It goes without saying that the biggest news of the past week is the Iran deal. When the President says it’s “historic”, he’s right. Now whether it will prove to be positive history or negative very much remains to be seen. In the paragraphs that follow, I will try to explain the basic pros and cons and how those elements inform our basic choices here.
For starters, I take as my premise that allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon is absolutely unacceptable. It cannot be allowed. Indeed, I would go a step further than the President in saying that I don’t believe Iran can be allowed to have the capability to produce a weapon, much less have the weapon itself. That’s how I see it. So how does this deal fit into that framework?
The strongest argument supporters make is that absent the deal, Iran would almost surely have a nuclear weapon inside of a year. Other plusses for the deal… The consensus seems to be that the verification mechanisms are more or less strong enough that we’ll know if Iran cheats.
That, in turn, brings us to what happens if they do cheat? It may well be harder to bring the sanctions back than proponents are suggesting. The reason for that is simple. The U.S. sanctions are not being repealed, they are being waived. In other words, the U.S. sanctions can “snap back” without requiring an act of Congress. The European sanctions, on the other hand, are different. They are being repealed. In order for the European sanctions to “snap back” in the event of Iranian backsliding, the various countries that make up the Eurozone will have to vote to reinstate them. That’s not guaranteed. And forget the UN sanctions, because they aren’t worth much to begin with.
Critics of the deal also point out that the agreement is time limited – it only lasts ten years. So in exchange for waiting ten years, the Iranians will have billions and billions of dollars in assets unfrozen, they will be able to import the oil drilling equipment they need to return their vast oil fields to productivity, they will be able to trade with Europe, gain access to the financial system and enjoy pretty much all of the economic benefits that they have been rightly denied. Maybe at the end of the ten years, we renegotiate and extend it some more. Maybe we don’t. In the end, regardless of when that end may be, they will have a choice of whether or not to pursue the bomb and roughly less than a year to achieve it.
And frankly, for a society whose time horizon stretches back thousands of years, waiting a decade for the thing you most want is nothing. It. Is. Nothing. And since they are going to be compensated very well financially in the interim, it’s hard to see any real downside at all from Iran’s perspective.
They will grow much stronger over the next ten years. They will become the undisputed heavyweight in the region over the next ten years. They will be able to meddle even more and sponsor even more terror and kill even more Americans over the next ten years. They will be able to keep threatening to annihilate Israel, keep chanting death to America, and keep sponsoring their clients in conflicts all over the region. The only thing they can’t do, basically, is spin their centrifuges fast enough to produce fissile material over the next ten years. They are still allowed to keep their centrifuges and to continue producing material, it just won’t be to the extent required to build a weapon. After those ten years, however, all bets are off. In exchange for that, they get everything they want. Including heavy weapons (air defenses, etc) from Russia or others after five years. For Iran, that’s the epitome of having your cake and eating it too.
The agreement is a fairly long and complicated document. It warrants further examination and reflection. We’ll certainly be looking to see what sort of insight we can glean as the various committees conducting their hearings and classified briefings in the weeks ahead. The bottom line is that simply because this may be the best deal we could get the Iranians to agree to, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s in our interests or the interests of our allies to agree to it. Similarly, just because it doesn’t meet the basic criteria of preventing them from retaining a capability of producing a nuclear weapon doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not worth considering. The alternatives in either case aren’t great. In the next couple of months, I’m going to take a vote here on behalf of all 696,000 of us in the 11th District. You have every right to be part of the conversation about that vote and I sincerely hope you will take the opportunity to do so.
Congressman Rich Nugent represents The Villages in the U.S. House of Representatives.
