Podcast: Iran and the JPOA

Aaron Stein 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Arms Control Wonk podcast. My name is Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog. I'm also an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, as well as a PhD candidate at King's College.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:15

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I'm the founding publisher of ArmsControlWonk.com. And the director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies. A couple of non-proliferations in there.

Aaron 0:28

Yeah, and I want to start off by thanking Mr. Carl Moran for walking me through the Idiot's Guide How to Podcast so that Jeffrey and I no longer sound like we're in a tank or buried deep down in a well.

Jeffrey 0:40

We are working hard to suck less.

Aaron 0:42

Yes, we are. We are not tech savvy, perhaps not as tech savvy as the Iranians, which today we'll be talking about the joint plan of action. And I think we start with the New York Times op-ed yesterday by Ken Pollack that put out some really interesting ideas, both controversial and perhaps having some good points as well. I think the op-ed, you know, Was emblematic of the divide in Washington over A, the Iranian nuclear program, and B, the ongoing diplomatic negotiations between the EU 3 plus 3 and the Iranians over their nuclear program.

And, you know, I think that divide is actually something that isn't getting enough attention, how Washington is dealing with this versus how the Iranians are dealing with this.

Jeffrey 1:39

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that, because what do you think is the source of that ambivalence? Because to me it seems pretty straightforward. I mean, no matter how... Complicated or unlikely a deal is to succeed, it's a lot better than a war. What do you make of the ambivalence about efforts to reach a deal with the Iranians?

Aaron 2:02

To be honest, I don't know. I find the issue to be so straightforward, I think we almost have to get a deal. I don't want to say the Iranians have beaten us, because that implies that they haven't gone through incredible economic hardship, particularly after the latest round of sanctions, or the oil sanctions. But I just don't think physics are on our side anymore to kick the can down the road.

We used to be able to deal with this because the breakout times and the time in which Iran could theoretically enrich to weapons grade was... Long enough to where we could comfortably say, oh, we can deal with it later and we'll try and pressure them a little bit more. I think relatively recently, starting as of maybe a year and a half ago, that just no longer became the case.

And it became an issue for me, at least, where we had to do something. It's really the United States and the Europeans had to do something in order to reach some sort of conclusion, short of striking their facilities. And short of letting them just have an unrestrained nuclear program to try and deal with their growing enrichment capabilities.

Do you have different thoughts?

Jeffrey 3:19

Well, no, I don't have different thoughts. I just have a memory. I mean, I was remembering how in 2006 I gave a talk, and there was a big debate in the nonproliferation community. At the time, the Iranians had just a trivial number of centrifuges. Memory is a frail thing, but it was, you know, sort of maybe it was a cascade, right, 164.

And there was a whole debate about What the conditions for negotiating would be. And one view was that they had to completely shut down the operation of this cascade as a condition for talking. And I remember I was on the incredibly dovish side because I was encouraging the idea, along with Matt Bunn, who was my colleague at Harvard at the time, that we should let the Iranians spin the centrifuges sort of in a kind of warm standby mode so they weren't actually feeding any hexafluoride.

And people were just like, you guys are crazy. You're giving the Iranians everything they want. And, you know, now it's... Now it's several years later, and, you know, they have, like, thousands of centrifuges that are enriching uranium. So, yeah, I just, like, every six months, I look back and go, like, hey, remember that deal that looked like it was giving the Iranians everything they wanted?

That looks like a really good deal now.

Aaron 4:48

They might actually do that. I mean, they might start spinning centrifuges with nothing in them, too. It's, it's the, it's the great unknown in this, in this, if the deals, if the JPOA negotiations succeed Iran has been very clear that they're not going to dismantle any centrifuges. Now that doesn't mean that they can't just sit there under heavy monitoring and not actually be enriching anything.

So we might actually get a deal where those centrifuges are spinning with nothing in them. But I, I think it, it, it, it goes back to the, the op-ed and It's this notion that we've been focusing really heavy on breakout. And I mean, even we were just talking about it. And to be honest, I think breakout isn't all that important anymore.

I mean, obviously it's important, but I think it goes back to how are we going to verify a deal? And this was, I think, the most controversial part about the op-ed, where Pollock was calling for UNSCOM, sort of Iraq, post-1991 war deal. Style inspections. And frankly, I just don't think that's a very viable idea. And I think there are other ways to go about it.

