Wasted Opportunities with the JCPOA

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

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

Aaron Stein 0:22

And I am Aaron Stein, Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Good to see you, Jeffrey. It is good to see you.

Jeffrey 0:32

I am... Happy, happy to be here in California.

Aaron 0:40

Yeah, I don't see any beautiful sunshine. I don't see the famous whale view. I do see a drop ceiling and you lit by sort of weird lights above your head. So you kind of look like you're dropping down from a UFO.

Jeffrey 0:54

I am in my office for the first time in months, and I have been slowly cleaning it out. It's a pigsty in here.

Aaron 1:05

Well, it's a sign of genius. Unlike what's going on with the Iranian nuclear program, or at least the Iranian nuclear negotiations, I think we're in a little bit of trouble. Oh, we are so f***ed. It is so frustrating. Okay. There was a good article on War on the Rocks questioning assumptions, and I was like, that's a good piece, but I still think we're going to get back to this.

And now I'm like, nope, I am no longer optimistic about this.

Jeffrey 1:34

Yeah, so for listeners, there are two particularly distressing bits of news that have come out. One bit of news came via Israel. I guess Bill Burns, the director of the CIA, was visiting Israel and apparently members of his delegation, that's how Haaretz reported it, explained to the Israeli counterparts that they do not expect that the discussions underway will result in Iran returning to compliance and the United States returning to compliance with the JCPOA.

And that is linked to a very frustrating story. It's wonderful reporting by Natasha Bertrand and Nicole Goethe at CNN, but a very frustrating story that says U.S. officials are beginning to say that there's no point anyway because they're not going to be able to get back to a year breakout time.

Aaron 2:32

So it's not great.

Jeffrey 2:36

Yeah.

Aaron 2:41

It brings us back to something that we've talked about on this podcast a lot, and will probably be the focus of this discussion too, is this sort of myopic focus on breakout as being the sole metric through which you judge progress on the Iranian nuclear program. I agree, the story is very well reported, but if that is the sole reason, as reported, or one of the reasons...

Hindering U.S. willingness to make further concessions to come back into compliance with the deal, it's at best misguided and I think at worst irresponsible.

Jeffrey 3:16

Yeah, I think I I want to just start by putting a kind of focus on the core problem here, which was a problem we did a podcast about, which is the Biden people fuck this up because they waited too long. Yeah. Biden came into office and they were being very timid. And partly, you know, when we say they, you know, it wasn't really they.

There were a lot of Trump holdovers, a lot of a lot of people who, you know, see themselves as nonpartisan civil servants. So, you know, it wasn't the full Biden team, but pretty much early on. The reflexive position of the U.S. government was that Iran should come back into compliance and then we would see about coming back into compliance ourself.

And that seemed to be all backstopped with this abso-fucking-lutely insane thought that with an Iranian presidential election coming up, you wouldn't want to wait. I mean, you wouldn't want to do anything early. You would want to wait for it because you might get somehow like a better deal or a more durable deal, which, you know, was so frustrating because I am now old enough.

That I remember when the Europeans didn't like negotiating with Rouhani when he was the negotiator in 2005. And they decided that, you know, well, there was an election coming up. So why hurry? We should just wait. And then they got Ahmadinejad. And nothing happened for a decade. So... You know, when the Biden people were sort of making this claim that like, well, you know, you might want to wait and see and, you know, good things could happen.

It was like, oh, it is totally unforeseeable that this could go sideways unless you were alive in 2005, in which case it is totally foreseeable because it's exactly what happened.

Aaron 5:13

Yeah, I would say in terms of like government time, they moved quickly. But I think that they could have moved faster if it was made a higher priority or if we had gotten out of our own way about being cautious. Because I do think that the original caution about just diving headfirst back into this, in addition to staffing problems and all that stuff that goes on, was the political optics surrounding it, right?

It wasn't just about policy. It was about the politics of looking weak on Iran as you take back over.

