Should the Next President Kill an Iran Deal?

by Ali Gharib

So far, the 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls fall, with the possible exception of Rand Paul, into one camp on Iran policy. They’re all against the developing nuclear deal. Some, like Scott Walker, have even already vowed to abandon the deal on “day one” if elected.

Last week, this preemptive rejectionism got a boost from a trio of policy scholars: the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments fellow Eric Edelman, National Institute for Public Policy scholar Robert Joseph (both former George W. Bush administration officials), and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Ray Takeyh. (Edelman and Takeyh both serve on the neoconservative group JINSA‘s Iran Task Force.) Writing in Politico, they open by noting that Republican hopefuls have “insisted on re-evaluating the agreement, if not jettisoning it all together,” and go on:

Secretary of State John Kerry has rejected such claims, maintaining that future presidents are unlikely to “turn around and just nullify it.”

Yet the history of arms control demonstrates that controversial agreements are usually reviewed by incoming administrations. On at least three recent occasions, a new president ultimately annulled a landmark agreement that he determined was not serving the interests of the United States or was being violated by an adversary it was meant to restrain[.]

Well, yes. presidents can do many things—and they have. An Iran nuclear accord, like other arms control agreements, will be no exception. The relevant policy question, then, is less what can the next president do, but rather what should she do.

This larger question goes unaddressed in the hawkish trio’s piece—I’ll get directly at it myself in a moment—but it’s worth glancing at their three examples. They serve as cautionary tales of what not to do and, in at least one case, hardly serve the point the scholars are trying to make.

Flawed Case Studies

The three cases Edelman, Joseph, and Takeyh cite are:

  • Ronald Reagan’s renouncing, in 1986, the SALT II treaty’s approach
  • George W. Bush abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in December 2001
  • George W. Bush’s decision to stop delivering on U.S. obligations in the Agreed Framework with North Korea, leading to its final collapse

No one—not least John Kerry, in the remarks cited by the trio—is arguing that these two presidents were not within their rights to make these decisions. What’s so curious is that the Politico piece fails to look critically at the cases to see if, in hindsight, those decisions were sound.

Jimmy Carter inked the SALT II deal but withdrew it from consideration for ratification after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Both sides, however, implemented its tenets. Then, the scholars noted in Politico, “The Reagan Administration’s review concluded that the agreement was ‘fatally flawed’ but provisionally decided to abide by the unratified treaty.” By 1986, after SALT II’s official expiration, Reagan renounced the SALT framing altogether, as the trio notes (“Reagan determined that the wisest course was to abandon SALT II despite the fact that the agreement was long-standing and had been negotiated by both his Republican and Democratic predecessors”). But even before 1986, Reagan had already set in motion what would become the START I treaty. Those negotiations came in fits and starts—mostly fits, resulting in the arms race of the 1980s that saw a dramatic increase in the number of nuclear weapons in the world—and by 1991 an agreement was reached that drastically reduced the world’s nuclear weapons stockpiles.

In the case of the ABM treaty, history’s judgments, so far, are much less ambiguous. “With the Cold War over, and with new nuclear threats from less stable and less predictable adversaries, the Bush administration considered it essential that the U.S. deploy effective missile defenses to deter and defend against the growing threat,” argue Edelman, Joseph, and Takeyh. “Once more, it was determined that America’s interests would be best served by abrogating an agreement despite dire warnings that withdrawal would spark an arms race which, in fact, did not occur.”

Well yes, that determination was made and enacted. But the fact that an arms race didn’t occur doesn’t obviate the apparent uselessness of withdrawing from the ABM treaty. Nothing was gained for American security thanks to this move. A decade-and-a-half later, we have no working ballistic missile shield, and “the emergence of new missile and nuclear threats from rogue states” like North Korea never materialized as credible challenges to American security. All we got was more a bill of more than $100 billion for a failed system and tensions with the Russians over the issue.

Then there’s the Agreed Framework with North Korea. The strange thing about citing this case is that it’s a poor analogy for unilaterally discarding an arms agreement. The North Korean analogy falls short because the result of the Framework’s collapse hardly serves as a good precedent for unilaterally withdrawing from a deal. North Korea, of course, tested a bomb four years after the U.S. withdrew. “I guess that showed ol’ Kim Jong Il,” wrote the arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis recently. Lewis’s take is instructive; it argues—persuasively, I think, but with room for disagreement—that the nuke test forced the Bush administration back to the table for the Six Party Talks where it basically got “a much watered-down version of the Agreed Framework.”