But I'm curious to hear your thoughts, if maybe I'm not being slightly dovish on the Iranians to the point where we have to do something different.

Jeffrey 6:08

Well, I mean, I should start by saying, and we'll have to talk about this in more depth in a couple of minutes, but I think you're exactly right that the problem is covert facilities. It's not the breakout. The breakout is the little chart that B.B. Netanyahu shows, the cartoon bomb. How many months are they away if they decide to do something?

I think that's not the problem. The problem is covert facilities. And so I appreciated... The fact that the op-ed tried to address those, but then it has this – I would say it's a poison pill solution. Iraq in 1991 was a defeated country that accepted incredibly humiliating inspections as a condition of an armistice. And it's just super hard for me to imagine that the Iranians would – Endure. Well, it's impossible for me to imagine an Iranian government that can survive accepting that kind of inspection regime. And you know, the example I always think about is in 2008, the Bush administration had a six-party deal with the North Koreans. And you know, you think the North, you think the Iranians are cheaters, like, wow, the North Koreans, right, right.

But even though there was an argument for really great inspections or an argument for pushing for really high levels of access, what really happened, and this gets back to this whole point about the ambivalence, is there were people who let the best be the enemy of the good. And back then it was called VCI, Verification, Compliance, and Implementation.

And they pushed for... A level of access that they knew the North Koreans would not accept and could not accept. And so as a consequence, you know, these people didn't have to say, like, oh, I'm against a deal. They could say, well, I'm for a deal. But, you know, I'm for this, like, amazing deal that involves the ritual humiliation of the North Korean leadership.

And, you know, when they sign that, we'll have a party and I'll bring my unicorn, right? So... You know, that's what I worry about the op-ed. And I should say, I don't know if that's Pollack's intention, right? I mean, he may sincerely believe you need UNSCOM-style inspections to deal with covert facilities, although I don't think so. You know, I don't know about his intention, but I do think that the effect of the op-ed and the recommendation is that, you know, make it harder to get a deal.

Aaron 8:41

I mean, I'm of the opinion that if you want to swing for the fences, I think you can... We always talk about tailored sanctions. Perhaps we could have tailored inspections. I actually think the current hexapartite safeguards oration for enrichment facilities are good for Natanz. And I think the additional protocol are pretty good, assuming the additional protocol is part of any final conclusion with the Iranians.

But I think if you want to swing for the fences, I do think that there are ways we could Augment the inspections without humiliating the Iranians with sort of on scum style inspections. And I think it goes back to the fact that there are two tracks. You know, there are two tracks in these negotiations. And I don't think that gets talked about enough.

I mean, we have the three plus three track. And then we have the IAEA.

Jeffrey 9:33

Oh, oh, oh, oh, Aaron, it's the E3, EU plus three. EU three plus three. For people who are listening, we used to call it the P5 plus one, and the P was the permanent five Security Council members, the United States, the Russians, the Chinese, the British, and the French. But because the EU is leading the negotiation, we have this new E3, which is the European three, so it's the British, the French, and the Germans, slash the EU because Lady Ashton, the EU leader, Is she the high representative?

Aaron 10:02

She's the high representative, yes.

Jeffrey 10:03

The high representative is sort of leading the talk.

Aaron 10:05

So it's E3 slash EU, and then it's plus three, which is the U.S. Well, having attended a few of these talks, I have never seen the Chinese ambassador ever at these talks. And the Germans just – they're hard to find, too, at these talks. I think the only ones who actually bring press officers to the talks – The Americans, the Brits, and now the Iranians.

And frankly, the Iranian journalists get stuff before the Western journalists nowadays. I think the Iranians are selling this pretty hard at home and their media strategy is quite good. As for the Germans, the Russians, and the Chinese, I'm not sure that they have a media strategy. Anyways, so we have the EU 3 plus 3 process. Right, right.

And then we have the IAEA. And I think actually the negotiations in the 3 plus 3 process are pretty straightforward. I mean it was the Iraq heavy water reactor which seems to have been dealt with. It will be how to verify this arrangement, and it will be the number of centrifuges. And those number of centrifuges is sort of the big elephant in the room that we don't quite know what it will look like.

But on the other side is the possible military dimensions. And I think that it's here where we have to start in order to build up An effective inspection regime that does not go as far as UNSCOM, but maybe taps around the edges and slightly augments the additional protocol to give all parties involved, mainly the United States, more, I guess, more assurance that there isn't some cheating on the deal.

