Reviewing that Iran Deal

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

The bottom line is the State Department and the IAEA say Iran is complying with the terms of the deal. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk Law and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:25

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East.

Jeffrey 0:31

And we're re-recurring this because I'm about to lose my mind because I'm also babysitting.

Aaron 0:36

That's right. You're joined by two of the three junior fellows from the Lewis side of the family. Ollie's actually here too, but he's in the other room under the care of my parents because I'm in Los Angeles.

Jeffrey 0:45

Yeah. I was like giving Bob Kelly a hard time about arm barring his kid.

Aaron 0:49

And then I lost my mind when my son started ritually banging the door to aggravate me. That's right. He'd stop playing with his Legos. He wants to rip up your books. Yeah.

Jeffrey 0:59

Ah, so there may be some interruptions. So we're going to talk about the Iran nuclear deal today because the State Department has announced that they're doing a comprehensive review of the agreement. And Secretary Tillerson came out to make that announcement and then said some tough things about the arrangement. So I thought this was a good chance to take stock.

Aaron 1:18

Right. It's interesting because it started with a letter to Speaker Ryan where he said in the top paragraph, the letter certifies that Iran is complying with its obligations under the JCPOA, but then adds a notwithstanding and then links the – it seems to link the review towards Iran's Regional behavior, so therefore expanding the scope of the deal beyond arms control to nasty regional security issues.

Jeffrey 1:50

I think that is probably the place to start this conversation because we're about to discuss the politics of things, and the politics of this thing aren't really connected to the reality. So one of the questions that I was getting from reporters who were asking me about the review was, how do you think the Iran deal is working?

And the answer is both the IAEA and the State Department have released statements saying that Iran is complying with the terms of the agreement. So while there's a bunch of back and forth about whether the agreement is a good one or not, we do need to start by saying the official position of the IAEA and Rex Tillerson State Department is that things are pretty good.

Aaron 2:33

Right, from the letter of the deal, not from the broader stuff.

Jeffrey 2:36

Well, right. And ultimately, then that raises, I think, the question that we should talk about, which is if Iran is complying with the terms of the deal, why do we need a comprehensive review? And what's motivating that? Because, you know, I have this... Ongoing frustration with the nature of political discourse in Washington, which really I think was on display during both Mattis and Tillerson's confirmation hearing, which is to say both of them went out of their way to criticize the deal, because that was like the Republican thing to do, but when really pressed on whether they were going to ditch the deal, both of them sort of said, oh, no, no, no, we're stuck with it.

And I have this kind of ongoing frustration with the way domestic politics in the U.S. play out, where You know, Republicans cannot endorse agreements that Democrats negotiate. And so we all kind of have to play along with this fiction that like that Democrats and Republicans would get different results, which to me is crazy. Right. Because the reason the Iran deal looks the way it is has a lot to do with how many centrifuges the Iranians had and how much leverage they had.

And, you know, not whether you send Condi Rice or Wendy Sherman.

Aaron 3:47

Almost like this is a repeat of the Republican encroachment or attack on Obamacare.

Jeffrey 3:54

I actually – I tweeted that, right? Because it's like there's this – I mean, this is, oh gosh, poor people who listen to our podcast for arms control, but as somebody who studies public policy, I mean, it is a delicious set of ironies and misrepresentations. The health care plan that the Democratic Party wanted in the 1990s was a single-payer system like you have in Canada.

And the Republican alternative to that plan was Was a private insurance industry system with a mandate so that the risk pool was big enough so that private insurers could still make money even in a situation in which everyone had insurance. So ultimately, the Obamacare proposal is... Fundamentally a Republican alternative to the Clinton plan of the 1990s. And when I was at the New America Foundation, we had a health care team that worked really closely with Republican governors trying to get them to adopt precisely this kind of approach on a state-by-state basis.

And ultimately, this is what Romney was famous for in Massachusetts. But what really struck me about that is that is in many ways comparable to the conversation that we're having now, where when we have – when you have one particular political party – That basically is so frustrated with a president that they don't like, that they don't support the things that they used to say that they were for.