Jeffrey 5:43

Yeah, I think that's right. I think the people who were opposed to moving forcefully to get back in the deal, or at least just moving first. They tended to view the JCPOA as a reward we were going to give to Iran and that Iran's behavior would need to warrant it, which, of course, is like the most f***ed up way to look at a diplomatic agreement possible.

Aaron 6:07

Because they saw the sanctions relief, right? It was the sanctions relief. It's that corner. Go ahead. Sorry, let me catch up.

Jeffrey 6:13

No, I know. But it's just so frustrating because... It's just such a childish and stupid way of looking at the world, and yet it's so common. So I guess I can't, I mean, maybe it's me who's bizarre, but it's such a dumb way of looking at the world. But they were so focused on that idea that it took them a while to, it took other people a while to elevate that up to Biden's level when it does look like when it got elevated to Biden's level, he was like, no, no, no, we campaigned on getting back in this thing.

We want to get back in this thing, like figure it out. But it seems like that just took too long. And there were too many people who, as you say, were timid because they were worried about the political consequences of this. And so, yeah, they were pretty fast for government time. But like people are cautious. And this is just a case where they didn't they didn't have that time.

Aaron 7:04

No, I think that the view that this is a reward for Iran coming back into compliance, i.e. That they would get sanctions relief. Overlooked the reward for us, which is the reimposition of more clarity and more restraints on their nuclear program that we could guarantee out for however many years now, basically out to 2039, 2040, whenever that last sort of provision falls off of the original JCPOA and just leaves us with normal safeguards and provisions.

Jeffrey 7:39

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it just seems it was such a simple deal. Sanctions relief for limits and monitoring on their nuclear program. And, you know, the problem was, which it was all along, there were a lot of sanctions that were being put on Iran nominally about its nuclear program. But people were happy to have those sanctions because they hated Iran for other reasons.

And so those people did not want those sanctions to come off, even though. You know, you could never have gotten those sanctions on Iran for its shitty behavior in Yemen or its shitty behavior in Iraq or, you know, wherever. But once the sanctions were on, there were people who preferred squeezing the regime to solving the nuclear problem.

Aaron 8:27

Well, should we talk about the money quote in the CNN thing? Perhaps why we're a little bit irritated because it brings back the whether or not this is worth it if you can't get a specified time on breakout.

Jeffrey 8:38

Yeah, let me mute my mic so I don't scream when you read it.

Aaron 8:42

Yeah, I mean, so I wouldn't call it a direct quote in the piece, but it's hinted at, and I'll read right now from the piece. So officials now believe, this is from the piece, officials now believe it would take far less than a year, the breakout center codified in the JCPOA for Iran to produce enough nuclear material for a weapon.

Dot, dot, dot. Hope has slowly been fading, said another person familiar with negotiations, since it became clear that a deal would not be struck before Iran's election. That timeline was the US's original goal, but significant sticking points remained, like the scope of sanctions relief, with the US and allies arguing that they can only lift sanctions connected to the nuclear deal, not penalties associated with human rights abuses, conventional weapons violations, or other issues.

The story goes on. You can all read it. But I think... The thing that it hints at is the stuff that we're talking about with sanctions relief, but also this reference to breakout time. So I think there's two issues at play. Now, I know you're quoted in the piece, Jeffrey, so you may have heard some of this from the reporters.

But just reading between the lines when I read that story, I think that there's three interrelated things. One is that in response to the American withdrawal, the Iranians have been upping their own coercive pressure, one of which is that some of the sublimits on enriched uranium, both in purity and the amount that they have stored, they have done away with.

And so that breakout time has gone down below a year. The other is that some of these more advanced centrifuges, which the JCPOA had some restrictions on, but one of which would sunset, were starting to come up on that first sunset. So you could foresee or imagine a place where the US and Iran come back into compliance, let's say in a couple of months, close to 2022.