Should the Next President Ditch an Iran Deal?

Edelman, Joseph, and Takeyh argue something of a moot point: that new presidential administrations can and have abrogated old arms agreements. This much is obviously true, as their three examples clearly show. But those same examples also present a more muddied picture of whether those presidents should have ditched the deals. A more insightful perspective would have addressed these questions. For a couple of them, there are good arguments on both sides. The most notable omissions, though, didn’t come from the past examples, but from the issue at hand today: a prospective Iran deal.

In another Politico piece several months ago, the former Defense, congressional, and State Department official Ilan Goldenberg, now with the Center for a New American Security, outlined some of the pitfalls of the U.S. violating a deal. Goldenberg’s analysis addressed what was, at the time of his piece, the chief concern from the American side: congressional action to kill a deal after it had been signed. However, those likely consequences would be the same if a future president killed a deal. Goldenberg’s short piece is worth reviewing in full, but let’s start with just one of the consequences: that the sanctions regime would unravel in the face of an American abrogation of an inked deal.

There are plausible scenarios in which the U.S. might not shoulder the full blame for the negotiations collapsing. I recently wrote about Yishai Schwartz’s argument, which is basically to take a quiet, harder (though still reasonable) line for these next few months and making it difficult for Iran to take a deal. But, as the hawkish trio shows with their past examples, this is a far cry from a president announcing that he’s quitting a pact that’s already been agreed to. In that case, Goldenberg is surely right that Iran’s major trading partners would blame the U.S. and leave their compliance with sanctions behind: “The sanctions regime would begin to unravel,” he wrote.

In this scenario, there is no getting a mythical “better deal”—the rallying cry of Benjamin Netanyahu and those opposing an accord—just the utter collapse of diplomacy. And Goldenberg offers a slew of other potential and likely consequences of that: “Iran would remove the constraints on its nuclear program”; a likely “escalation of the covert war between Israel and Iran”; “undercut[ting] Iran’s pragmatic President Hassan Rouhani”; and “profound implications for America’s standing in the world.”

On that last score, consider this sentence from Edelman, Joseph, and Takeyh: A nuke deal “will be will be applauded by America’s rivals and adversaries, such as Russia and China, yet disclaimed by its closest allies such as Israel and the Gulf Arab states.” That’s a nice dichotomy, but it fails to capture the real international politics around the Iran deal. China and Russia, first of all, aren’t our only negotiating partners in the so-called P5+1 group. That cohort includes Germany, France, and the U.K., whom, if one was not blinkered by ideology, might be recognize as our actual “closest allies.”

That leads to one other point cribbed from Jeffrey Lewis’s Agreed Framework piece worth mentioning here. The überhawk Bush administration official John Bolton wrote that when North Korea’s uranium enrichment went public, it became “the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework.” As Lewis noted, “The phrasing—’had been looking for’—is telling.” It’s a stark rendering of not American national security interests, but rather of ideological and political considerations. Reagan was a hardline anti-Soviet warrior; Bush campaigned on a ballistic missile shield, causing arms makers to salivate; and Bolton’s remark reveals the ideological preconceptions of a set of hawks in Washington averse to any and all diplomacy with rivals, a set that is, as it happens, always looking for hammers to smash things. One can’t help but wonder how much of the opposition to an Iran deal, especially among GOP presidential hopefuls, is itself ideological or political posturing that if acted upon could end up, in history’s judgment, harming American national security interests.

Ali Gharib

Ali Gharib is a New York-based journalist on U.S. foreign policy with a focus on the Middle East and Central Asia. His work has appeared at Inter Press Service, where he was the Deputy Washington Bureau Chief; the Buffalo Beast; Huffington Post; Mondoweiss; Right Web; and Alternet. He holds a Master's degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. A proud Iranian-American and fluent Farsi speaker, Ali was born in California and raised in D.C.