So the Bush administration, for example, would get very bent out of shape when you would accuse them of not wanting to negotiate with the Iranians. They would say, yes, we do. This is entirely a function of how difficult Ahmadinejad is. And I think a little bit in their defense, that's partly true, You know, because the Obama people didn't make it a whole lot further with Ahmadinejad either.

I mean, you really did have to have Hassan Rouhani in power. But then, right, like the GOP Congress watching them repeal Obamacare or fail to repeal Obamacare, it's like impossible to look at that and think like, oh, yeah, you guys would have gotten a better deal.

Aaron 6:17

Right. And I think it's something that we started with, you know, that prompted my joke about Obamacare is that you do inherit a certain set of realities. And then when you're presented with an opportunity to – I think what the JCPOA does is place considerable restraints on Iran's enrichment program. You take it. And then ultimately, it is a deal.

And so you have to give something away. And I think what the Republicans are bent out of shape about – and then there's confusion here, and we can get back to the Tillerson thing – is that it's not zero enrichment. And the sunset clause on the – let's call it the SWU, the number of centrifuges Iran can have after eight to ten years.

Would you say that is accurate?

Jeffrey 7:00

Yeah, I would definitely say that the – well, look, the agreement is imperfect because we waited a really long time to negotiate it. And the Iranians had a whole bunch of leverage when we did negotiate it. And so just apart from the terms – You're naturally negotiating an agreement with a party that is going to retain a significant breakout capability no matter what.

And so this is the argument I used to make about zero centrifuges, right? So yes, you're right. One problem with the deal is that they're allowed to retain a significant stockpile of centrifuges and that gives them a certain breakout capability. But I often would do the thought experiment, imagine it this way. Imagine that they agreed to zero enrichment.

But then said, you know, because we've agreed to zero enrichment, it's not like we need to sign the additional protocol. It's not like we need to have these extraordinary measures. So we're going to have just a standard old style safeguards agreement because we have zero enrichment. That would be the worst possible situation because we would have no confidence that they didn't have a secret centrifuge facility.

And given all the work they had done. Not just on a bomb program, but just generally the work they had done in the enrichment field, we would be terrified that there was an undisclosed facility with thousands of really advanced centrifuges out there somewhere.

Aaron 8:23

So we came into the negotiations at a disadvantage because they had – I can't remember that time. Was it 6,000 centrifuges? No, but that's what they have now. I mean they had way more than that.

Jeffrey 8:32

Oh, yeah. No, it was way more than that. It was like nearly 15.

Aaron 8:35

Nearly 15,000. That's correct. And then – Their red line was that they would not give in on the zero enrichment pledge. And so where the beauty of the deal comes in – and this is where this gets lost. The deal gets broken down into this – Bullpucky analysis on breakout capability, because it's easy for people to understand, is not that we turn the zero enrichment, sorry, we turn the continued enrichment Iranian red line into a piece of leverage for us.

We said, okay, but you have to set a cap of 6,000 centrifuges, of which only about 5,000 are actually enriching uranium because of their own secondary red line on Fordow, into we need to build confidence that you don't divert. And you saw this in Tillerson's statements at his confirmation hearing is that there's this idea that the deal is somehow a replacement to the nonproliferation treaty and even IEA safeguards.

Yeah. It's an excess. I mean it builds on that.

Jeffrey 9:37

Yeah, it's a very strange thing and I mean I think ultimately – Not to belabor the Obamacare comparison, but it's ultimately, I think, the difference between the political requirement of having something nasty to say about something your political opponent did and the reality, right? And so there is this continued argument in Tillerson's confirmation hearing, you know, he said, oh, well, the deal doesn't prohibit Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, like purchasing one, right? And and he ultimately has to walk that back and say he misspoke, but he still like tries to have it a little bit both ways. Like he doesn't fully admit he's wrong. He has to slip into like, well, there's some disagreement about it. But it's crazy, right? Because Iran is a member of the NPT, and Iran and the NPT requires you to have a safeguards agreement in force, and the Iran nuclear deal is

Requires Iran to have a stronger safeguards agreement in force than anyone else, right? It requires them to not only agree to the additional protocol, right, which is, as the name suggests, an additional safeguards agreement that is sort of the best level of safeguards we have, but then proceeds to, in a number of other areas, spell out in greater detail the requirements of the additional protocol and the safeguards agreement in general.