And then within a year, The first sunset comes along, right? And then Iran drops again below that fictional or at least notional one-year breakout time by virtue of its advancements and centrifuges and some of the terms of the JCPOA. So that political goal all of a sudden starts to rear its head is that the JCPOA isn't really blocking Iran's program.

That's how I think about it.

Jeffrey 10:49

Yeah, I think that's – What they're going through right now. And I mean, it's incredibly frustrating because the whole point of the JCPOA was to buy this time During which the agreement would work and you would build confidence in what the Iranians were and weren't doing. And the Iranians would have sanctions relief so they would have incentives to stay in the deal and on and on and on.

But of course, we we we all that up. Right. Because we we we pulled out the deal and tried to put as many sanctions back on as we as we possibly could under the Trump administration. And so, you know, now they're kind of picking up the pieces and that confidence building period has been squandered. And so you can sort of understand how the original logic of the agreement really is going to struggle.

But I think it's just important to step back and keep in mind that this idea of breakout, I mean, apart from the fact that it's stupid, which we will talk about in one second, but The idea that Iran would be compelled to live forever at a certain kind of level of technological backwardness, like that was just not going to happen.

You know, I think the thing that we discovered from the beginning of the nuclear crisis in 2002 up until the negotiation of the JCPOA is that we could stomp our feet and impose sanctions and scream like you can't have this. And they were just going to build centrifuges faster than we could add sanctions. You know, I still vividly remember giving a talk, you know, like 2005, 2006, where just whenever they had gotten to that, their first cascade of 164 centrifuges.

Yeah. And my crazy give away the store, give away the store was actually a phrase used. Proposal was let them keep the 164 centrifuges and they can run inert gas through them. And people are like, how could you let them do that? That's the camel's nose under the tent. So we constantly are showing up a day late and a dollar short, I think, to this agreement.

And that's why it keeps getting worse And so when I hear people saying, you know, like, well, we won't be able to sustain this year long breakout. It's like the Iranians have moved so far beyond that, that that that that's that's crazy. Like that is literally an insane thing. It is it is as insane as imagining you're going to go to a world in which they are at zero centrifuges.

Aaron 13:31

And breakouts just it's I mean, we've talked about this so many times that it's just a silly metric. I mean, it's just a basic math formula and it doesn't really reveal anything about intent. And the thing about the JCPOA, and I think we're stealing an original James Acton phrase, which is it was to increase confidence that we would detect sneak out, not break out.

And that's what we need to be worried about, which is increasing confidence that if they were to make the decision to break the terms of the agreement, right, clandestinely, and then surreptitiously build a facility in the mountain, you know, perhaps like they did at Fordow, that we could catch them soon enough and have time to react. And because elements of the JCPOA requires the declaration of associated nuclear sites, you can be more confident that you at least know where a lot of them are, if not everyone, at least a large majority of them, so that you could at least have a clearer picture of where you need to start looking.

That's always how I thought about this agreement.

Jeffrey 14:44

Yeah. I mean, the first thing to observe is there is no magic about the number 365 days other than it is a round year. You know, Iran was however many months away from a bomb for many, many years during the Iran nuclear crisis, right? And so the idea that you would need one year exactly to be able to respond is just totally arbitrary, right?

It doesn't take a year to bomb them. And honestly, a year is, as we have seen, not enough time for a diplomatic effort. So they just picked it because it was like a round number, but it's not, it doesn't correspond to anything. But at a deeper level, I think that makes me crazy is how absurd is the breakout scenario, right?

Because these facilities, even without the JCPOA, are still under IAEA safeguards. And so the thinking of the breakout crowd is that the Iranians are going to Publicly, visibly, either show the IAEA that they are reconfiguring the Cascades to build bombs or throw the IAEA out. Either way, they're essentially saying, we are building a bomb. And that they are going to proceed to go about that activity in these well-known open facilities that would, you know, immediately be the subject of attack, right?