And I think you could either do it by – I mean, I have a number of – And I think the main way to do it is to track the centrifuges and try and get yourself involved permanently in the machine shops to see where the centrifuges are going.

Jeffrey 12:00

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, the way that I always think about the problem is... And the additional protocol provides for some level of access on a very limited and I think it's voluntary basis to the centrifuge workshops. But, you know, it's this crazy safeguards legacy we have where... If you build all the parts for a centrifuge and you box up the kit and you put the kit on a truck and you drive the truck into tons and then you set up the centrifuge, it's under safeguards.

But you know, nobody knows whether those trucks are driving under mountains. And so clearly getting as close as we can to the front end of that process is, is tremendously important. Considering that in 2003, Natanz was a secret underground centrifuge plant, and in 2010, KOM was. By the way, this is kind of how we figured out the North Koreans had a uranium enrichment program, which is we saw them buying stuff in really big quantities.

So yeah, I think that's how you deal with covert programs.

Aaron 13:12

Yeah, I completely agree. One other way is to get even farther on the front end. At the conversion facility. Or their radical idea of trying to monitor the uranium mine, which I think is a little too far out there. But my point is that if you want to swing for the fences, there are ways to swing for the fence.

I think it will be more palatable to any agreement outside of UNSCOM. And so I think that there is a way forward here that we need to talk – that I think needs to be hashed out a little bit more amongst the arms control – Community, as well as other people about perhaps ways to go about doing this.

But it speaks to a larger question. I mean, how is this PMD thing going to get resolved? I mean, one thing we need to know a little bit more about how their centrifuges are made, where they're made, so that we can make some effective verification. But there is a PMD elephant in the room. And how... How far do we actually want the Iranians to go in terms of admitting to what they have done or perhaps not admitting to what they've done if indeed that they do prove that some of the allegations or forgeries are false?

Jeffrey 14:28

Yeah, well, this is one of my favorite perverse things about public policy and international relations. And we just saw it the other day. So the Japanese announced that they were returning some fissile material that the U.S. had loaned them for scientific research. So the Japanese sent it back. And you would think that this would be the cause of, like, great celebration, right?

Because they had this stuff. It was a proliferation risk. It doesn't seem like they were doing such a great job of guarding it. Now they're giving it back to the United States where it'll be, you know, disposed of. And so now it's not a problem. And so, like, you know, the Japanese have announced this and they're, like, expecting, like, all of the, you know, cheers and applause.

And, like, the Chinese reaction, which, you know, is a little bit... A little bit staged, but I think is also real, is they had no idea that the Japanese had this material. And so they were like, wait a minute, what do you mean you had this material? Why didn't you give it back 10 years ago? And basically the Japanese just spend the weeks following the return answering questions about why they had it in the first place, why they didn't give it back earlier, and what was taking so long.

And I think it's totally the same thing. If the Iranians come out and say, oh yeah, we had a nuclear weapons program, You know, the impact on the deal, even though in theory we want them to come clean, like if they actually come clean, you can imagine the stuff that's going to get said in Washington. Yeah.

Aaron 16:01

So, you know, maybe we need to find some kind of amnesty provision and, you know, they should be honest but not so frank. Yeah. I mean, there are things in the IAEA track that, you know, they can answer honestly. Without tipping their head. I think we're going to see a lot of shape charges and shockwave work for fracking or oil and gas coming out in the next couple of days.

And look, if you have that much oil and gas, you got to know how to frack and you got to know how to use shape charges. But anyways, I mean... You forgot nanodiamonds. Oh, nanodiamonds. Yeah, you got to have nanodiamonds because, you know, God, nanodiamonds are... Flying off the shelves all around the region. Then, you know, the Iranians...

Jeffrey 16:46

I'm an arms control wonk. It's the only kind of diamond I can afford.

Aaron 16:48

It's true. It's true. It's better than cubic zirconia.

Jeffrey 16:52

Yeah. Yeah, no. For listeners, no, no. They use them. They're very hard. So they use them in industrial processes. Industrial processes.

Aaron 17:00

This is not the kind of thing you give your girlfriend. No.

Jeffrey 17:04

I'm not even sure my wife could see a nanodiamond. Maybe I could give her just an empty box and say, oh, there's a nanodiamond in there.