And so... It's just, it's incredibly frustrating because there's this... Criticism of the agreement as though it is a departure, right, from the NPT. I mean, there's this one of our local television stations had this thing on this conservative cartoonist in the Bay Area, and she had drawn this cartoon where like Iran is, you know, at a table, personified by the Ayatollah, and he's ordering from John Kerry, and the Saudis are like, I'll have what he's having. It's so silly. I can't stand those. It's so frustrating because like Yes, I would love Saudi Arabia to have the same safeguards as the Iraqi nuclear deal.

Aaron 11:35

Can I just divert again? The worst comes out of people like the Emiratis who are like, well, in order for us to get a nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States and the international community, we had to forego enrichment. But you allowed Iran to have enrichment. And therefore, why are there secondary standards? It's like, wait a minute, you're talking about a one, two, three agreement for the United States for peaceful nuclear cooperation, in which you chose to forego enrichment.

If you want the secondary inspections that Iran has to undergo, and you want to have a bogus little centrifuge program, by all means, have it. You know,

Jeffrey 12:13

Yeah, I mean, it's not like the United States is ever going to give Iran a one-to-three agreement, right? Like, it's just, it is, well, I will say some of our colleagues in the non-proliferation community, a term I'm using really quite broadly, because I don't really know that they really deserve to be called colleagues, but some people deliberately conflated peaceful nuclear cooperation agreements in which we provide technical assistance with this agreement in which we removed sanctions, right?

And just the idea that these two things are somehow the same is absurd. Yeah. And and yet the political requirements of opposing the deal were so great that you will find a whole bunch of people who allege to be experts who will deliberately blur those two things and will say with a straight face, yes, the Iran nuclear deal is is you know analogous to the one degree agreement we gave the UAE, but much more favorable

Aaron 13:05

Which is just so absurd as to be... Yeah, and I think a lot of the disinformation out there is built on ignorance. Well, A, about how basic safeguards work, right? Two, about how the additional protocol works. And then three, what did the agreement end up being? It was about 118 pages, wasn't it?

Jeffrey 13:27

Yeah, it's pretty long.

Aaron 13:28

It's long. And most of that is technicalities on how you move around on the inspection machine because it's far more comprehensive than what we take to be as the gold standard, which is the additional protocol.

Jeffrey 13:46

Right. Oh, I will always be frustrated – By that 28-day nonsense, because this to me is just a perfect illustration of one of the most perverse effects in public policy. The reality is, as you say, people don't understand how safeguards work.

Aaron 14:01

Well, I just saw this in Syria, but anyways, yeah.

Jeffrey 14:03

People don't understand how safeguards work. And so when you improve them, you don't get credit for fixing them. You get blamed for all the ways in which people's folk beliefs about safeguards are disappointed.

Aaron 14:19

It can't possibly just be a declaration.

Jeffrey 14:22

So the additional protocol is awesome in that it provides access to an array of facilities. But the reality is the additional protocol is imperfect because it does not put hard time limits. On that access. And so countries can stall and delay forever. We saw this. As the Iranians did. 2003. Right. So the Iran deal fixes that by putting hard time limits on when Iran has to respond to a request.

And how long they have to work it out before it becomes an issue. Right. And instead of people saying, congratulations, you strengthened the additional protocol, you finally put some hard time limits on, people are like, oh, every inspection will take 28 days. I know. And it's like – it is such a classic public policy problem though because – People are basically ignorant of the details, which is understandable because these are really, like, in the weeds.

But instead of, like, educating themselves about the details and sort of saying, like, oh, so this is imperfect, but it is an improvement. That's good. You know, they sort of say... But I saw some IAE inspectors on an episode of 24, and they were able to kick down doors. And you're telling me it's not really like that.

So now I'm going to be angry and upset, and I'm going to say this is a bad deal. Not because it's worse than other deals we've gotten, but because it's worse than my totally fictitious imagined reality. People privilege their fantasies. Which is just insane.

Aaron 16:04

It is. It is.

Jeffrey 16:05

But what is disappointing is Rex Tillerson has those fantasies.

Aaron 16:10

Yeah, that's where I wanted to go, but I wasn't sure if I should say it. It's like, yeah, he doesn't know.

