Making the Easy Stuff Hard: Re-joining the JCPOA

Aaron Stein 0:01

But why are you such a wussy that you can't say it?

Jeffrey Lewis 0:09

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control disarmament and non-proliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron 0:28

I'm Aaron Stein, the Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. I'm in my daughter's room, so it's probably a little tinny. I'm in my basement. I can see the sun, but I know that it's very cold and very windy outside, so I guess I'm staying warm with my little space heater down here.

Jeffrey 0:48

Ah, is that a metaphor for where things are with the JCPOA? Blustery!

Aaron 0:57

It was really windy last night, so perhaps in danger of being toppled like my patio furniture. Hey, I am making season two of The Deal. Well, that's good news. I will admit to listeners, I have yet to listen to the first episode, but it's been a year since I've been in quarantine, and the past couple of days have just been extremely busy, but I promise it's on my queue.

Jeffrey 1:20

Well, I'll tell you, we just dropped the first episode of season two of The Deal, and this season is going to be a little bit different, because instead of going over the history of the Iran nuclear deal, we're going to try to... Look at historical aspects of the deal, but in ways that intersect with the current news cycle.

You know, really to sort of frame the choices available to Biden and then inform them with the past, all organized around one central theme, which is, why the F are we like this? Like, why do we take the easy things and make them hard? Because, you know,

Aaron 2:01

We're doing it again. So we talked about it on the show. I mean, well, we alluded to it, but we never overtly talked about it. It was always written that rejoining the deal was going to be this complex thing. And I think both you and I said it didn't have to be all that complex. It was relatively straightforward to just rejoin this thing.

The problem was the politics surrounding it. And I think that the politics surrounding it Sort of let's call it the clean rejoin, have kind of mucked it up a little bit.

Jeffrey 2:35

Yeah, so for listeners, if you want to go to wherever you get your podcasts, wherever you got this podcast, episode one of the deal looks at this question of what is the nature of the standoff. But we thought we would talk at length about that problem just because there's also, I think, a need for a kind of informal back and forth because it does really seem At least to me, like this is a straightforward, solvable problem.

I mean, there are moving parts and, you know, nothing is ever, nothing is ever super simple, but this is a solvable problem if we have the will. And Biden said he wanted to reenter the Iran nuclear deal on the campaign trail. And suddenly it seems that will has evaporated.

Aaron 3:27

Well, I think they want to rejoin, and I think we have to give a little bit of, like, a pass isn't the right word, but I think we have to understand that. How many days has it been since he's been in office? We're recording this on March 2nd. I guess he was elected, he took office January 20th, so it hasn't been that long.

It's been about, what, 40 days? And so, I'm willing to sort of not be that concerned about it, but It just does seem like the politics of rejoining it cleanly aren't as simple as perhaps they were on the campaign trail. I know that's not a shocker to anybody listening, but I'm worried that the external factors are starting to overcome the necessity of rejoining this agreement.

Jeffrey 4:15

Yeah, I suppose the positive way to say it is, you know, back in the old days, inauguration was on March 4th and we aren't even past that date. So it is it is early going. But, you know, the flip side is it's not clear to me how much time Biden really has. You know, I mean, they were able to move very quickly on extending new start because they were facing a deadline.

And it seems to me that we are facing similar sorts of deadlines in Iran. We have the Iranian parliament passed a measure that reduced the IAEA's access to And I know that we should talk about the way in which the IAEA came up with a bridging agreement, which is only going to last a few months. And we have a presidential election coming in Iran, where you may get a very different team.

And so... Boy, I am sympathetic to this idea that it's early days and that a lot of key officials haven't even been confirmed in their posts. On the other time, I teach a class on U.S. nuclear weapons policy and decision-making, and several of those classes are about how when you dick around, the window shuts. And there are a lot of cases that I teach about where people think they've got a year or two.

And it's like John Lennon says, life is what happens while you're making other plans. While they're making other plans, stuff happens, and then you never get around to doing what you want to do.

Aaron 5:54

No, I feel the same way. And I feel the same way because the targets Like if you were to start the stopwatch, right, like you didn't start the stopwatch on inauguration. The clock was running ever since the Trump administration withdrew. And then you began to see the Iranian counter moves to that to try and sort of force sanctions relief.

And so you inherit a problem that's like long festered, right? And so you inherit this festering problem that's getting worse. It's still better than where we were at, you know, before the JCPOA. But clearly on the wrong trajectory. And then you have these own political goalposts in Iran. I think the most important one is the election coming up.