Aaron 17:11

I know a guy in Istanbul who gets them for bulk prices smuggled over the border. Also with the fact that if they do come clean and they do tell us some stuff about their program, they do have a history of sort of Letting it leech out over time in order to draw it out to ensure that they aren't beaten up too badly.

I'm thinking of between 2002 and 2003. What happens if this is after the JP, they reach an agreement with the JPOA and there's maybe a disagreement about Iran's admissions on the IAEA track, or maybe there's a disagreement about the way Iran is implementing the deal. I think this goes back to the most unsexy part of the JPOA, which is the dispute resolution mechanism and the ability of the two sides to talk to each other without a B-2 bomber.

Jeffrey 18:08

Yeah, so, and I would add a third wild card, right? Because there's the, there will, first of all, there will be compliance concerns.

Aaron 18:16

Yeah, absolutely.

Jeffrey 18:17

Because the first time you implement an agreement, even if both parties want it to work, If you've ever looked at, I know you have, people are listening, if you ever look at an agreement, there's sort of principles. And then the question of like, no, no, no, how do we actually have this meeting? It turns out people have different ideas.

And so there are certainly disputes about implementation that are pretty routine. Then there are always disputes about implementation that are more serious, where we think the Iranians have agreed to one thing and they think they've agreed to another and we've really got to work it out. But then the third case that I would add to this problem, or the third problem that I would add, is false positives, right?

Because the thing we're worried about is the Iranians digging tunnels under mountains and spending a lot of time working on North Korea. We had this problem with the North Koreans in the late 1990s where we became convinced that – well, some people became convinced that they had an underground nuclear reactor at a place called Kumchang-ri, and we spent – An enormous amount of time and effort negotiating with the North Koreans to get in and see the thing.

And then when the U.S. inspection team went in, it wasn't a reactor, right? So, yeah, having a routine way to address... Places where we disagree, places where the Iranians are maybe being a little tendentious, or places where, you know, our suspicious minds get the better of us.

Aaron 19:45

Yeah, that's super, super important.

Jeffrey 19:47

And, you know, as you noted, right, there's this huge divide in Washington. And so the first time something goes wrong, there will be the parade of people who say, I was opposing this deal all along, and now it's clear the Iranians are cheating, and, you know...

Aaron 20:03

I mean, I'll take it a step further. I mean, with the way that Obama gets blamed for everything, it will be linked. It will be Obama was weak on Syria, which thereby allowed for Vladimir Putin to invade Crimea. And then because he didn't do anything for either of them, Iran feels like it's emboldened to eat around the edges.

And so we have to scuttle this entire deal. And I think we should actually go bomb them because they're cheating anyways. Yeah.

Jeffrey 20:31

Well, I mean, the worst part of it is I teach this class on national security process, and we spend a lot of time looking at leaks. And what's inevitably going to happen is we're going to have a suspicion, and that suspicion is either going to be correct or false. But the Iranians are going to have some complicated explanation for their behavior that we have to decide whether it's sincere or cheating, or it's going to be wrong.

And either way, there will be this process where we try to deal with it quietly, so it won't be put in the papers. The people who don't want to deal with it Iran, as soon as they find out about it, we'll go to the papers and they will make it a public issue. I think you've seen this a couple of times.

I think sometimes the Obama administration waits too long to tell people stuff, so I don't want to endorse how secretive they can be. But on the other hand, The people, for example, who leaked the existence of the underground facility in North Korea did it because they thought it was a reactor and nobody else believed them. So they figured, I get it in the Washington Post or the New York Times.

For all intents and purposes, it's a reactor. Yeah, I can just see the A1 story in the New York Times and the Washington Post about the Obama administration trying to hush up an instance of Iranian cheating.

Aaron 21:59

It's going to be a real challenge for them. Yeah, but it does, well, I mean, it speaks to a larger issue. This verification, if we emphasize covert program over breakout, which I think we both agree on, a lot of it hinges on the quality of U.S. and Western intel. Yeah. And, I mean, what do we think about the quality of U.S. Western intel about Iran's program?

And do you think it maybe has something to do with the pace of Iran's nuclear program, the decision-making behind the Supreme Leader's actions since 2003? Yeah, well, that was a leading question. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, so...

Jeffrey 22:43

Those people who are listening, right? Aaron and I were talking about this before. I think it is so interesting that we have this breakout conversation that's measured in months, right? And so over the course of the decade that we have been having this discussion, the Iranians have gone from a breakout capability of a few years down to a few months, and now the JPOA is going to put a few more months back on the clock, right?

