Opponents Of The JCPOA Unlocked A Hellish Future
They made a gamble with a rickety but salvageable global order—and lost.
When Barack Obama signed the JCPOA with Iran and other global powers in 2015, his critics wailed that the deal was bad, but also too short.
It echoed the Annie Hall joke: What terrible food—and such small portions!
But these malcontents did have an argument about why bigger would be better. Taken at face value the idea was that Iran could bide its time, submit to an intrusive inspection regime for 15 years, then revert to form when the terms expired.
“It is only a deferral and a delay,” bellowed the hawkish critic Leon Wieseltier. “Every pathway is not cut off, not at all. The accord provides for a respite of 15 years, but 15 years is just a young person’s idea of a long time.”
People in this camp feared, or claimed to fear, that in the ensuing decade and a half, Iran would amass wealth through oil markets, invest proceeds in conventional military, then cut bait. They’d break the deal late in the game, or comply through the term, but refuse to modify and extend it. They’d expel IAEA inspectors, knowing international sanctions would snap back into place, but then reconstitute a nuclear-weapons program as a middle power, which would likely make the risks of preventative strikes or regime-change war too great.
Somewhere in their minds, though, this was always about steering the U.S. toward regime-change war. And the tell was that these critics would never stipulate what, in their minds, would constitute a satisfactory term. What’s a suitably long time? What’s the longest inspections regime a sovereign nation might conceivably accept? Twenty years? Thirty?
No state would submit to a permanent affront to its sovereignty. One might quibble at the margin with 15 years, but it was not absurd on its face.
Hungary lost and regained democracy in 16 years. Germans elected Adolf Hitler, lost World War II, and reconstituted as a constitutional democracy over the course of 16 years. Fifteen years on from 2015, Ayatollah Khamenei (then 76) would have been 91 years old, or (more likely) deceased. From the vantage point of 2015, nobody who signed the deal could have known with certainty how much oil the world would be demanding a decade and a half later. Fifteen years is more than enough time for cynics and fanatics to see the light, or be overthrown by popular uprising. It’s long enough for a regime, or at least the character of a regime, to change. It may be a young person’s idea of a long time, but it’s a presumptuous man’s idea of a predictable time horizon; and an old man’s idea of a blink of an eye.
The JCPOA provided a reasonable window for reassessment. If Iran reneged, the sanctions would snap back into place, and Iran would return to pariah status. But if Iran upheld its end of the bargain, conducted itself acceptably in its international affairs, and sought an extension on more lenient terms—that would represent real evidence of normalization. Diplomatic success! It would suggest Iran was no longer a rogue regime, and perhaps never was.
In any case, under the terms of the JCPOA, which Donald Trump voided, we would have reached that crossroads in 2030.
Under the terms of the mess Trump has made, his vice president now says, “we feel with extraordinary confidence, if [the Iranians] did everything that they could to build a nuclear weapon, they couldn’t do it during this administration.”
This administration ends in January 2029.
First and foremost: Fuck these people. Having behaved so recklessly, and caused so much damage, the Trump administration can now only promise to wipe its hands of Iran and leave the nuclear proliferation challenge for another administration. This is their tell, and their tell is that—having started and lost a war, rather than honor or revive the JCPOA—their top priority is making this someone else’s problem. Someone they won’t hesitate to attack and smear and saddle with blame from the cheap seats, if Iran becomes a nuclear power a few years from now.
But as a close second: this is worse than it sounds.