The Last Days of the JCPOA

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

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 Dr. Aaron Stein, Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, here along with junior fellow Aaron Stein, who is watching cartoons in the background. So for listeners, if you hear Mr. Bean, that's my explanation. I'm sticking to it.

Jeffrey 0:37

Okay. Well, you know, we got to do what we got to do in this year of our Lord 2022.

Aaron 0:43

It's what we got to do. I was on vacation, so we got to give people what they want, which is more podcasts. Yeah, we've been slacking a little bit.

Jeffrey 0:52

I'm going to blame that mostly on, I don't know. You can blame it on me.

Aaron 0:55

You sent me a beautiful picture that, you know, made me feel a little dead inside. For listeners, I was in Montreux, Switzerland, which is a very nice place and happens to abut the Swiss wine region. Yes, it's very nice. Very good wines and keeping an arms control long fashion. We consumed a lot of them. And when I got back, I had my knee fixed.

And so I was on crutches walking around with a repaired meniscus or at least removed meniscus. That is my excuse for missing all these podcasts.

Jeffrey 1:28

And I'm in upstate New York, where we abut several gas stations that sell malt liquor.

Aaron 1:36

You know, malt liquor.

Jeffrey 1:38

I mean, if you think about it, it's really the same kind of situation.

Aaron 1:41

Malt liquor, I don't even know where to take that, except that, you know, a good Colt .45, you know, this is America, so like, let's roll.

Jeffrey 1:52

I know exactly where I'm going to take it, which is, do you know where you can get neither?

Aaron 1:57

Schmancy Swiss wine, nor a cool Thunderbird, that would be none other than the Islamic Republic of Iran, not the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where our president is currently, but relatively close. and because I am Philadelphia, in Philadelphia, boys to men, 90s reference, is this the end of the road?

Jeffrey 2:21

Oh, I think it's the end of the road. I was actually thinking that the dry locale would be Doha, which appears to be the literal, literal end of the road for negotiations to revive the JCPOA, even if the parties are not quite admitting it yet. So... Yeah, did you bring any of that wine home? Would you like to pour a little out for the JCPOA?

Aaron 2:46

No, for the sake of this podcast, we should pour out some of our Colt .45 because it certainly seems like we, if listeners want to go back into the archive, we were giddy, happy, positively enthused by the terms of the original JCPOA. I remember reading it, and that seems like a very long time ago.

Jeffrey 3:12

Ah, yeah. Well, you know, it was too good to be true, Aaron.

Aaron 3:15

Pour one out. This, this is why we can't have nice things. Nice things. This is true. But I think for listeners, we are a little late to this, but we thought it was important. The U S and the Iranians indirectly in Doha seem to have laid the final offers on the table and both walked away from those final offers with those offers still on the table, but neither side

Jeffrey 3:42

Really eager to take it and so it seems like we're in a stalemate yeah and i mean i think you know obviously we are not formally at the end of the road in the sense that the parties are not saying that things are over but doha itself looked like pretty much a hail mary because you know the iranians are refusing to meet with the u.s because the united states is It's actually not exactly not a party to the JCPOA, but the US says it's not a party.

There was no withdrawal clause, but you know, hey, whatever. And so the EU had to actually carry notes back and forth between the two sides. And I, you know, I don't think there was much chance of a breakthrough, but if there was going to be one, I think we would have seen it by now. And my... My sense is, and Biden came close to admitting this the other day, my sense is that both parties are now firmly in the camp of making sure it's the other that takes the blame for what is the inevitable collapse of the agreement.

Biden didn't say that, but basically he was asked, You know, so what do you think of your giant fiasco? And, you know, his argument was, well, it's not a fiasco because the Iranians are isolated and the Iranians are taking the blame. And any time that you're like actually vocalizing your sense that your success condition is that the other side takes the blame for the failure of things, I think that's probably a pretty good sign that the clock has run out.