So it's going to be like six months or something, maybe a year. Mm-hmm. But this has happened over 10 years, right? So the six months or a year thing is not as interesting to me as what it is that's caused the supreme leader of Iran to hold for 10 years. That's interesting. And the thing is, there's a school of thought, and I don't know if I...

I don't know if I buy it or not, but I think it's really interesting that what stays the Supreme Leader's hand is his conviction that we've penetrated that program and that, you know, we found Natanz in 2003. We, within a year or two, figured out that they had shut down or, you know, the intelligence community said halted the program.

Do you notice that halt meant like stop in a march?

Aaron 23:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 24:01

I think it's terrible because I hear halt and I think end, but, you know, they meant, you know, Pause.

Aaron 24:07

Yeah, I think I know why they use that word.

Jeffrey 24:09

Tape player when I was a kid, so I think pause. But anyway, so, you know, we found the Tons, we figured out they shut down the program, and then we found the underground facility, Porto Enrichment Plant, near Gome, or Combe, or however you say it. So yeah, I think He's certainly got to be worried that we have some insight, although how good it is, it's a little hard to say.

What do you think?

Aaron 24:37

I think it's twofold. I mean, I think the fact that I do think Western intelligence was able to penetrate the program, but I think that they were able to penetrate the program for multiple reasons. I mean, the first is that when the Iranians started their internship program in 1985 but really got it off, really started lighting up Really started pushing forward with his procurement plans in the late 1980s.

They did it a little clumsily, sending out telexes all over Europe for dual-use items that when you put them all together, hey, that looks a lot like the front end of the fuel cycle. And so I think that allowed the West, which was already suspicious of Iran, to start paying a lot more attention to what it is they are buying.

And what I find interesting is that a lot of these – Iran guys who've been around for a long time started working on the Iran file in the mid-1980s, the Iran nuclear file. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that Iran has since admitted that they began looking into enrichment in 1985 and first approached the Pakistanis in 1986 and then make their first contact with AQ Khan in 1987.

And so you can clearly see the way in which the program goes and the time frame in which... It rolls out. But when they decide to go after enrichment, which is in 85, they don't actually introduce UF6 until 1999. And that's 14 years, 15 years. I think it just goes to the fact that it's actually not that easy to build centrifuges.

And so I think one of the reasons that the Supreme Leader has been so cautious has simply been the fact that it's a lot harder to make centrifuges, even if you have the blueprints. Then we may think so, especially if all the specialized components are being watched.

Jeffrey 26:34

Although, you know, I mean, they could have... Well, two thoughts. They could have done what the Pakistanis did, which is they just run the centrifuges until they break. Even if they're not very reliable, they just, you know... They don't care about efficiency. But maybe they didn't have enough stuff to do that. They might not have had enough components.

And then the other question I have is what we make of the second secret plant. Maybe the second secret plant was the decision to break out, or maybe it was just a hedge they gave themselves.

Aaron 27:17

So yeah, I kind of agree with you. I just don't know. There's a lot of... I mean, there's a lot of... Spooky stuff, right?

Jeffrey 27:28

It's hard to know.

Aaron 27:28

Yeah, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, there are known unknowns.

Jeffrey 27:33

Please, no, please, please, please don't quote Donald Rumsfeld.

Aaron 27:38

No, no, he's on a little PR tour to rehash his image, so I thought we'd bring him into the arms control. No, there are known unknowns. I happen to think that if you read these documents that you link to in that Piece that accompanied the foreign policy piece where Ayatollah's pregnant pause.

Jeffrey 27:58

I like the plug, thank you.

Aaron 27:59

Yeah, no problem. One, I have absolutely no idea why those documents aren't just plastered all over the internet and people just don't take them and read them and highlight them and go back to them because they're amazing. I think they're the best recounting of Iran's nuclear decision-making between 2002 and 2003 that I've ever seen.

Jeffrey 28:23

Listeners may not know. There are these two amazing – well, one is a – One is a transcript of a talk, and the other is an interview with a newspaper that Hassan Rouhani, who, before he was president, was the lead negotiator before Ahmadinejad was elected. After Ahmadinejad was elected and Rouhani gets turned out of his position as the lead negotiator, he gives these two interviews, or a talk and an interview, and he does so basically to defend his...

