In his address to the world on Tuesday announcing the accord between the P5+1 countries and Iran over the latter’s nuclear program, President Obama seemed bent on emphasizing more than anything else that the agreement was “not built on trust, it is built on verification.”
Indeed, the president must persuade Congress that the agreement has within it the means to ensure Iran will meet its commitments. But the president will also have to persuade the nation that the package of commitments his negotiators wrested from Iran will effectively restrain Iranian nuclear power, and therein lies the tale.
Thus Mr. Obama will have to convince an increasingly skeptical public that the negotiated program for inspections of Iranian nuclear sites will be sufficiently random and otherwise unexpected so as to be a reliable means of uncovering possible violations. He will also have to demonstrate that procedures are in place to enable timely determinations not only as to whether violations have occurred but also how to respond to them.
Plainly, Russia and China constitute a special P5+1 subset and will no doubt present difficulties in this regard. So how realistic are the assumptions underlying the so-called snapback plan, given Russian and Chinese opposition to economic sanctions as a tool of international diplomacy?
The president will also have to explain whether the number of centrifuges and quantity of uranium stockpiles retained by the Iranians will unduly empower Iran and whether their retention should have been conceded. We can easily see him arguing that “expert advice” renders those fears irrelevant.
One of the intriguing issues the president will face arises out of the American penchant for papering over differences with ambiguous language in which both sides can claim validation. One suspects that, given all the speculation over those reportedly heated 11th-hour exchanges between the participants, such obfuscation will come back to haunt the administration as soon as issues of implementation or Iranian cooperation begin to arise.
The media, in the coming days and weeks, can be expected to thoroughly ventilate every one of the agreement’s aspects, though if the past is prelude, it can be expected that Mr. Obama’s “legacy” foreign-policy effort will get a pass of sorts. And with the mainstream media favorably disposed to the agreement, it is hard to believe the president’s take on these provisions will not prevail.
Congress will now have approximately 60 days to examine the proposed agreement. Even if lawmakers ultimately are unable to change anything because of Mr. Obama’s veto power, a real airing of the issues would still be useful in terms of educating the public concerning the validity or invalidity of some of Mr. Obama’s assumptions. Certainly they will provide a convenient counterweight to the president’s heavyweight importuning.
One of the more troubling aspects of the path to this agreement is the way the administration repeatedly revised its end-game expectations.
Back in April, to cite just one example, President Obama confirmed rumors that his negotiators were authorized to negotiate a deal that would lapse after little more than a decade. He went on to say he expected Iran would be free at that point to acquire nuclear weapons. He also acknowledged that Iran would then probably have large numbers of advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, such that the so-called breakout time would shrink “almost down to zero.” (This in sharp contrast to an earlier statement by his energy secretary that what was contemplated was a “forever agreement.”)
So Iran emerges from the talks with its nuclear ambitions intact. It also perceives itself – and is perceived by others – as having taken on the major powers of the world and prevailed. Surely no one can deny that the Iran that emerged from the talks with its trophy agenda items in hand is very different from the Iran that was forced to the negotiating table under the crushing economic impact of the sanctions regime.