Jeffrey 16:15

I mean, you know what?

Aaron 16:17

He doesn't know. We talked about this in one of the Donald and the Nuclears. He just doesn't know. And so when he doesn't know, He sort of falls back on what I call like the cramming for the test at the last minute. You know the basic Republican talking point about why the deal isn't good from their perspective.

And when you're asked a technical question, you don't have the answer. You can see them get crossed up and then they just sort of blurt out the line as if they crammed at the last minute for the test and got stumped on the essay question.

Jeffrey 16:53

It's totally true. And – And then this gets echoed. By the way, just so you know, Alma has picked up Jack Pritchard's failed diplomacy and has turned to Chapter 2, Confrontation Over Highly Enriched Uranium, and is now leafing through this little book.

Aaron 17:08

This is a young wonk in the making. All done.

Jeffrey 17:11

Yes, all done.

Aaron 17:12

But just to pivot, I mean, the talking points in this blurring of, you know, comparing the JCPOA to a 1-2-3... Blurring the inspection regime and the JCPOA versus the IAEA. And then now the notwithstanding dot, dot, dot in the letter, is this sabotage, you know, along the lines of what we were seeing through 2016? Yeah.

Jeffrey 17:38

So these are my, this is my big question because I actually said two contradictory things at the beginning of this administration. And those contradictory things are because I was thinking about two different groups of people. I definitely think that we are torn between two realities. One is that there are a bunch of people in this administration who know that the deal is in our interest and who are going to criticize it because that's what you're supposed to do as a Republican.

But they know damn well they couldn't have gotten a better deal and they're not going to walk away from it. And that's actually kind of what Mattis and Tillerson said in their confirmation hearings, although whether they believe it or not, it's hard to say. Tillerson certainly, I'm sure, is eager for Exxon to get in there. Did you catch there was that hilarious interaction where Tillerson said, I never lobbied for the removal of sanctions on Iran?

And Bob Corker is like, you called my office all the time.

Aaron 18:33

Yeah.

Jeffrey 18:34

And Tillerson had some lawyerly answer about how that wasn't that was, you know, trying to understand the implications of sanctions removal and not lobbying. And you could tell Corker was like, oh, OK, all done. Yeah, well, I'm we won't say which of our colleagues that is, but I'm all done with that person. Oh, this this is George W. Bush.

He was president.

Aaron 18:55

Right.

Jeffrey 18:56

He's undergoing a little bit of a renaissance, Alma, because he's been replaced by an even crazier person.

Aaron 19:02

Right. He's charming on late-night talk show hosts.

Jeffrey 19:06

He's charming on late-night talk show hosts. He maybe dances a little too much at funerals. And he paints lovely portraits. And so he's emerged as a kind of sensitive and introspective person who we think we may have misunderstood.

Aaron 19:21

Yeah. I'll admit to watching him on Jimmy Kimmel one night going, man, maybe it wasn't so bad. Jolting myself out of that reality saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It was that bad. We're still in Iraq.

Jeffrey 19:33

I think he's a bad president, not a bad person.

Aaron 19:37

I think that's a good way to put it. He seems like a good person.

Jeffrey 19:40

And it's a hard job. I mean, I'm not prepared to spot Donald Trump good person.

Aaron 19:45

Can we talk about the heavy water?

Jeffrey 19:48

Yeah. Well, okay. So let's close this thought out. But I have these two conflicting thoughts.

Aaron 19:53

Poor Scott is going to have terrible trouble editing this episode.

Jeffrey 19:56

On the one hand, there are the people like Mattis and Tillerson who I think know that this deal is in our interest. And they know that they couldn't have gotten a better deal. And they know that if we toss this thing overboard, they're going to spend the next six, seven years Trying to get it back, just like the Bush administration tossed the agreed framework for North Korea overboard and then spent the rest of their term trying to renegotiate a watered-down version.

So that's one group. But then there are people who I think take that too far and say, because that's true, this administration won't do anything crazy.

Aaron 20:28

I mean, I think we're going to conclude with this.

Jeffrey 20:31

But there are, you know, like, you know, Bush had John Bolton and, you know, Trump has Seb Gorka and Steve Bannon. And so God knows what they'll actually do.

