Obama bets on a changing Iran

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

The president's message is this: It may not be the most perfect deal, but left on their own, the Iranians were going to build a bomb anyway.

President Barack Obama almost came right out and said it: Under the terms of the nuclear deal reached in Vienna, by the time Iran could build a nuclear bomb again the country might be a very different place.
That was the message implicit in the president’s remarks from the ornate State Hall of the White House on Tuesday as he announced terms of the deal. Even if Tehran tries to cheat or just puts off its nuclear ambitions until the deal expires, the president and his top aides see the decade or more they’ve now bought as a decade or more in which a lot of things could happen in Iran, according to several sources who’ve had conversations with high-ranking people in the West Wing.

That could mean regime change. Maybe moderates and the democratic opposition will strengthen enough as more time passes for the Supreme Leader, who’s already 76 and has had prostate cancer (though that kind of bet hasn’t paid off well for the United States elsewhere around the world of late). Or perhaps Iranians will get used to having more of a place in the international community and the global economy, with the country’s young and secular population given time to gain more influence.
Gently, but unmistakably, Obama pointed at what more he believes could happen because of the process he started, off an idea that many Democrats (including his former secretary of state) and Republicans mocked as naïve and pointless.
He used a word from his campaign posters, a word that captured the idealism that got him elected in 2008 and the evoked the bitterness about his failed promises: “Our differences are real and the difficult history between our nations cannot be ignored. But it is possible to change,” he said, hitting the end of the sentence.
“This deal demonstrates that American diplomacy can bring about real and meaningful change,” he said, “change that makes our country and the world more secure.”
Now Obama and his aides will try to sell the Vienna agreement on the largest-scale version of their favorite game: What’s your alternative? Obama’s efforts will basically amount to asking his opponents and critics what they’d propose to do instead, especially now that he’s already got this document in hand and leaders around the world have agreed to it. Here’s diplomacy that seems to have worked, he’ll say, as opposed to mongering for a war that’ll probably just make things worse.
Health care reform, gay marriage legalization, expanded trade, a renewed conversation on race — the big accomplishments he spent the end of June celebrating were all policies he embraced because he was forced to, and still managed to fumble a few times along the way.
But talking Iran out of its nuclear program was his own idea, from even before he was president. Now he says he’s made it happen — and along the way created a new template for multilateral diplomatic engagement.
He’s not about to let anyone forget it. By American figures, Iran had 164 centrifuges in 2006 after the last attempt at engagement broke down under President George W. Bush. Iran had over 6,000 by the time Obama took office. Now they have 19,000. Ten years from now, if this deal holds, whoever’s president will have five times the breakout cushion that Obama had coming in and twice what he has now under the terms of the Joint Plan of Action that’s been in place since talks got serious.
“Tough talk from Washington does not solve problems,” Obama said Tuesday morning at the White House. “Hard nosed diplomacy, leadership that has united the world’s major powers offers a more effective way to verify that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon.”
The agreement exemplifies Obama’s pragmatism: It may not be the most perfect deal. It doesn’t have everything that everyone wanted. But left on their own, the Iranians were going to build a bomb anyway, and complaining and isolation weren’t stopping it. This deal, at least, goes pretty far toward halting that, and runs the clock in a way that will matter, and got it done before the rest of the world gave up on the sanctions and started buying oil from Iran anyway, leaving the United States to isolate Tehran on its own — a Cuba of the Middle East.
“It has the full backing of the international community,” Obama said. “As the American people and Congress review the deal, it will be important to consider the alternative. Consider what happens in a world without this deal. Without this deal, there is no scenario where the world joins us in sanctioning Iran until it completely dismantles its nuclear program.”
The deal and what comes next also exemplifies Obama’s sense of realism versus bloviating: Yes, Iran is scary and untrustworthy, he said, but that can’t compete with American intelligence and international inspections. If Iran already had a secret nuclear facility, he said, they’d have found it already. If they try to build one, there are American satellites watching every hole the Iranians start to dig and asking what the holes are for. If Iran tries to pilfer material from the facilities they get to hang onto, the inspectors will catch that from weighing it on both ends of every process. If Iran tries to ship any in, they’ll see that too.
“This deal is not built on trust. It is built on verification. Inspectors will have 24-7 access to Iran’s key nuclear facilities, to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain, its uranium mines and mills, its conversion facility and its centrifuge, manufacturing and storage facilities,” Obama said.
Reflecting what will also be a central part of the strategy, he started rattling off numbers and details aimed at overwhelming the opposition chatter: 98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium will be gone, for example, getting rid of enough to build 10 nuclear bombs, as opposed to not having enough left to build even one.
Even in the final weeks, Obama didn’t spend much time at all talking to Secretary of State John Kerry, leaving that mostly to his national security adviser Susan Rice. He got regular briefings, but wasn’t doing much to guide strategy. The presidential-level work, he felt, was all at the beginning. Now Kerry and the rest of the team could either make a deal happen on the lines he’d laid out, or not.
Obama’s only got 18 months left in office. In the best case scenario, most of what’s in this deal won’t be implemented until he’s out of office. Most of what he sees as the diplomatic benefits that might come from validating his recalibration of America’s involvement in the world won’t play out until he’s gone. This is more of a capstone to his foreign policy than an opening.
But if he can convince Congress to stick with him, he feels like he’s set America and the world in a new direction for long after he’s gone.
“This deal offers an opportunity to move in a new direction,” Obama said. “We should seize it.”