During an interview on Wednesday with Michael Froman, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked about the possibility of Iran speeding up its nuclear program in light of its debilitating failures across its sphere of influence in the Middle East. Below is the interview, with minor edits to help the flow of the text:
MICHAEL FROMAN: Iran has lost its primary proxy, Hezbollah, in terms of its effectiveness as a second-strike capability. Its missiles have proven to be quite feckless against Israeli, US, and allied partners’ defense. Is it inevitable that they go nuclear now? That’s the third leg of their deterrence and defense stool, with the other two having proven to be weak. How do you see that evolving? And what advice would you be giving to the incoming administration on how to develop the relationship with Iran?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: There’s no doubt this has not been a good year for Iran, and we’re seeing that play out every single day. And I think Iran has to make some fundamental choices.
One choice it could make – and should make – is to focus on itself and focus on trying to build a better, more successful country that delivers for its people, which is clearly what most Iranians want, and to stop getting involved in these adventures – or misadventures – throughout the region and beyond. Now, whether it will be wise enough to make that choice, I don’t know. But they desperately need to be making that choice, and they need to be focused on their economy, focused on growing the country, and delivering for people.
Now, if they don’t make that choice, they have some hard decisions to make, yes, about where they’re going to go in the future to be able to sustain the kind of troublemaking that, unfortunately, they’ve been engaged in for many, many years.
I don’t think that a nuclear weapon is inevitable. I think this is something that may be more of a question now because as they’ve lost different tools, as they’ve lost different lines of defense, sure, you’re going to see more thinking about that. But the costs and consequences to them for pursuing that route I think would be severe, so I am hopeful that that remains in check.
Now, I’m also biased. The one problem that we successfully took off the table through the so-called JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, was the prospect of Iran getting to a nuclear weapon anytime soon by bottling up, tying up the fissile material, making sure their breakout time in producing enough fissile material for a bomb was pushed back beyond a year.
Now that breakout time in terms of the production of fissile material is a matter of a week or two. They don’t have a weapon, and the weaponization piece would take them some time, but the thing that we could have eyes on most effectively to make sure that they weren’t moving in that direction – the fissile material that this deal put in a box – unfortunately, the decision to break out of that box I don’t think, to say the least, was a wise one.
So, the next administration is going to have to find a way to engage this, because the production of 60% enriched uranium gives them the capacity, at least in terms of fissile material, to produce multiple weapons’ worth of material on very short order.
FROMAN: And looking at the US approach to this, we’ve tried sanctions, we tried engagement with JCPOA, we’ve tried sanctions again. What do you think – what influence can we have on Iranian behavior? And do you think there is the prospect of a negotiation of a new deal on the nuclear piece of this with Iran?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: I think there is the prospect of negotiations, and, of course, it depends on what Iran chooses to do and whether it chooses to engage in meaningfully. And of course, the incoming administration will have to make a decision. President Trump last time around, in pulling out of the deal, said that he wanted, as he called it, a better, stronger deal. Fine. Let’s see what’s possible.
FROMAN: He wrote a book about that. Yeah, “The Art of…,” right.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: So, let’s see. I think that would be a better way to approach it. But look, one way or another this much I know: from administration to administration, whether it’s ours, whether it’s the Trump administration, whether it was the Obama administration, there’s been a shared determination and a shared determination that remains to ensure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon. One way or another, I am convinced that, just as our administration had that policy, the next administration will, too.