Aaron 20:44

The anti-Iran animus that flows through this administration is really real. You know, and that's why the notwithstanding has really caught my eye.

Jeffrey 20:55

Well, and so we should talk about the regional piece and this is a good transition to it. But I think ultimately that's the point on which this whole conversation turns because that was Tillerson's real point. Yes, Iran is complying with this deal, but they're doing all this other stuff we don't like, which by the way is true.

Like that is a totally fair criticism. Yeah. And then there's this question of Mattis because when Mattis was nominated to be secretary of defense, there were a bunch of columns where people had this kind of debate because he really hates Iran. Yeah, they killed a bunch of his guys. Which is, again, like totally understandable. And so the debate was – Is he viscerally anti-Iran, which I think the Obama administration felt he was, and that was in part why they wanted him out of CENTCOM?

Or was he just hawkish, which was kind of Leon Panetta's view? Panetta kind of took the view that actually Mattis was a pretty good, reasonable, and pragmatic guy.

Aaron 21:59

I think that's right. I go with the Panetta view. I've never met the man. Okay, so Mattis strikes me more as a hawk than a guy who wants to rush head-on into war. I think that's right. But here's where I think where the broader regional piece comes into this is that they're looking for ways – because one of the things that gets sort of traded around in the right about the JCPOA is that the JCPOA took hold of broader Middle East policy – broader US Middle East policy.

Particularly in Syria, is that you can't push back really hard against Iran because we had a tenuous deal hanging in the balance that Iran could walk at any moment. And I think that there's probably some truth to that, although not as diabolical and nefarious as the right would have us believe. But nevertheless, I think that the pushback now will be to, quote unquote, reassert American resolve in the Middle East vis-a-vis Iran.

And that's where the notwithstanding comes from. And so you see this playing out in Syria and then, oddly enough, inside of Yemen, another quagmire, where I think the U.S. would like to try and play a more assertive role.

Jeffrey 23:16

Yeah, I have to say I was really struck by all of the back and forth about secret deals, which is like a reliable talking point. There was also claims about secret deals for the New START treaty and like anytime you don't like an agreement, you claim that they're secret deals so that you can object to things that you are inventing, right?

Right. You know, like a secret deal allows you to invent any detail you don't like. But what I was really struck by is there have been a lot of reports about that. But like the one thing that is potentially in fact a secret deal, although I think that's probably an unfair characterization, is this – precisely this idea that – While talks were underway in Oman, and then once the agreement got underway, I don't think there are any literal secret deals.

But I do think there was probably a reluctance to confront the Iranians at a time when we needed them to do this other thing. And that's not nefarious, right? Like, you know, like it would be insane to think that you have to like bomb the Iranians right in the middle of negotiating an agreement with them. But it does, I think, raise this broader question of now that we have a deal, now that we have the nuclear program managed for a period of time, right?

How do we want to use that period of time? And what kind of regional security structure do we want to put in place? And do we care about Iran's ballistic missiles? And do we care about their – Support for proxies. And I think the answer to all that is, yes, we care about that and we should do something about that.

And we shouldn't be so worried about the deal that we're not willing to confront them in other areas. And if we had like a sane, competent Republican administration, I actually think you might be able to improve on the deal by broadening things out. And my hope is that's what this policy review is going to be. But, you know, God knows what the Cheeto Jesus...

Aaron 25:03

Yeah. Well, look, I think the saving grace with Cheeto Jesus is that I don't think he even knows what JCPOA stands for. And so you have flexibility within, I think, the access of adults within the administration to actually improve upon elements of it. I agree that Now that the agreement is locked in and that as the State Department has just reaffirmed in addition to the IAEA that Iran remains in compliance, we don't have to tiptoe around what were very tenuous negotiations between basically seven parties.

Jeffrey 25:43

Yeah. I mean we had talked about this on the podcast. I was really frustrated they didn't do this. I really thought that – Clinton had an enormous opportunity in the campaign to say, hey, just FYI, I don't think there are any secret agreements, but if there were, I'm certainly not going to be bound by them.

Aaron 26:02

Yeah, to cut the legs out. Well, there were no secret agreements, but to cut the legs out from underneath the, at least that, that talking point.