And so if you can run smack into that, if you have a change in political team, Then all of a sudden you end up in a place where you were like with Ahmadinejad, where negotiations may not be foreclosed, but you're negotiating on modalities about where to hold the thing, like in Astana or Baghdad or places like that, rather than Geneva or Vienna.

And you're negotiating about the shape of the table and not anything serious. Right. And that's my problem.

Jeffrey 7:06

Yeah, absolutely. And that is one of the things that I wanted to talk about. Maybe we should frame first the nature of the standoff. But I really want to talk about the idea of the election. But tell me if you disagree. I mean, my understanding of the standoff at the moment is the U.S. and Iran each said the same thing.

The U.S. position coming in was we will rejoin the deal if Iran comes back into compliance. And the Iranian position, I think not without some reason, was you're the ones who left the deal. So if you come back into the deal and lift the sanctions, we'll come back into compliance. And so you have both sides saying they want back in the deal, but each side saying the other has to go first.

That's Softened a bit. Javad Zarif initially was the one who said, well, we could talk about coming back into compliance together or not. And for the longest time, the U.S. was like, no, you must come back into compliance. I gather I have seen some statements from the administration that suggest they have softened on that. But the issue really came to a head when the EU offered an informal mediation, and the US said, yes, we would go.

And the Iranians said, no, we will not. And it seems that the sticking point is still this issue of the Iranians don't want to show up at a negotiation if there's any risk that they'll leave empty-handed without any sanctions relief at all.

Aaron 8:38

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And this is why I always thought it was technically straightforward. Is it like you come... You both mutually come back into compliance much like we did in the initial JCPOA, right? You have this complicated dance, although this is much easier where you go, we go, or we go at the same time at some guaranteed day, right?

And so I do think that the thing that overshadows this is that, well, one, is that there's a hesitance on the U.S. side To front load any sanctions relief because of broader political problems in the relationship also stemming from the maximum pressure campaign, but which the Biden team inherited, and you can sort of focus it on Iraq, but you can go out into the broader Middle East, is that you seem like you open yourself up to criticism, is that you're focusing exclusively on the nuclear deal while ignoring sanctions.

Iranian provocations throughout Syria, Iraq, and also throughout the Gulf area.

Jeffrey 9:46

Yeah. So, and I think the flip side is, for the Iranians, they have a presidential election coming up, and I can absolutely see why, you know, Hassan Rouhani can't run again, but I'm sure he's going to have a dog in the fight. And I am sure that if I were... If I were if I were one of the people around Rohani and I was thinking, like, how does our group still stay in power?

Going to this meeting, having already softened the position. Right. I mean, the position starts with you left the deal. You need to come back. If you come back, then we'll comply. Like that's already frankly, that's a pretty reasonable position. And they soften that position by saying, look, we understand you have political problems. We have them too. We can come back together.

But you can understand how they would not want to show up at a meeting to talk about how they're going to come back together if there's any risk that Biden is just going to leave them holding the bag like idiots, right? I mean, they can't, I can completely understand how if you're a group of people who support the JCPOA in Iran, you cannot go to a meeting like that and come home empty-handed.

Aaron 11:12

Right, especially when one of the tangible benefits that they want to demonstrate out of JCPOA is not the limits that they will self-impose on their nuclear program. It's that we've bought, you know, we've traded... We've traded something in return for sanctions relief, which will improve your daily lives that they can then use to catapult themselves domestically into how they frame their own argument in that we don't have to be pushovers, but we still have your best interests at heart because we want to help you economically.

Jeffrey 11:45

And I mean, people forget that Rohani ran on achieving sanctions relief. And that campaign promise is at the moment dead.

Aaron 11:55

Right, but on the flip side is that their efforts to gain coercive leverage over the U.S., right? We always talk about maximum pressure, particularly the critics of the deal, and they say, well, the JCPOA doesn't stop Iranian bad behavior. See, when we pull out of the JCPOA, Iran still does bad behavior. That bad behavior is segmented, but ultimately...

Jeffrey 12:23

Pushed in favor of trying to exact the cost on the united states for its withdrawal from from the jcpoa so they're saying if you withdrew from the jcpoa you place us under sanctions that won't be cost free for you either which yeah i mean i mean it's a recurring theme that i i i revisit in both my class and in my writing because it comes up all the time in north korea which is the u.s has this tendency to walk away from agreements and then like we want to get back into them And typically the other side's leverage has increased or their ability to give us what we want has decreased.

And we're like, but no, no, no, we want the original deal we walked away from. And it's like, yeah, it doesn't work like that, right? It's the fundamental problem we've had with North Korea, which is we consistently walk away from agreements and everybody promises we'll get a better one. And when we don't get a better one, no one wants to admit that we aren't even going to get the good one we had before.

