I write in support of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, concluded among the U.S., Germany, France, Britain, Russia, China (the P5+1) and Iran.
U.S. Sen. Susan Collins has shown a cooler temperament on this issue by her refusal to sign the controversial letter to Iran’s leadership earlier this year by freshman Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Collins said that it is “more appropriate for members of the Senate to be giving our advice to the president, to Secretary Kerry and to the negotiators.”
The JCPOA is an agreement between the P5+1 community and Iran; President Barack Obama is not required to obtain Senate approval as a treaty negotiation. However, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee co-sponsored legislation making way for a vote this month for approval or disapproval of the deal. Corker is another leading Republican not wholly yielding to what Michael Krepon of the Stimson Center, a global policy think tank, calls “ party insurgents.” He didn’t endorse the insurgent Cotton’s letter to Iran, either.
While the Cotton letter is old news, its strained logic bears on the future of the JCPOA assuming the deal survives congressional insurgent attacks. Cotton claims two things: a future Republican president can undo the deal, and an earlier nuclear deal with North Korea, from the Clinton administration, led to a North Korean bomb because of the weakness of that deal’s timeline. That’s a criticism leveled against the Iranian deal — that the inspection regime is too short. Cotton was factually incorrect to claim the North Korean timeline was at fault and only partially correct to say a later administration could undo the deal.
Cotton, in a Breitbart interview in March, said, “It only took North Korea 12 years to get a nuclear weapon from the time we reached the Agreed Framework in 1994 to the time they tested their first weapon in 2006.” Following that logic, he also said, “Iran might break the deal in the next 10 years and get a nuclear weapon, but they might simply keep the deal for the next 10 years and get a nuclear weapon.”
Cotton’s thinking is mistaken because it was the Bush administration’s failure to keep to the Agreed Framework, not the timeline, that led to a North Korean bomb. The Bush administration broke off talks with North Korea meant to move the process forward and dithered while developing its own policy. North Korea cheated; further U.S. actions led to a complete breakdown of the agreement.
If Congress scuttles the JCPOA, it is likely to produce a breakdown of current International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, no new inspections and the breakdown of significant international sanctions leaving Iran free to pursue its own national ambitions without guidance. If the JCPOA is adopted, a future president hostile to its provisions could try to renegotiate a “better deal,” repeating the failure to uphold Clinton’s Agreed Framework bargain with North Korea. Bush’s re-negotiations angered Japan and South Korea, cosigners of Clinton’s executive agreement, making the U.S. the “bad faith” partner in that deal. With broad support of the JCPOA in Europe, a U.S. rejection risks another “bad faith” foreign policy blunder.
Nothing prevents future administrations from taking stock of Iran’s nuclear position in 10 years and addressing concerns at that time, except perhaps a failure of imagination. History certainly doesn’t stop with the sunset of certain provisions of the JCPOA. Some provisions limiting Iran are for 25 years, others in perpetuity.
Opposition to the deal is misleading and fierce, with many millions being spent to sway politicians to support the expected veto override vote. World support for the deal is broad and deep, even among military leaders in Israel.
Iran will never be drawn back into negotiations for a “better deal.” Those angling to kill a new robust inspections regime adding to the already well-established inspections regime hope to achieve an impossibly perfect inspections regime. Poison pills work that way.
For some, the war they have pushed for for at least a decade, hardly a “better deal,” is the objective. I hope Collins stands in staunch opposition to that possibility, and that she sees her way clear to support the JCPOA.
Stephen Demetriou lives in South Portland and has followed developments in the U.S.-Iranian relationship for many years.