Jeffrey 26:10

Well, not just the talking point, but even to then signal that, you know, maybe you thought you had a secret agreement. I mean, it may be that It may be that the Iranians, even if there's no secret agreement that the Iranians... Or some Iranians may have concluded that, you know, they could get away with stuff because we cared about the deal.

Which, by the way, is not a reason not to have a deal. It's just a, you know, it's a problem you have. But it's a problem that's easily solved because we replace presidents all the time, right? And it's like, well, that's the deal you had with that guy. But like, if it's not on paper, you know, I'm not responsible for it.

So I don't think of it just as knocking down the conspiracy theories. I thought of it as like a valuable thing you could do to signal to the Iranians that like... Okay, you got the nuclear deal with this guy and that was great. But if you had hopes for a broader transformation of the relationship, my expectations are going to be higher.

My expectations are going to be different. I'm going to need progress on this other stuff if you really want to see the relationship transform. So I don't understand why they didn't do that. And then my frustration is this administration isn't really doing that either because they feel so You know, as much as the Obama administration was wedded to protecting this deal, this administration is wedded to saying bad things about it.

And, like, nobody seems to be able to do the grown-up thing, which is just to say, look, this is part of the environment now. And so we're going to build on that and move on.

Aaron 27:37

Well, I think Matt has basically said that in his confirmation here.

Jeffrey 27:41

Well, Tillerson did too. But now, you know, Tillerson's having to, like, trot out and get all, you know, nasty.

Aaron 27:48

This is true. So here's my concern about this. The areas in which you push back on Iran are active combat zones, and I think that the desire to do so that you hear out of this administration makes sense in that the agreement's there, but now we need to push back, and the areas to do it are Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

But my question is, does that preclude from actually gaining control At least some modicum of stability inside the region, so that, you know, are your ambitions exceeding U.S. capacity with the commitment to dedicate forces? So can you really, really push back on Iran with sort of a symbolic 59 T-LAM cruise missile strike on an airbase, which, you know, makes sense within the deterrence mission to Syrian chemical weapons, but doesn't do anything to minimize Iranian influence in Damascus?

And if that becomes part of your goal and linked to, you know, You know, sort of broader strategy, do we really have the means to carry that out? Or are we getting ourselves involved in another tit-for-tat escalation scenario, you know, by trying to push back?

Jeffrey 28:57

Yeah, I don't want to imply that I think dealing with this broader issue of both the missile program and the regional security behavior is, you know, as simple as a strike. I mean, I, you know, ultimately, I'm the kind of person who thinks that Force is only valuable if it's married to some clear diplomatic strategy, right? So I tend to be supportive actually of doing more militarily in Syria, but at the same time, that's only valuable Just like sanctions, if you're willing to trade the military force and the sanctions for the behavior you want.

If you go down this crazy route, which a lot of people do, which is, oh, we're going to use force and they're going to capitulate, then that's crazy. It actually has to be the, we're willing to use force so that this is going to be costly for you. But we're also willing to make concessions and strike a deal that's relatively in everyone's interest.

Like that to me is always the crucial piece. And I just – I don't know. It seems like we just – for whatever reason, our political discourse can't quite capture that. And it's odd to me because like that is – that is the canonical lesson of the conflict in Bosnia, right? It's that – We had this enormous ability to use force, but that ultimately that ability to use force was only good in these really specific examples of, you know, working out an armistice and a peace deal that was, that sort of everyone could broadly see coming, right?

But the point of force was to like get people to suck it up and agree to what they knew the deal would look like.

Aaron 30:48

Ironically, we had that inside of Syria on March 30th and then they used chemical weapons on April 4th.

Jeffrey 30:56

Well, I mean I do think that we've done a bad job of – I mean my criticism of the Obama administration on Syria would be that we didn't do a great job of making it clear that we weren't going to let Assad win. Like the Russians did a great job of making it clear they weren't going to let Assad fall.

And so it becomes clear like, okay, well, so they have a really strong negotiating position because they're prepared to let this thing grind on forever. But we seem to be, in my opinion, acting as though we would like this to get over with, right? That we would like Assad to win so that we can complain about how bad Assad is, but that the political problem generated by this conflict goes away.