We have to settle for less.

Aaron 13:18

But in this case, we can get the good one we had before. We just may not get the extra stuff that people want.

Jeffrey 13:25

But we have to humble ourselves. And take some steps, you know, by our grown-up selves, right? Like, which is, I don't understand, like, why Biden just doesn't, like, you know, like, yeah, I'm going to waive some sanctions. Sure. I get it. You're going to come to the meeting. We were the first ones out. We're going to have to be the first ones in.

We obviously don't want to, like, completely leave ourselves hanging. But yeah, yeah, if you come to the meeting... We, we will, we will, we, you will not go home empty-handed. Like, what? Why is that? Why is that so hard to, to? Why is that so hard to? I mean, like, what? We can't reimpose the sanctions in six months if, if things go badly. So there was this Politico report that one of the big debates Biden had.

Before deciding that they were going to try to seek a deal, is maybe they should just wait out Rohani altogether. Maybe they should just wait for the presidential election. And... We can talk about it more later. Like, that's an insane idea because the EU tried to do that in 2005 when Rohani was the negotiator. They decided to wait out what was Hatami was the president and see if they got somebody else who'd pick a new negotiator who wasn't as big of a pain in the ass as Rohani.

And they got Ahmadinejad and literally nothing happened for 10 years. So that's insane. But the question is, like, where does that insanity come from? And I think the answer is because you don't have the arms control team really in place, and you have a little bit of the Iran team now. Yeah. But what you still have is Brett McGurk and the team who are trying to deal with Iran's malign influence in Iraq.

And, you know, all due respect for what he's trying to do in Iraq, It seems like the Biden people are feeling like there's this tension where in order to isolate Iran and Iraq, they have to be tough in ways that means they're going to keep wasting time on the Iran nuclear deal.

Aaron 15:44

Well, I think, you know, I mean, I think that's right, actually. And I think the tension is it's over... I do think that the main thrust of Biden's Middle East policy is going to be three prongs, right? The first is going to be this global posture review that the Department of Defense is overseeing, which I think will ultimately lead to the fact that we are putting too many chips in the Middle East and needs to be reallocated particularly to the Pacific.

I think that's one. The second is how do you stabilize the region? And that's trying to facilitate an end to the conflict in Yemen. And downgrade the American involvement in Syria and focus U.S. policy on Iraq. And the way that you focus U.S. policy on Iraq is by sort of bringing together America's partners in the Gulf area to try and support the legitimate government in Baghdad.

And all of that is collectively designed to try and undermine Iranian influence. Now, I don't think that the Biden team will end up in a place where it's like anything that resembles the maximum pressure strategy. But I also think that they are concerned about being perceived as Obama 3.0 and focusing only on the JCPOA and not Iran's malign activities.

And so they're focusing on that, you know, right now. And so they're seeing the JCPOA return as kind of a reward for Iran rather than as a reward for the United States. And that's where I actually fear is that we've gotten ourselves into this cul-de-sac where we don't realize that the JCPOA is far more important than support for militias because nuclear weapons are far more devastating for U.S. interests than others.

Does that make sense?

Jeffrey 17:34

Well, I mean, it makes sense as a diagnosis of a policy that has gone awry, right? Because, you know, and maybe I am just too cynical, but... I don't see the long-term upside of Iraq as a country. You know, I don't... I understand the desire to try to fight Iranian influence in Iraq, but, you know, newsflash, I think Iraq is going to be a basket case for a long time.

And if we accept that that's true, then the idea that we would Sabotage other interests. And it wouldn't necessarily just be nonproliferation, but, you know, obviously letting the JCPOA collapse and letting Iran get a nuclear weapon, right, which is the outcome that I think we're heading towards. The idea of paying that price in what I think is probably ultimately a futile effort to build an Iraq that is free of Iranian influence, that strikes me as insane.

And it strikes me like the kind of thing that happens when you've given a person a problem to solve, like they've given McGurk this problem to solve, and he's going to try to fix it. But it's actually consuming all our other interests. And Ed, he can never show up and be like, hey, this is a fool's errand.

We should give up because that's like not his job. But someone in the process needs to say, you know, it's great that you want to fix country. I'm so pleased that you are willing to do this, but you are not going to be able to fix this country and we should only be willing to pay so much to do.

Aaron 19:35

Right. And I get the perhaps instinct to wait out the Iranians because you don't want domestic politics interfering in the negotiations, i.e. They're going to pursue maximalist positions because they're posturing before an election. It It really does, just to bring it full circle, it really does frighten me because you can end up with the worst team on the other side.