SHOW 7 COMMENTS

7 Comments

  1. Congress and the handlers of people like Edelman and Takeyh are helping drive our country off the cliff with the influence they have over our nation’s foreign policy. U.S. national interests are repeatedly ignored or compromised for their own profit, while our fisc is emptied (and our Social Security Trust Fund, which is overfunded by $2 trillion is borrowed against to fund the wars we initiate, and that our proxies in the Middle East perpetuate and fight on our behalf- or by their ever spiraling demands for financial and military aid to fund their own foreign misadventures, when the conflicts they cause can only be solved through peaceful engagement, respect for the rights of others, and meaningful compliance with international law. We enable when we should say ‘no’ and enforce the law, and we demonize, frame and attack when some other nation (such as Iran) pursues an independent and peaceful economic policy. Iran’s development of, or interest in developing, WMD has been a canard since 1979 and our leaders have always known it, even as they tried to convince Americans and the rest of the world otherwise- yet they are nonchalant when putative allies like Israel develop lethal arsenals and show little hesitation to use them. Who, after all, are the real terrorists, and why are we funding them, instead of sanctioning and putting them out of business?

  2. I don’t have a comment on the article itself but I have to share with you the belly laugh I enjoyed after I saw the headline “should the next president…” accompanied by a picture of the Walrus himself, the guy who is a joke even among the severest neoconservatives, none other than John Bolton himself. His mommy, George W Bush had to use a recess appointment to get around the Senate opposition, and for years could not get even the Republicans to get him the votes he needed. The man who couldn’t secure even a puff position like the UN ambassador, despite his party controlling Congress and the WH, wants to conquer the highest office by popular vote. Should he win, sure, not only is he going to kill the Iran deal, he’s going to go back in time and kill all the deals with USSR.

  3. At least with Bolton you know where he stands, unlike some other weasel-minded politicians. Regarding the larger question of the US world decline, they say that the right leaders come along at the right time in history, and we have the right leaders to lead the decline. (Look on the bright side.) But what would Bernie Sanders do, Ali Gharib? I was shocked to read that a retired top military guy favored Bernie. He’s pro-people, and at the same time a Jew who is pro-Israel. A socialist too. It’s worth sticking around for.

  4. Is it suggested that Bolton or someone like him would be the next US president ? It seems that Mr.Gharib chooses the most unlikely subject for his discussion to attract attention!!
    John Bolton as president of the US ?? That must be a joke!! You might as well assume Netanyahu as the president of US!!
    No doubt that the powerful Israeli lobbies will do their best to send their man to the White House,but not an obvious extremist that would certainly initiate reactions from some patriots etc.
    Let us suppose that the negotiations with Iran breaks down or comes to some sort of agreement which would be broken by the next President of the US,wether Republican or ,for argument sake,Democrat. Then what ?
    Iran as in N.Korea will continue uranium enrichment with the intention of building several A-Bombs. The West tightens sanctions against Iran and Iran hastens enrichment to get the Bomb as soon as possible. Then the west ,namely the US, decides to employ the ultimate alternative in cooperation with Israel ,its European allies or alone.
    War with Iran can be on the basis of different alternatives : hitting specific targets with smart bombs, total war with Iran as in Iraq, or even dropping a few A-Bombs on Iran,as suggested by the new defence minister of Israel.
    The short term consequences of employing each of these alternatives is not easy to predict but not so difficult either,though as usual the predictions may be far from the reality. It is the medium and long term consequences that a
    are not so easy to even guess .Iran is not like Iraq ,Afghanistan or any other country in the area.
    Instead of arguing what the next president might do and what the immediate consequences of such decisions might be :
    I SUGGEST LOBELOG AND SERIOUS POLITICAL ANALYSTS(AS AGAINST LIGHT AND SHALLOW JOURNALISTIC ANALYSTS ) OPEN A FULL AND VARIED DISCUSSION ON MEDIUM AND LONG TERM CONSEQUENCES OF STARTING A WAR WITH IRAN (COMPLETELY UNNECESSARILY JUST TO PLEASE ISRAEL,WITHOUT POSITIVE RESULT FOR US OR EVEN ISRAEL), CHOOSING ANY ALTERNATIVE METHODS AND WEAPONRY. TRY TO SEE WHAT YOU GET FROM WAR WITH IRAN,IF YOU CAN!!k

  5. There shouldn’t even be a question of “should the next president…………..”
    Why all the BS? When I asked a WWII vet why didn’t the US negotiate with the Nazis he said “everyone knew you can’t make a deal with Hitler”. So what’s the difference between Hitler and the Ayatollah”s? When I asked a Jew that survived the concentration camps he said “when someone says he wants to kill you, believe him”.
    U Americans already have a 9/11 taste of what jihad world domination can do. So sit back a enjoy your ride in delusion land.
    Any deal made with people who believe in Taqqiyya is NOT WORTH THE PAPER ITS WRITTEN ON.

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