Aaron 5:12

Yeah, the it's not me, it's you bit is a bit tired by this point, because I do think, again, we're going off open source reporting. I do think that there was a sense in the US, and I think a genuine one, is that the Iranians weren't actually like prepared, or at least weren't negotiating completely in good faith.

But at least what it seems like is the final sticking point, which is the designation of the IRGC. You know, that's a domestic politics issue on both sides.

Jeffrey 5:41

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you know, it is extremely hard to tell. I mean, as you and I have talked about before on the podcast, when Richard Nephew and Arianne Tabatabai left the negotiating team, you know, a lot of the reporting kind of implied that they were like these right-wing lunatics who, you know, were against a deal, which I think is just absurd.

You know, the way I interpreted their departures, and I want to be clear, it's how I interpreted it, was that, you know, I think that there was probably some Concerned that the Iranians weren't really interested in reaching a deal. So why would you continue on? I don't feel like throwing stones at Rob Malley. It's his job to continue on.

I'm glad that they gave it the old college try. You know, if, you know, if the referee indicates there's still a few more minutes of stoppage time here, I, you know, keep trying to kick the ball in the goal. But it does seem to me that the domestic politics in both the US and Iran have shifted I mean, they were never super great in favor of this deal, but I think they've shifted pretty decisively, decisively against it.

I saw the other day on Twitter, you know, a very hawkish Iranian account put up sort of mirror images of Neville Chamberlain waving the Munich Agreement right next to Javad Zarif waving a piece of paper with some of the JCPOA on it. And I think that's probably a pretty good indication for where a lot of elite opinion in Iran is at the moment on this issue.

Aaron 7:25

Well, the Neville Chamberlain reference would be good on Fox News in terms of fodder. So in that case, the two sides deserve each other. I think talking about the domestic stuff, to bring this back to when we first read the JCPOA, For people who actually do this for a living, the disagreement with domestic politics were never sort of like about aspects of the deal that were bad for proliferation issues.

It was always about, well, we just don't like making a deal with the Iranians and vice versa, right? And so like the domestic politics ultimately consume this thing to the point where even resuscitating it, right? Was always beholden to changes in the U.S. political environment because the other side, at least the Republican Party, was pledging at every turn to overturn it as soon as they were in office.

Jeffrey 8:28

Yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple of pieces here that are worth exploring. One is the... Obvious fact that if you were the Iranians, how could you ever agree to any deal, knowing that there is a significant chance that Joe Biden is going to lose in two years, and that the deal that you reach is going to be torn up and tossed aside again.

And, you know, it's not cost free for them to agree to deals. You know, like people don't Often agree to things cynically. If you want to make a diplomatic deal with the great Satan, like you're sticking your neck out in the Iranian political system. And like, who the hell is going to do that at the current moment?

And the other thing is, you know, it's not, you know, the Biden administration has basically done everything that the FDD crowd wants it to do. They've refused to delist the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization. They've taken a very hard line throughout the entire process. They have treated this agreement like it is a reward to give to the Iranians rather than something that would be in our interest.

And, you know, those people are partisan Republicans and they still hate them. And, you know, it's just it is the classic argument. Annoying thing about Democrats, which is they care deeply about the opinions of people who A, will never vote for them, and B, who are like not even sincere in their criticisms. Because I, you know, like I lived through the run-up to Iraq.

Like these people are not going to be happy, you know, until the 101st Airborne is in Tehran getting blown up with IEDs like in 2003. Like they don't think that was a bad decision.

Aaron 10:20

I mean, yes, that's true.

Jeffrey 10:21

Like, they think that that was a successful example of both outside groups pushing U.S. policy in a positive direction, and they still believe it was a positive direction. Like, you know, sometimes they stick their heads down because they sound like morons when they say it. But like, that is the outcome they want. So, you know, like, I just, I don't know.

The Biden people baffle me.