Handling, I guess, of the dossier. And he is really, really explicit about their structure for making decisions and the timeline on which they made them. And it's really, it's amazing to me that we had those basically in real time. Sorry to cut you off.

Aaron 29:21

No, no. Because I think they shed light on why there was the Combe facility. And I think between August 14, 2002, which was when the NCRI reveals the Natanz and all the associated facilities, and if you believe the November 2011 IA board report, the PMD, sometime in 2003, they ran through a full-scale implosion test with their shock generator that's used to produce nanodiamonds, allegedly.

With all sorts of diagnostic equipment and a stand-in for uranium. I'm not sure what the material is, but something of similar density. And I think it's at that point, in 2003, that the decision goes from what was, I think, a very clear weaponization program to a very clear, we're going to be latent. And the focus of Iranian decision-making was, A, a bureaucratic right down the middle.

Khamenei comes right down the middle, and he sort of Says, okay, those who favor a nuclear weapons program, we're not going to stop enrichment. We may halt it. Halt is not a good word. We may stop it for a little while, but it's our right under the NPT, and we will go back to it, and we won't touch the missile issue.

So you have your delivery vehicle intact, and you have your ability to break out also intact. But meanwhile, we have to make some concessions, and this is the Rouhani side. To keep our file out of the UN Security Council, because at that time, you know, the Americans were quite successful in Iraq. And I can imagine talks about a loosely worded UN Security Council resolution with something like, you know, the or else clause, the very broadly worded or else clause, unless Iran complies, and military action being something that they would be very concerned about.

And by 2006, that starts to go away, and Ahmadinejad comes back, or comes in, and The decision-making process gets tilted far to the right. And so that could be the reason for the second facility in Qom. And and the fact that the EU three negotiations broke down. So the threat of military action could have come back up.

So it was again, a hedge in order to maintain latency. And I would, no, I'm just, I know I'm droning on here, but the last thing is, is that That HALT, the HALT order in the 2007 NIE, I think why they used HALT in a march was that the center with which these weaponizations experiments were allegedly being carried out was literally raised to the ground.

You could watch it on satellite photos.

Jeffrey 32:05

Yeah, it's a park now. It's a park now. Wonderful photos on Flickr.

Aaron 32:09

Right. There are. I know, I know. I've looked at them and I think they have a nice soccer field on there and sort of oddly shaped because it used to house buildings.

Jeffrey 32:18

Well, you know, you have to make sure that you have the asphalt over all the potentially contaminated dirt.

Aaron 32:22

Right, I know. Exactly. And so it's an odd shape for a park. I mean, there's a lot of parks in Tehran. If you look at enough Google Earth, it doesn't look like any of them. Anyways, but... Well, let me say this. I agree with all of that.

Jeffrey 32:36

I would only make a very short observation, and then we should probably turn to a couple of wild cards and wrap it up. But... I care deeply about bureaucracy and the role of bureaucracy in making national security decisions. And I often say we love sanctions because they are a perfect example of satisficing. Instead of optimizing or working out a perfect compromise, bureaucracies tend to settle on the first acceptable solution.

Aaron 33:01

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 33:02

And in the United States, sanctions are perfect because there are people who want to bomb the Iranians and they can't get support for that. So sanctions are the next best thing. And there are people who don't want to bomb the Iranians, but they don't want to look weak and indecisive. And so sanctions are the best alternative to bombing.

And so we sanction the heck out of people because really the problem is we don't agree about talking or bombing. I suspect that the Iranian nuclear program is exactly the same thing, which is there were people who wanted a nuclear weapon and there are people who don't. The people who want a nuclear weapon realize that at least for the moment they can't have it.

So having a big, robust nuclear program is the best thing, the next best thing. And for the people who would like to avoid having a nuclear weapon or avoid running those risks... They don't want to be seen as weak and sellouts to the West. And so being vociferous advocates of a civil nuclear program, you know, is, is also their, their preferred option.

So, you know, we're stuck with this. I think they halt for all the reasons you say But it makes perfect sense if you don't agree. You stop the weaponization program, you engage with the IAEA and the EU, and you continue your civil nuclear program. That's a very middle-of-the-road-y compromise.