And I think that that's... If I'm Assad, I don't think I'm coming to the table, right? I think I'm going to get a better result on the field. And to go back to sort of Iran, if you're the Iranians and you're looking at their influence in Damascus and you're looking at their goals, and I think this is true of Yemen too, there's not really a good argument for them to stop fighting.

Aaron 32:02

No, I mean without Iran – Russia and the regime cannot achieve their political goals. And so they're married in that, you know, Russia needs Iranian proxies and Iranian regulars to hold territory taken. And so there's symbiotic organisms along with the regime on their half of the battlefield. And so you hear it put out there a lot that, you know, you can peel Moscow from Tehran and Damascus And one thing you can do that is by making life uncomfortable for Iran through the reintroduction of sanctions or pressure in this that you can flip Russia.

Like these people are smoking something and they aren't following the conflict with the level of granularity that will allow them to understand that Russia can't turn on Iran inside of Syria. In addition to, you remember the shenanigans they pulled with the conventional cutout in the JCPOA? Yes. They got themselves basically their own monopoly on selling Iranian arms.

Jeffrey 33:10

Yeah.

Aaron 33:11

These people aren't following this stuff. Yeah. And so where is this coming from? And so how do you exact leverage on it? How do you increase costs on Iran in ways that would be beneficial for US interests? And I think what we would like, I mean, I know what I would like, You mentioned in your very good North Korea piece on foreign policy this week is you do want to start touching on these missiles, correct?

Jeffrey 33:39

Yes. Yes, absolutely. I want to do something on missiles, although it's complicated because our allies also have missiles. The UAE has North Korean missiles. And I'm not sure our allies want to give them up. So it's a harder deal. But yeah, I do think we want to try to head off an advanced missile race in the Middle East.

Aaron 34:02

Yeah, I do too. But that begins to blur.

Jeffrey 34:07

Either that... Either that or we just go to Lockheed Martin and tell them that they can sell as many ATACMs as they'd like to the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Aaron 34:25

So, I mean, the Trump administration, even within the axis of adults, to coin a phrase I think Colin Call uses on Twitter, the McMasters, the Tillersons, the Mattises, people who are Normal Republicans, let's call them, I think they're going to run into constraints on efforts to use the deal as leverage to put pressure on Iran. Does that make sense?

Jeffrey 34:52

Yeah, of course. I mean, yes. Will you finish your thought? Because that's almost exactly what I'm trying to say, maybe said more elegantly.

Aaron 35:02

Yeah, and so they're going to run into constraints. Just to get back to the Obamacare analogy is that there's nowhere to go from here. Because the alternative is that you rip up the deal, you remove the extra inspections in place, and then you as the administration own the mass proliferation again of Iranian centrifuges and then own the ticking down of the breakout window because everybody's obsessed with breakout versus talking tough.

And saying you're going to push back and doing things around the edges against sanctioning people in Lebanon for association with Hezbollah. But not encroaching on that little space that the deal has carved out.

Jeffrey 35:57

Yeah. So my concern, which I take from both how the Bush administration responded to abandoning the agreed framework but also the Obamacare replacement fiasco, is that – Because of the political requirement to criticize the deal and the resulting distortion of the deal's terms, the adults are backing themselves into a corner and making it hard for them to have a frank discussion about About how to deal with this national security problem.

Because you can't – if you frame the problem accurately, if you look at the situation with Iran clearly and you speak about it clearly – You're not going to be able to say all the crazy things they've said about the Iran deal. And so if your first requirement is, no, no, no, we have to be crazy, we have to pretend like it's worse than the NPT, then you're not really going to be able to deal directly with the problem you're facing.

And it's hard to put into words, but you can see that with Obamacare. Like, an essential... Problem with the way that they tried to repeal and replace Obamacare is that they could not admit how insurance markets worked. They could not admit that A functioning market for insurance needed to have healthy people in the pool because they'd engaged in all this other language about how the mandate was some kind of a front to freedom, right?

And so you had people nominally say that they're free marketeers who had to deliberately ignore how insurance markets work in order to sustain their political rhetoric. And then they weren't able to, I think, as a consequence of that, do anything more than just come up with kind of a dog's breakfast of changes, none of which satisfied anyone.