Aaron 10:49

Let me ask you a question. I mean the Iranians in their efforts to sort of play hardball with the US were kind of like, I don't know, perplexing in themselves in that they were – it was an obvious thing that they were trying to do in that as the US ratcheted sanctions, they were ratcheting their levels of enrichment or some sort of testing around the edges of the agreement or at least in some cases violating the agreement to the point where it became impossible for the Europeans in the agreement – To sort of like, I don't want to say give them cover, but to say like the Iranians were like upholding their end of the agreement as just the U.S. that was outside of it.

Do you know what I mean? And so like in that sense, that's what I keep talking about. It's like we deserved each other because they did their part to piss all over their own shoes.

Jeffrey 11:35

Yeah, I mean, my sense is that the, all of those tit for tat measures came during the Rouhani period. And I think they felt like they were backed into a corner. Right. That they couldn't, Just sit there and watch the US walk away from the agreement and then sort of still adhere to the agreement while getting none of the benefits.

Right. And, you know, obviously that strategy did not work and it was never going to work, except it possibly worked in a domestic sense. But then ultimately, right now you have the Raisi administration, which is much more hawkish and I think does raise significant concerns. It certainly does for me about whether this particular administration in Iran would work.

Be at all interested in returning to the deal. And then, you know, you have this whole other question of like, where is the supreme leader on all this stuff, right? Like he is the supreme leader after all, right? He allowed the Rohani people to do this. He's allowing the Raisi people to pull back quite a bit. But like where his actual views are, you know, I think it's quite difficult.

It's quite difficult to know. And so, you know, If you imagine the decision-making of all the administrations involved, whether it's Trump and Biden or Rouhani and Raisi, as disastrous as their decision-making is in terms of the outcome of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, It's not clear to me that their decision making was disastrous in terms of what they actually cared about, which is to say, in Trump's case, satisfying a particular element of his base.

In Biden's case, being terrified of that particular element of Trump's base and sort of doing whatever they say. In, you know, Rohani's case, limiting the damage. And, you know, in Raisi's case, either making sure the U.S. gets blamed. Or like building a fucking bomb, which, you know, is kind of where I think the story ends. Although, you know, that's the North Korea analyst in me talking.

Aaron 13:44

Right. Well, so, I mean, so, I mean, we should say that their tit for tat elements have brought them closer. And again, we do not like breakouts. I'm on this, but has clearly demonstrated that there was no like technical reason why they couldn't quickly build a buff. Right.

Jeffrey 14:06

Right. I mean, one of the things that's driving me crazy is the big argument now coming from the regime change crowd, which to be clear, the regime change people did not like the JCPOA, not because it was a bad deal, but because it took regime change off the table. And their hope is that by taking the deal off the table and making the nuclear issue salient again, that they will be able to use that as a regime change argument in the same way that they successfully did against Saddam.

Correct. They're wrong about that, I think. Dead wrong. Right? That this is not going to be like we're not going to invade Iran like we did Iraq. This is going to be like North Korea. The Iranians are just going to build a bomb, but like whatever. But their new argument is now plan B. We have to have a plan B, which by plan B looks a lot like it was actually plan A, right?

Aaron 15:00

Well, in the absence of choice, you need plan B.

Jeffrey 15:05

Right. And let me say, I mean, I'm really, you know, to just to really just like vent my spleen, my member of Congress, Jimmy Panetta, who's generally a pretty good member of Congress, you know, is absolutely flirting with these people, literally co-sponsored a meeting of these Plan B people. And so I sent them, I sent the office an explanation.

Aggravated email, to which I did not get a response, I might add. I did not even get the thank you for your interest in national security. We'll see if I get a Christmas card. I have to say, I was mad about the meeting. I still think he's a pretty good member of Congress, all things considered. I'm not like I'm going to vote for the lunatic Republicans or anything against him, for God's sakes.