And I think, you know, to talk about your, you know, we were talking earlier is that we are actually up against the timeline. You know, the timeline is, you know, maybe the timeline is maybe tiered. It's the expiration of the Band-Aid that the IAEA negotiated with the Iranians. It's the creeping up of their stockpile of LAU. And then you have to factor in one of the things that we talked about in this podcast a couple of weeks ago, which is the trajectory of Iranian developments on this ballistic missile program and all over the place.

This is not like a cost-free program. Waiting is not cost free. Every single day that passes by makes it more difficult to try and get back to where we were in 2016.

Jeffrey 20:44

It's just remarkable to me that, you know, what are we now? 18 years later, we are still tossing interests on the funeral pyre that is Iraq. I mean, it's like, well, you know, we can't have a – we can't solve the nuclear problem with Iran peacefully because, you know, we're still building a democracy in Iraq. Like, oh, for f***'s sake, stop.

We lost. It's over.

Aaron 21:16

I'm going to be a bit more optimistic than you. I mean, maybe I'll look like an idiot and we can reverse. I don't think – I do think is that once the team is in place – There will be a concerted, top-down effort to rejoin the JCPOA. And I still think that the mechanics of rejoining are relatively straightforward.

But I also am worried that if that's a month from now, the pressure on the Iranian side actually makes that More difficult, even if there is a desire for them to go. And so I wish we were going faster, although I'm sympathetic to why you can't go fast.

Jeffrey 21:53

I mean, I will tell my favorite story from North Korea, which is the Clinton people were closing in on a missile deal with North Korea. And anytime I say that, people object. They say, well, they weren't close to a missile deal. They were close to a deal. They were just close to a deal at the time we would not have liked.

But a deal that, in retrospect, would be much better than what came after it. And Clinton ran out of time. And so Colin Powell, pretty early on in the Bush administration, said, we're going to pick up where they left off. And that pissed Bush off. And he wanted to do a policy review because he didn't like that view of continuity.

And the policy review basically ended with something called the bold approach, which was pick up where Clinton left off, but just with a new name. And they were going to go ahead and brief it to the North Koreans. But there was some stuff over the summer and it kind of got pushed into the fall and then there were planes into buildings and in the wake of that Bush said the axis of evil thing and suddenly it was a whole year That had just been wasted with atmospherics and people yelling at each other.

And they get back to the summer of 2002, and they're ready to re-engage with the North Koreans. And by then, it becomes clear that the scale of North Korea's enrichment effort was much larger than we realized. And we had a new crisis. And ultimately, it's that intelligence that leads to the collapse of the Greek framework. So they thought they had all this time.

Right. Like they thought they had time to do a policy review and then to take it to the North Koreans and work it out. And a combination of stuff the North Koreans did. Stuff that Osama bin Laden did and self-inflicted stuff that Bush did. Combined to make that impossible, they had far less time than they. And so I just, you know, I worry about that same scenario here.

I worry about the Iranian presidential election producing someone impossible to deal with. I worry about, you know, what happens if the Supreme Leader drops down? You know, I mean, he's like he is of a certain age and health that he has. He's in fur. He's in fur. You know, this is a this is a this is a what?

Oh, you know, he's not he's not exactly Prince Philip, but this is a month to month, week to week kind of thing. Right. I mean, are you counting on him being in office three years from now?

Aaron 24:17

No, and the JCPOA doesn't count on him being in office. The entire agreement is premised on eventually he'll die, and 25 years from now, maybe we'll be able to reset.

Jeffrey 24:27

So you can have a new president, you can have a new supreme leader, you know, something could blow up, someone could get killed, you know, Biden is no spring chicken, Biden could get sick, you know, you just, oh, don't waste time. I got you. No, I get it. Four years goes by like that. I got three kids.

Trust me. I know.

Aaron 24:54

Do we want to figure out what, you know, basically what they did with the IAEA for listeners before we wrap up here?

Jeffrey 25:01

Yeah. I mean, it's very unclear. As far as I can tell, Grossi has said that the impact of Iran's moves is negligible for declared facilities. I think he said practically negligible. But that it's all of the special aspects of the JCPOA have ended. So there's no real-time monitoring.

Aaron 25:24

God damn it.

Jeffrey 25:25

I hate it.

Aaron 25:27

Like I'm muttering into my breath because it's so bad.

Jeffrey 25:29

Go ahead. However, Iran has agreed to save the data for a few months. And so if we get a deal soon, then Grossi says they'll just go back in, and even though they haven't had access to the data, the data will have been saved, and they'll be able to look at it and maintain the continuity of safeguards.