You know, it's just it's just crazy to me that the supreme leader would be like, hey, I am going to build a bomb. I am going to do it here. You've got a year or six months to get your stuff together. Go for it. Like that is not what they're going to do. Right. What they're going to do is what they did, which is that they will attempt to build a facility in secret.

You know, they didn't they didn't declare the Kalai electric facility outside of Tehran. They didn't. Well, they they they avoided having to declare the Natanz facility, although I don't believe they ever would have declared it if it had not been revealed. They did not intend, I think, to declare the facility at Qom, the Fordow facility. You know, if they do this.

They're going to try to do it in secret. And so, you know, as we have said, and I know you have said it and I have said it, we've said it till we are blue in the face. The value of the JCPOA were the provisions that improved the ability of the IAEA and then indirectly the U.S. intelligence community Their ability to monitor Iran's nuclear program and look for covert facilities, backstopped by like a deal that was good for the Iranians, right?

A deal that created incentives for them to keep the capability they have as a latent capability rather than to cross that threshold. And it just seems crazy to me because, you know, we're going to be like, oh, you can't have a breakout time of less than a year. How could we sign a deal like that? And they're going to end up with like six bombs in a basement somewhere.

And we're going to somehow imagine that that is a better outcome than a monitoring agreement that has some measures against sneak out and, you know, some like lower breakout time. It's fucking insane.

Aaron 18:00

It is. Especially with all the hullabaloo about the nuclear archive, and sorry to swerve us off course here, but that was the scenario in the nuclear archive. That was the big reveal to me. Not that they were building a bomb in secret, but some of those documents were detailing what they conceptualized their deterrents as looking like, and it was that bomb in the basement.

And why would we want to go back to that place?

Jeffrey 18:24

It was the South Africa program.

Aaron 18:25

It was the South African model. And like, why would we go back to that? Like literally, why would we end up in a place where that is the outcome? I don't understand.

Jeffrey 18:35

I literally don't understand. It's good for myself and my merry band of open sorcerers.

Aaron 18:41

I mean, look, it's good for us because we can apply for funding off of this stuff, okay? Like, it's good for the think tank community, but, like, it's not good for mankind or humankind.

Jeffrey 18:52

No. No, it is not. No. Actually, somebody asked me the other day. They were like... It's like, oh, you must feel so much better now that Trump is gone. And I was like, well, I do feel better, but things are a little slow.

Aaron 19:08

Things are slow. It's a good slow.

Jeffrey 19:12

If they slow down further, that'd be just fine by me.

Aaron 19:14

Yeah, things can even go slower. They can do San Diego slow, which is the slowest city in California, if you ask me.

Jeffrey 19:21

I mean, I just think in closing, I just... Just I want to step back and just at a very general level say it is a miracle to me we got the JCPOA in the first place because all of the arguments about it in terms of why it's good and why it's bad seem to me to miss fundamentally the point.

You know, so the Obama people kept harping on the year long breakout. And that just struck me as like the dumbest reason to to sign the JCPOA. But like, whatever, it worked. And all the criticisms of it, like it paves the way for Iran to build a bomb, which is just like totally nonsensical. Right. It imposes limits.

And so it just from from a subject matter expert perspective, it is ridiculous. Baffling to me that we got so close to getting it right, given how just completely detached from reality our discourse about this agreement has been. So, you know, like, should we really be surprised that this is all collapsing like a house of cards? I mean, no.

Aaron 20:35

No. No, I don't think we should. Perhaps we, I mean, looking back and being, you know, self-critical, we were overly optimistic about that brief window before Iranian elections and our ability to organize and get moving really fast, you know.

Jeffrey 20:50

I mean, it would have been very simple. I mean, the president just had to stand up and say, I'm reentering the deal. I am prepared to waive some sanctions. We're going to work out a timeline in which we will waive all of the sanctions to come back into compliance in a manner that's consistent with the Iranians coming back into compliance, too.