The choices have become far clearer in 2022, but okay. I still think he's a force for good. I don't like one meeting he co-sponsored. What are you going to do? But, you know, like... Plan B is a fantasy. There is no plan B. And what I loved, you know, we were talking off pod about this article in the New York Times about the internal debate in Israel, which is like the internal debate in the US, which is to say politically, it's very popular to be against the deal because why would you make a deal with these evil, scary Iranians?

But then when you get into like the bureaucracy where people are actually responsible for like, I don't know, fixing this problem, everyone is like, Oh my God, there is no plan B, right? And so there are things in the New York Times story that sort of explains why there's a big constituency inside the Israeli military that wants a deal, even though the political leadership is against it in some aspects of the military and the intelligence community are against it.

But there were two quotes that I really thought were just incredible quotes. That I wanted to read. In a series of interviews in recent weeks, officials on the military side said that the new chief of the IDF's Intelligence Corps and his aides are arguing in internal discussions that any deal, even one with major flaws, would be better than the status quo with Tehran making rapid progress in its nuclear program.

Aaron 17:32

Yes. I mean, what's there to add to that?

Jeffrey 17:36

No, no deal is not that they stop. We learned this at the agreed framework with North Korea. No deal is they finish the bomb. That's right. And the second one, which really goes, I think, to the just insanity of plan B, is that the people who are arguing for no deal are Ultimately believe that no deal means the sanctions go back on and this campaign of sabotage continues and there's this enormous pressure.

Aaron 18:12

But the counterpoint to that is in the article. Israeli officials admit that the sabotage campaign has had very little impact on the trajectory of the program.

Jeffrey 18:29

Yes. So that's not working. Right. And so in response to the argument of, oh, well, there will be all these sanctions and we'll do this sabotage. There is, yes, the officials admit that the that the sabotage is not really working, which, by the way, we can see.

Aaron 18:43

Yeah.

Jeffrey 18:43

Right. Like they blow stuff up and then the Iranians rebuild things and, you know, they continue enriching. So like, OK, you're not achieving anything. But I think this is the really important point. In contrast, military intelligence officials argue that if a new nuclear deal is not reached, the US and Europe will abandon the topic, which is like 100% what's going to happen.

Aaron 19:08

I mean, there's no number higher than 100%, but it's so firm in my mind that this will just fall to the back burner and it will not be a salient issue.

Jeffrey 19:18

It will become exactly like North Korea, which is every time you tell the administration, my God, they're deploying a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons. We have to do something. The administration says, not touching that with a 10-foot pole. All that is going to do is I'm going to get the stink of diplomacy on me, which, you know, presidents inexplicably hate.

Talking with foreigners. And it's going to go nowhere. And I'm going to get nothing out of it. And it's just going to be a disaster. And that is exactly what is going to happen, is every time the Iranians are making some additional progress, yeah, sure, we might pass some sanctions. But it's not like the Chinese and the Russians are going to enforce them at this point.

No president is going to look at the JCPOA experience and be like, oh, I want to get some of that. Sign me up for round two. Like, the Israelis are going to be facing this problem alone.

Aaron 20:20

Oh, no, I know. And plan B will be sanctions and missile defense. Right. That's it. I mean, it's sort of the fulcrum around Biden's visit. It's like the positive tangible impact is that they may share early warning data. How long have you been working on this topic where the Gulf Arabs and Israel are going to do sharing of early warning data for missile defense and with the U.S. as the hub and spoke?

Has it been 20 years? 15? 10? I can't even remember when I first heard this idea.

Jeffrey 20:50

Sharing early warning data is the last refuge of someone who has no idea what to do. I mean, not that it's a bad idea to share early warning data. It's fine. It's fine. It is literally the equivalent of going like, oh, see that blip? You're f***ed. I'm really sorry about that.

Aaron 21:12

It's so old. I just read this stuff. I'll be like, oh, the Saudis may put some Israeli early warning radar. I'm like, cool. They're going to build the bomb. Yeah. Yeah. I'm all fine with theater ballistic missile defense, but the bomb is much bigger.

