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, dismantling the required number of centrifuges and removing fissile material from Fordow, removing the core of the heavy water reactor at Arak, and addressing past weapons work known as “possible military dimensions” or PMD.
Even once this is agreed (no easy task), negotiators need to finalize a mechanism for sanctions to “snap-back” into place if a violation of the agreement occurs. U.S. sanctions, controlled by the President and the Congress, are not a problem, but international sanctions, which are required for pressure to be effective, will be difficult. The best approach would be for the UN Security Council to merely suspend the sanctions and require a positive vote to maintain the suspension every six months, if the IAEA certifies Iran is in compliance with the agreement. As Tehran is unlikely to agree to this, an alternative could be to lift the sanctions, but make clear that if a member of the P5+1 alleged a violation, unanimity at the Security Council would be required to prevent re-imposition of sanctions, which the U.S., as a permanent member of the Council, could of course block. The United States could also probably safely agree to allow “snap-back” to be determined by some subset of the P5+1, confident it would find support from the United Kingdom, France, and/or Germany if a violation occurred. It should not be acceptable is for a single country—Russia, for example—to block the re-imposition of sanctions if Iran violates the agreement.
A third key issue is that debate over PMD. John Kerry got in trouble last week for saying he was “not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another” since “we have absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities they were engaged in.” While far from helpful—or even an accurate description of the U.S. approach—his valid point was that restrictions and transparency about potential Iranian weapons work going forward is far more important than explanations of what they did in the past. It is not necessary for the Supreme Leader to make a public statement that Iran has been lying for over a decade and did, in fact, experiment with the technology for making a bomb. That’s not going to happen.
We do, however, need Iran to provide answers to questions the IAEA has been asking and on which Iran has been stonewalling. Iran must provide samples of requested materials, interviews with scientists, and access to documents and sites. The IAEA may well conclude that weapons work was done (and consistent with publicly available U.S. intelligence assessments, ceased a long time ago), which Iran will vehemently deny. But the IAEA will have the information it needs, which will help inspectors going forward with what really matters: a framework that prevents Iran from doing such work again.
Finally, to be acceptable, a comprehensive deal should put restrictions on Iranian research and development of advanced centrifuges, such that Iran could not bring such machines on line the day after the ten-year limitation on its uranium enrichment program ends. Proud of its scientific achievements and resentful of the notion that these can be constrained in any way by the international powers, Iran will strongly resist this requirement, and it may be necessary to enshrine the commitment in an indirect manner, for example within the enrichment plan that Iran would submit to the IAEA. But the effect must be the same—no R&D that would allow Iran to use advanced centrifuges in a way that would reduce the framework’s one-year “breakout timeline,” the amount of time it would take Iran to accumulate enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon, during the first ten years, and no quick installation of the most advanced machines in year 11. While Iran’s R&D cannot realistically not be constrained forever, the idea is to delay its progress long enough—until 2025 at a minimum—for Iran to provide the necessary assurances—assurances not present today—that it is not seeking to build a nuclear weapons.
Truthfully, I do not know if we can get the elements of a deal just described.
While critics—and op-ed writers in the comfort of their offices—can easily say what an agreement should contain, our negotiators have to find a way to deliver across the room from Iranian negotiators who are under as much pressure as they are—with their own domestic politics, redlines and hard-liners back home. What I do believe is that if we can get these remaining elements, the agreement will be in the national security interests of the United States. Critics of the Lausanne framework would consider even the agreement described here a “bad deal” and will call on Congress to reject it or the next president to repeal it. But while true that it could always be better—which is true, of course, for every diplomatic agreement ever reached—letting the perfect be the enemy of the good would be a historic mistake.
A deal that verifiably constrains Iran’s enrichment program until at least 2025 or 2030, limits its R&D, prevents the production of weapons-grade plutonium and reprocessing and provides unprecedented transparency and verification forever, would be an enormous win for the United States and its partners. Kill that deal, and tomorrow Iran can resume enrichment including to higher levels, keep its fissile material stockpile, finish building its heavy water reactor, and do unlimited R&D, all without transparency or international supervision.
Good luck with that.