Heads, Iran wins. Tails, the U. S. Loses.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the Iran deal—is facing another life-or-death deadline on May 12, and once again we must listen to the arguments for and against the deal and wonder if President Trump will or won’t keep the United States in it. The president wants out of it, but European allies, particularly France’s Emmanuel Macron, want him to stay in. Trump seems to lean toward abandoning JCPOA and renegotiating a new deal, but he has seemed so in the past, and here we are.
The momentum may have changed on Monday. In a dramatic news conference, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a cache of incriminating documents—a half-ton of stolen paper and digital documents from a storage facility in Tehran—that prove, he claims, that Iran has brazenly lied to the international community about its nuclear activity. The trove may or may not give us much information that wasn’t already known, but it again confirms what skeptics have said from the deal’s beginning—namely that Iran negotiated the deal in bad faith.
The Israeli intelligence confirms that the Iranians have maintained a covert nuclear program since 2003. The program, headed by Iranian physicist and defense official Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, both pre-dates and post-dates the July 2015 signing of JCPOA. That of course violates the deal’s third clause, which “reaffirm[ed]. . that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” The agreement, in other words, was negotiated in bad faith.
Other documents in the trove similarly indicate Iranian duplicity—they reveal, for instance, a design for a nuclear payload on a Shahab-3 missile. It’s unclear why a government that has forsworn all intentions to build a nuclear weapon would want to attach a nuclear warhead to a missile.
There are thousands more documents for U. S. and allied officials to interpret and examine, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted on Monday night, but none of this will change anybody’s mind. If Pompeo insists that Israel’s documents “show that Iran had a secret weapons program for years” and that “Iran sought to develop nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems,” the response of JCPOA’s proponents will emphasize the fact that little of what Netanyahu revealed is new. Both may be right. Iran’s duplicity is nothing new to the Iran deal’s proponents; indeed its duplicity (in their view) is precisely why we needed the deal in the first place and why we should stay in it now.
Welcome to the world of diplomatic groupthink. We need the Iran deal, we’re told, because it’s only by “engaging” with the regime that we can monitor what it does through JCPOA-mandated inspections. The Iranians may be hiding all sorts of things from the inspectors, the thinking goes, but without the deal there would be no inspections at all.
But by this logic there is nothing Iran could ever do, short of launching a nuclear attack on Saudi Arabia or Israel, that would persuade the deal’s proponents that discarding it is a good idea. The more Iran lies, the more it’s shown to have deceived western powers before and since signing the agreement, the more its proponents insist on preserving it. Nor is there anything else Iran could do to persuade western deal-backers to change their view. Is Tehran funding genocide in Syria? Yes, but the nuclear deal implicitly allows them to continue this behavior. Is the Khamenei regime funding Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations around the Middle East and the world? Yes, but we mustn’t “disengage.”
Iran deal proponents have come to resemble a police department that places security cameras all over town so that it can watch crimes being committed but can’t or won’t do anything about what it watches. We see Iran pursuing its nuclear program in flagrant violation of the 2015 agreement, but we can’t muster the will to do anything about it.
We’re grateful to the Israelis for reminding America and its European allies of this melancholy reality. At some point, it’ll be time to stop watching and start acting.
