The new US policy has layers of contradictions. By not rejecting the nuclear deal the administration tacitly acknowledges that it’s working, yet senior officials continue to harshly criticize it. This extreme distaste for an agreement that has removed—at least for a decade—a nuclear threat that a few years ago raised the specter of another war in the Middle East is even odder when set against the standoff with North Korea. If anything were needed to underline how much safer the Iran deal has made the United States, the menace of North Korea’s nuclear development surely qualifies. [...]
Iran has accepted around-the-clock supervision by IAEA inspectors, cameras, and monitoring equipment at its nuclear facilities. There have been no problems with access. These inspections include some places, like uranium mines and centrifuge rotor production facilities, that have never previously been subjected to international oversight in other countries. Their inclusion makes it much harder to operate a covert program. Iran has adhered to allowed limits on R&D, and an innovative mechanism to track sensitive imports has been created.
Two years ago critics in the United States were deeply skeptical that these steps would be carried out. Today they are facts. Most of the commitments extend for ten or fifteen—and in a few cases twenty-five—years. Iran remains a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (North Korea withdrew in 2003), and several of the deal’s enforcement provisions strengthen the treaty by serving as models for application elsewhere.
In this light, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent description of the agreement as “the same failed approach…that brought us to the current imminent threat that we face from North Korea” is simply bizarre, betraying either ignorance of the facts or a willingness to wholly distort them. A “failure” like this would be an unimaginable success in North Korea. [...]
Parsi’s answer is domestic politics. Because of what he dubs the Supreme Leader’s “incentive structure”—by which he presumably means the policies Ayatollah Ali Khamenei favored and hence rewarded politically—Tehran convinced itself that “the nuclear issue ultimately was a pretext the West used to pressure Iran, to deprive it of access to science, and to deny it the ability to live up to its full potential.” This would keep Iran from being able to challenge US domination of the region. The right to enrich uranium became a symbol of national pride, technological prowess, international standing—and fairness. How could the great Persian nation be denied the right to do something that eight other nonnuclear weapons states were doing? At the least, having given up so much else, drawing the line at enrichment was a way for Tehran to keep the deal from looking, and feeling, like a defeat.
No comments:
Post a Comment