I mean, it would have been a political hit, but he could have done it. He could have done it on day one if he really wanted or if he was surrounded by people who really want it. But I don't think they wanted to take the hit. I mean...

Aaron 21:21

And stuff I've heard is that basically Biden is cautious on Iran from a long history of dealing with them and doesn't really trust them. And so, like, the people who were working for them did reflect the wills of the commander in chief. And he was just a cautious dude about this. You know, I think that that's just as likely an outcome, too.

But the caution, too cautious, I think, may be the phrase that I would use because we had to go faster. Yeah do we want to mention the other big news that happened in the arms control wonk sort of extended patreon universe because we've beaten this iran thing to death we all know how we feel but there's the good news about the the the about features and the economist and all the cool stuff that happens in the slash show

Jeffrey 22:12

Yeah, I am so impressed. So The Economist had a cover story on open source intelligence, and there was some discussion of Decker Eveleth's find of the Chinese silos. There was some discussion of some different things that CNS has done. And sort of getting equal billing with the day job was the Slack channel. Yeah, our people.

Aaron 22:39

Yeah.

Jeffrey 22:41

I just I'm so impressed that this community has grown up around the initially the blog and now the podcast. And it's its own thing. You know, it's its own self-sustaining community of human beings who are doing really fascinating work of the kind that gets written up in The Economist. And so Patty Curley was was quoted. And I just I just.

You know, we can't take credit for what they do. So I just feel so fortunate to be associated with such a great group of supporters who have really built this thing on their own. I'm just impressed. So I think hats off to our supporters in the Slack channel.

Aaron 23:33

So before you and I met, I was a reader of the blog, right? And, you know... The blog was one of the original places where you had to read the comments. You know, before places stopped, turned off comments because it was the original crazy for Twitter, right? The arms control on comments were always good. And there was a lot of open store stuff that went into there.

And I think about the evolution, right? I think about some of your early work on Lavazan Shiad, you know, to keep it in the Iran stuff. And how that's evolved. And how that now brings in all these people that we interact with on a daily basis. And how they're all then collected in one place online. And this isn't even the plug.

It's just really fascinating to... To follow and really a testament to where this field is going. It's really a brand new field and, and, and like looking back on some of the stuff you were doing and it really was you, right? Like in a few others, you know, Corey Hinderstein being the other who guest on the show for the long last episode because the file got corrupted.

It's just been an amazing thing to watch how much this field has evolved in his littlest is what it's been about what, 15 years since, since, since, since it's really taken off.

Jeffrey 24:54

Yeah, yeah, and I would say really just the last 10 years where it's been really rapid. Yeah, exactly.

Aaron 25:02

It seems longer than it is when I was going through it in my head, but really the rapid buildup of it over the last decade.

Jeffrey 25:08

I sometimes look at some of the photo interpretation that I did in the kind of 2005, 2006 time period, and I sucked at it.

Aaron 25:17

Yeah, no, but like that's normal though, right? As you look back at some of your early work, you're like, you cringe. Yeah. But no, I get it. I understand what you're saying. It's just, it's great. And to see it get featured, I mean, you guys have been featured in New York Times and The Economist, Washington Post, all over the place.

And to see our community get some love, it was heartening. Yeah, it was awesome. I'm really pleased. So with that, I will do the plug now. So I will pivot. It's a good place. It's good people. And if you want to get involved with it, head on over to patreon.com slash jcwpodcast. $3 if you're a student, $5 if you're not.

And you too can have stories written up about you and The Economist. I think we've had mentions in The Washington Post as well. And become your own celebrity on Twitter. If you don't have the financial resources to do that, one of the ways to help out the show is to rate and review the show on iTunes, five stars, and write something nice about Jeffrey and I.

Because we appreciate it. So with that, Jeffrey... I have a date with the park on this August afternoon with my children. Hey, thanks for joining me, Aaron. My pleasure. Thanks, everybody, for listening.