Right. And I feel that this or I fear that this administration is backing themselves into the same corner. Like if they they need to be able to see what it is that the agreement does that they like and they need to be able to admit that. And then once they've admitted that. Then I think you can start to see clearly the places that you're going to have challenges like the very first thing.

Well, the second thing you mentioned the very beginning of the podcast, the sunset of a lot of these provisions. Right. We don't want them to sunset. So the problem is extending the deal and trying to do the things you need to do to prevent the provisions from sunsetting, which I think there are things you could do that will get the Iranians to keep them on, requires admitting that those provisions were good things in the first place.

And if they can't do that, then I feel like they're not going to make that next step of – you basically can't fix the deal unless you understand what part of it works.

Aaron 39:03

And I'm going to add one more variable before we wrap up here is that I think, well, there's two big issues coming. Well, there's obviously Syria, which we talked a lot about. There's Yemen. It's just a festering wound. Let's just put that aside. But there's also Iraqi elections coming up. And this will cause a lot of angst within the Washington, D.C. discourse about how we basically want the prime minister of Iraq to stay because he's not an Iranian proxy and he's closer to us.

But my concern always is that we overextend and that we try and push back too hard is that we actually tip the leverage back to Iran. And they can meddle around the edges, blow up a convoy here, turn the pressure up there in response to us. And I think they would love to do that in certain places.

But with all of the stuff going on in the region, they have an interest in keeping things with us quiet because we share an enemy in the Islamic State. And so you can see broad outlines to where we'll be co-located, at least very close to each other. The threat from Islamic State will be gone, or at least go down considerably, and you'll have bellicose rhetoric coming out of Washington.

You have to match their bellicose rhetoric that comes out on a daily basis. So tensions go up, and the deal, because it gets linked to secondary behavior, comes into question, and then improving on the sunset provisions, on... I don't know. You can come up with any number, limits on R&D, certain things going forward, but we'd have to trade something, become impossible.

And so it becomes brittle the longer it goes on. And then efforts to try and gain leverage actually contribute to its fragility.

Jeffrey 40:50

So, Aaron, you're supposed to give us a happy ending.

Aaron 40:52

Well, the other happy ending is that all sides actually have incentive for it to stick around. You know, as I said earlier before this, I don't think any administrator, you know, it's like the health care debate. They'll pull a vote and then they'll try and ram it up and through before 100 days, but they won't. And then hopefully everybody will think about it with the signing of another executive order that means nothing.

Jeffrey 41:14

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean it's really interesting. We went for like 40 minutes and there's so much that we weren't able to get into. We didn't even talk about the Iranian election which is coming.

Aaron 41:23

Oh, I know. I mean yes, I wanted to talk about that too. The Iranian election, who wins there? Ahmadinejad was not allowed to run by their own internal system. There's a lot to talk about.

Jeffrey 41:36

But I do think it's a useful sort of refocusing discussion in advance of this review to note how there is this really interesting divergence between the written assessment of both the State Department and the IAEA, which is Iran is complying with the deal, and the Political rhetoric coming out of the administration. And it, it really does to me feel like there's a kind of mismatch there, you know, that there is a, that in some ways the Iran nuclear deal has become a beauty contest, which I, you know, often treaties are like, do you like this country?

And, and, you know, as nonproliferation people, that's not a frame that we typically adopt, right? I mean, we, we, the whole reason we have a nonproliferation agreement or a, or in this case, a Well, I guess I should call it a nonproliferation agreement with the Iranians because we think they're not nice and that they wouldn't win a beauty contest and that they did want a nuclear weapon.

But, you know, in IR, it's often the opposite case. You know, you only sign agreements with countries you like and agreements are kind of a favor we do for friendly countries. And so it becomes really hard to sustain support. So it will be really interesting to see which – Aspect of the Trump administration prevails, the kind of grudging acceptance that they wanted a bomb and this is kind of the best way to delay that and manage that problem, or the kind of visceral dislike for the regime.

It's going to be an interesting time.

Aaron 43:02

That's right. There's a lot of future podcasts to tee up about this arrangement.

Jeffrey 43:07

Well, on behalf of my two children who are ransacking file folder after file folder of daddy's important papers, Aaron, thanks for joining me.

Aaron 43:17

It's always a pleasure.

Jeffrey 43:19

And thank you for listening.