Aaron 34:19

I completely agree. It just seems like it was the Supreme Leader coming right down the middle between what you would suspect would be nuclear hardliners versus nuclear softliners. And here we got this policy, and it just limped along for the last, I guess, 10 years. And now we've reached the point where maybe there could be some sort of compromise, and we could move forward with an agreement.

Which brings me to wild cards, because this is what I find so interesting.

Jeffrey 34:46

The Iranians still have a missile program.

Aaron 34:48

Right.

Jeffrey 34:49

And they got some pretty unpleasant buddies in Lebanon, Hezbollah, who's, you know, fighting in Syria. Can we get a nuclear deal that we can sustain even if the Iranians test missiles that we don't like or sell missiles that we don't like or sell missiles to Hezbollah or run guns to Hezbollah? Can you imagine an engagement with Iran on a nuclear program that doesn't require...

Politically, I understand substantively it shouldn't, but politically does it require some movement on those other issues?

Aaron 35:34

It goes back, I think, to the original thing. I think the Iranians are more unified on a deal than the U.S. is. These wild cards, one, I don't think should play any role in the nuclear negotiations.

Jeffrey 35:46

I agree with you substantively. I'm only asking from an empirical, political perspective. Keeping in mind that we're still taking Benghazi seriously.

Aaron 35:57

Exactly right. We have to go sell – the Obama administration has to go sell this. I'd even add another thing to that, Iranian human rights. How many pictures on Twitter can you see of people hanging from cranes? It's absolutely horrific. It's awful. It is pretty awful. It's barbaric behavior. But I don't know, you know, this goes back to the age old question, you know is these are spoilers.

But I, I always think, and this is the model I go perfect is the enemy of good enough. I think the counter argument is that without fissile material, these missiles are not as dangerous as they would be. Although I think people in Syria would tell you that conventionally armed missiles are pretty, pretty bad. It can do a lot of damage.

And you know, Hezbollah and the running of guns to Syria You know, there's also a school of thought in Washington who says that this is Iran's Vietnam and that we should let them keep doing this because we're killing off IRGC soldiers. I don't particularly agree with that, but it's an expensive proxy war for the Iranians.

Jeffrey 37:05

Well, the reason I ask is because, again, and I analogize everything to China and North Korea because that's where I spend most of my time working, but The Clinton administration signed a limited nuclear deal with North Koreans in 1994, the agreed framework. And then when the North Koreans tested... Kind of ICBM in 1998, suddenly that nuclear deal started to collapse.

There were other reasons, too. And the Clinton administration went through this whole thing that resulted in something called the Perry Process, named after William Perry, the former Secretary of Defense, where in order to save the agreed framework, they felt like they had to go negotiate a separate missile deal. So they Really felt like a partial deal was only politically sustainable if they continued to expand it to encompass the entire range of terrible North Korean behavior.

And so I worry about the same thing in Iran, which is we'll have a deal and the deal will be fine, but if we just leave it like it is and we don't find a way to make progress on these other issues, it may not be sustainable. And I say that, by the way, from somebody who thinks...

It's always better from a perspective, a long-term perspective, of advancing free and open societies to avoid military conflict. Did you see Persepolis? Yeah. So what I take away as the most interesting phenomenon from that entire story is the author's Very insightful observation that the repressiveness of the regime in Iran was tremendously enabled by the fear generated by Saddam's attack.

You know, that actually... Drove so much of or created the conditions for the regime to be really pretty abusive. And so I suspect, you know, I mean, Rouhani is an opportunity here. I definitely worry if relations go in the toilet about the sort of character we get next. I just want a visa. Yeah.

Aaron 39:26

To Iran? Yeah. I want to go. It's incredibly difficult to go visit the country. So if any of the Iranian leadership is listening to this, I'm a friend. I would really like to go visit. And when I send in my visa application, please do take it seriously.

Jeffrey 39:45

I don't know, man. There are plenty of decent kebab shops in Bethesda. I think that's enough for me.

Aaron 39:50

I don't know. Anyways, I think that's a good place to wrap up. I think you and I are basically on the same page, that we think a deal is in the making, that we think a deal is Better for the two countries moving forward, but there's a lot of wild cards. And the wild cards have not been, in my opinion, diagnosed and discussed amongst policymakers and policy wonks to the level that we had because we've been focusing on breakout too much.

Until this very moment. Until this very moment. Hopefully this will start a revolution.

Jeffrey 40:24

It was nice talking to you.

Aaron 40:25

Nice talking to you. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.