In Making a Nuclear Deal, a Winning Argument for Iran

WSJ

Ahead of a challenging Nov. 24 deadline, nuclear diplomacy is playing out against the backdrop of U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State. U.S. and Iranian nuclear negotiators just met in Oman to narrow their differences, and Iranian officials signaled interest in President Barack Obama‘s recent letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urging Iran’s supreme leader not to miss a historic opportunity. An Iranian official recently told Reuters that Iran would be willing to work with the U.S. against Islamic State if the Obama administration would be more flexible in the nuclear negotiations. But in attempting to link the regional conflict with Islamic State extremists to the nuclear talks, Iran risks overplaying its hand.

The major issue of contention in the nuclear negotiations has been the scope of Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Because centrifuges that enrich uranium to low levels for nuclear power reactors can keep spinning to yield material for bombs, Mohammed ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, asserted that any country that has attained the ability to enrich uranium is a “virtual nuclear weapons state.” From a national security perspective, a nuclear hedge is Iran’s strategic sweet spot: maintaining the potential of a nuclear option while avoiding the costs–both regional and international–of weaponization.

President Obama has said the U.S. objective is “to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” signaling that the United States would not launch preventive military action to deny Iran a nuclear hedge option. A U.S. prerequisite for any comprehensive nuclear agreement is that Iran’s “breakout” period, or the time needed to convert a latent capability into a weapon, should allow Washington enough time to mobilize an international response. (U.S. negotiators have suggested 12 to 18 months.)

Since nuclear diplomacy is focused on bounding, not eliminating, Iran’s uranium enrichment program, an agreement offers the Islamic Republic a potentially winning narrative: Tehran’s regime can assert that it stood up to the “bullying” of the world’s major powers to defend Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium (thereby preserving its hedge), secured meaningful sanctions relief, and deflected efforts to link the nuclear question to other policy issues.

Sanctions brought Iran to the negotiating table and will surely affect Ayatollah Khamenei’s calculations about whether the political costs of an agreement–which would alienate hard-line interest groups, particularly the Revolutionary Guard, upon which the regime’s survival depends–outweigh its economic benefits. Recent declines in oil prices have ratcheted up economic pressure on the regime.

The campaign against Islamic State, in which the U.S. and Iran have some mutual interests, offers Tehran neither leverage in the nuclear negotiations nor a reason to hold out for better terms. Diplomats are offering Iran a straightforward trade-off between technology (a bounded uranium enrichment program) and transparency (assurances that a “civil” nuclear program is not a masquerade for a weapons program). There is a clear argument for why the regime should take the deal.

Robert S. Litwak is a vice president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of “Iran’s Nuclear Chess: Calculating America’s Moves.” He was director for nonproliferation on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton administration.