Of course, the fear is that we take too long, or you get a new president, or the Supreme Leader drops dead, or, you know, whatever, just they change their freaking mind, and when that deal ends, they hit delete, and then you have that break in continuity, and you have no idea how many components were produced. You really don't know a lot of different things that happened.

And then that, that I think is kind of interesting.

Aaron 26:15

So they're self-inspecting. Oh, stop. I always like to watch that. I'm so angry about that.

Jeffrey 26:21

You know, a colleague of mine sent me a note about something that came up when the self-inspection debate was happening, where it was like, wait, don't the Brazilians take their own pictures of their centrifuges and give them to the IAEA? And was like, yes, they do. And yet not a single person in the world complains that Brazil self-inspects.

Aaron 26:42

Can I ask you one last question before we sign off here?

Jeffrey 26:45

Anything for you, Aaron.

Aaron 26:46

You know, this is the second go-around here, right? It's the same debates, right? Pro and for, fix or nix, all that stuff, right?

Jeffrey 26:53

Oh, yeah.

Aaron 26:56

Groundhog Day. I find myself just having no patience for the nixers. Sorry, for the fixer-nixers or the... Sorry, the fixers are nixers. The fixers are cowardly nixers.

Jeffrey 27:10

The fixers, like Mark Dubowitz, are people who are too afraid or unable to defend their actual position. I agree. Which is that they want to kill the deal. And you'll be like, oh, you're calling me a warmonger. Yes, you support the violent overthrow of the Islamic Republic. And that's fine. That's an acceptable, if insane, opinion. But why are you such a wussy that you can't say it?

Aaron 27:40

I agree. Why? I totally agree.

Jeffrey 27:41

Why? You know, he makes like, what, like $400,000 a year. More, I think.

Aaron 27:47

With that kind of cash, you'd just be like,

Jeffrey 27:50

Yeah, of course I support the violent overthrow of the Islamic Republic. I mean, do you know how many people would support truly insane ideas for 400 grand?

Aaron 28:01

I think you're lowballing them. But my point of this is by saying... I just don't have the patience anymore, so I'm not even engaging any longer. Oh, no. The debate is with ourselves.

Jeffrey 28:13

Well, it's not— The debate is— I mean, the reason I make fun of him is their interventions are not in good faith. Right?

Aaron 28:24

Yes.

Jeffrey 28:24

So when you debate with them, and it's like, well, we could fix the deal. Like, what you would discover is when you tried to fix the deal, then they would still have problems with it. And so it's a waste of time. I mean, that's what Gary Seymour discovered, right? Remember, Gary Seymour was running United Against Nuclear Iran, and I think he believed that these arguments were in good faith.

And then the JCPOA came out, and Gary writes an op-ed about how, like, well, you know, it's a pretty good deal. And he's the president of United Against Nuclear Iran, and they won't distribute his op-ed. Do you remember that?

Aaron 29:01

I do.

Jeffrey 29:01

And we trolled them for like, I certainly did, for like a couple days on Twitter before then he had to resign. And it was like, oh, we actually aren't united against a nuclear Iran. We're united against Iran and the nuclear thing is like a convenient stalking horse for the other thing you want. But like, I didn't sign up for that, you know?

Aaron 29:21

Right. No, no.

Jeffrey 29:24

Yeah. I mean, I would like all, I would like every country in the Middle East to be nuclear free.

Aaron 29:28

Yeah, and self-impose caps on missiles and not do nasty things. I also want my son's school to be a little bit longer so I can get through a few more emails before I have to leave to go pick him up. As I always tell my son, you can't always get what you want. Mick Jagger told me that.

Jeffrey 29:43

How about a pony?

Aaron 29:44

I don't actually want a pony.

Jeffrey 29:48

It's a lot of maintenance and upkeep and I don't have the land for it. No, I mean, I take your point. I mean, if Donald Trump was good for one thing, I think it was stopping the incredibly self-destructive tendency of many liberals to insist that they were being engaged with in good faith when it was clear that it was not raining, someone was pissing on their back.

Aaron 30:21

I think that's a good place to end. What do you think?

Jeffrey 30:23

I got nothing more to say.

Aaron 30:26

Yeah, neither do I. We've made our point. The point is, don't wait. Just go. We've already done the hard part. The hard part was already done. And so let's go.

Jeffrey 30:38

Hey, you know what? It's going to be a little politically painful. That's why you'll probably get a Nobel Prize for it.

Aaron 30:45

That's right. And if you want the backstory on all this, check out Jeffrey's podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts, it's called The Deal. Season one will tell you what happened. Season two will all live in real time. Episode one is out, and it will intersperse the history with current events to tell us what the hell's going on.

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