Jeffrey 21:32

By the way, this is a digression, but this is why I always laugh at South Korean officials when they're like, we're going to have to build a nuclear weapon to deal with North Korea's nuclear weapons. And it's like, oh, have you talked to the Israelis lately? They have nuclear weapons, and yet they somehow are not reassured facing the prospect of a mutual deterrent relationship.

Aaron 21:51

It is a slippery slope.

Jeffrey 21:53

Isn't that funny that Israel is terrified of Iran's nuclear weapons, even though Israel already has nuclear weapons? The nuclear weapons don't seem to be a magic wand. Can't just wave them and make the problem go away. So I always like, I mean, I just flat out laugh in South Korean officials' faces when they say that.

Aaron 22:15

Are you still invited to meetings? Less and less these days. I will say, so what I find funny about Plan B, so Plan B, to be less facetious, is sanctions, isolation, some sort of military buildup, either directly on part of the U.S. or facilitating the buildup of Gulf partners with Israel to include the sharing of early warning data.

Jeffrey 22:47

That'll really show the Iranians. Can you just imagine? Just imagine this meeting. Well, Supreme Leader, I think at this point, we know that we really have no choice. So having all these underground facilities, we are now going to complete construction of a small force of six nuclear weapons. We understand that this is going to bring a lot of pressure on you.

So we just want you to be prepared. There may be some more sanctions. And the U.S. is going to share early warning data with the Israelis.

Aaron 23:26

And the Israelis amongst the Gulf Arabs, but yeah.

Jeffrey 23:29

So it's a tough call. I don't know.

Aaron 23:32

Yeah.

Jeffrey 23:34

Wait, if we give up the nuclear weapon, will they stop sharing the early warning data? You think they'd do that trade?

Aaron 23:42

It'll be great. The Iranians can be observers to the fusion center.

Jeffrey 23:51

For listeners, Aaron is talking about one of my favorite moments at which I realized the Obama administration was hopeless when I asked them what their plan to resurrect the Joint Data Exchange Center, which was supposed to be the early warning center with the Russians that had laid moribund for like 10, 15 years. And they were like, oh, we have a plan.

And it turned out the plan was renaming it the joint data or dropping joint and renaming it the Data Fusion Center. So, yeah, we can go back to that old building in Moscow. We can get the Data Fusion Center and we can maybe we can.

Aaron 24:24

I think the point is.

Jeffrey 24:25

Do you mean like the Iranians or the Gulfies? It's a party. Without alcohol, apparently. Is that really a party? Can you do that? Could we could we it wouldn't be possible, right, to have no drinking in a Russian facility?

Aaron 24:39

I'm not going to touch that. I think sort of bringing this back is that I know you and your team watch them and they're not stopping because even as the quote-unquote sanction pressure has become more robust and in fact it's just the opposite that's happening. In addition to the JCPOA stuff, the The increase in the amount of fissile material they have and the purity of that fissile material, they also are continuing their own missile program.

Jeffrey 25:19

Yeah, so there are two bits of open source work we've been really focusing on with regard to Iran in the last couple of weeks. One is the enormous underground facility that Iran is building next to Natanz. Initially, when Iran started excavating the facility, it looked like it was going to be pretty small and the spoil pile was pretty tiny.

And over the past year, the spoil piles are enormous. We've actually been using synthetic aperture radar data to try to estimate their size, to try to work out what the footprint in the place would be. And Iran initially said that they were just going to use this facility to replace the centrifuge assembly facility that had been destroyed in an act of sabotage a few years ago.

But now they actually have moved the equipment For manufacturing some crucial centrifuge components to the facility, which I think they also have some in underground tunnels at Esfahan. And so, you know, we're watching, in addition to Fordow, the underground enrichment plant they have, right? They now have an underground... Capacity to produce and assemble centrifuges. And honestly, it's a really big facility.

And so if you told me that they did other stuff there too, I guess I wouldn't be totally surprised. And that's under like a really tall mountain. And so, you know, the idea of plan B is, If it has any teeth, it would have to be backed by a threat of military force. And just the reality is that Iran has responded to Israel's campaign of sabotage by just putting stuff underground where it's harder to get.

And so we've been sort of modeling the facility, working out how big it is, figuring out how deeply it's buried. And I, you know, I think the answer is that like Israel has like zero chance of attacking this facility if it comes to that. So no, they're not stopping. They're just actually hardening the system. And so this deal we had under the JCPOA, right, where they were not allowed to enrich uranium at Fordow because it was buried so deeply, it would have been a really hard target for the Now, not only do we face the situation where like, yes, they're enriching it at Fordow, They have moved all the upstream stuff.

I shouldn't say all, but a significant portion of the upstream stuff underground. And so, like, I don't think there's like a feasible military activity. And then, you know, there's the missile program. You know, the Iranians just tested the Zuljana again, which is a space launch vehicle. But it is a space launch vehicle that looks exactly like Israel's Jericho.

Right? Like, it's a solid propellant rocket, and the first two stages are identical. This is exactly the design of the Jericho series, which, you know, exists also as space launchers called Chivit. Now, I think the Zul'jan is probably not quite as capable, but, like, you know, this is a Country that could be North Korea, and some in a heartbeat. So you know, just looking at the open source, I, I, you know, I see a lot of support for what I always say, which is, if you liked walking away from the agreed framework with North Korea, you're gonna love walking away from the Iran nuclear deal. Well, you know, and I guess, you know, one last thing to bring up is, you know, it's something else that came up in that New York Times story, and I, I guess.

Aaron 29:03

It's another quote. It's like from the former deputy chief and head of operations of Mossad. It's a quote like the Mossad stole Iran's nuclear archive to provide evidence that Iran lied when they claim it did not have a military nuclear project. Those evidences were used to help persuade Trump withdraw from the nuclear deal. I only bring that up as sort of like as we ran to the end there because like if that was the rationale for stealing the nuclear archive and leaking it to everybody was to prove what everybody had already accepted, I don't get it.

Like I just don't know like what the overall rationale was even from Israeli hardliners to like making it more difficult to politically stay in the deal. I mean to the point where at least according to this New York Times story, Much like our own system, they're grappling with sort of the outcome of their successes in the 2018 withdrawal, from the 2018 withdrawal.

Jeffrey 29:58

I always say to my colleagues, when we are trying to understand the decisions of senior political leaders, that we make a mistake in assuming that they are like us and that they think about problems in the way that we do. Right. Because for them, I think this question of getting elected and being popular and having power and wielding it are inseparable from the question of what's good for the country.

Right. What's good for them and what's good for the country are mixed together. And I don't mean that like they're bad people. I just mean that like that I think is what that animal is like. And so I often think that these people who then have to be experts about all this stuff in the world, right? Like you need to know what to do about Iran's nuclear program, plus you need to know how to fix policing.

And it'd be great if you could deal with our financial regulatory environment. They, I think, are governed by really simple ideas about what's good for them, what's good for their career, and how the world works. And so I truly think that for the people around Netanyahu, it's as simple as the Iranians are liars. You can't make deals with liars.

You stand up to bullies. It's better to be stronger than to be weak. Well, Aaron is having a management issue with the junior fellows. And I don't think that there's really much more for us to say. So we're just going to take this one out to a slow jam from boys to men. And... And just say that, you know, in lieu of flowers, if you want to make a gift for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, you can go to our Patreon page, which is patreon.com forward slash ACW.

$3 a month if you're a student and $5 a month if you're a grown adult. So with that, Aaron, thank you so much for For joining me on this sad, sad occasion. I will.