And in late August, US and Iranian forces clashed in Syria. Meanwhile, and largely in reaction to Iran’s stiffening stance, Washington appears to have hardened its own positions and has signaled that is not ready for “a deal at any price”. It sanctioned Iranian companies violating the sanctions. The vigilance of hard-line Republicans in Congress who stand ready to accuse the Biden administration of weakness may also have contributed.
All this does not bode well for the successful conclusion of the negotiations. Moreover, a new agreement would not solve the Iranian nuclear question “once and for all” more than the JCPOA did. Iranian hardliners might be even more tempted to cheat than was the case in 2015, counting on the lack of attention by Western powers.
What to do in the absence of an agreement
Still, as was the case at the time – and even though the JCPOA may not have been the “best possible deal” as described by the Obama administration – it might be better overall to live with a moderately constrained Iran than with a totally unconstrained (or constrained only by IAEA obligations it has flouted for decades) Iran. There is no Plan B – or, rather, we’ve already seen what Plan B could be (the so-called “maximum pressure campaign” by the Administration) and it did not exactly work. A major crisis would probably ensue at some point, especially if a hard-line Republican president was to be elected in November 2024. The Iranian program would eventually reach a point where it would change the strategic calculus of key actors in the region. Perhaps Iran would not build operational nuclear weapons and claim only the “capability to do so immediately if need be”. But that is a risky bet: nuclear program history indicates that no country has ever stayed very long at the threshold.
The possible consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran have been analyzed for more than two decades now and, in many ways, such a scenario would be much worse than the North Korean one. Broadly speaking, four consequences are feared.
- The possession of nuclear weapons would embolden the Islamic Republic in its regional designs, including through the support of terrorist forces.
- Bilateral deterrence vis-à-vis Israel would not necessarily operate, given that Tehran does not even recognize the existence of that State.
- Given that, by definition, the international community would have been unable to stop Iran from acquiring the bomb, the whole international order would be shaken.
- In particular, the loss of confidence in the United States and the erosion of the NPT would heighten the probability of further proliferation in the Middle East and in East Asia.
In many ways, in the absence of an agreement, we would be back to the late 2000s and early 2010s, when a central question was how to avoid two bleak scenarios, “to bomb Iran or to have an Iranian bomb”. So what to do to avoid such a terrible dilemma?
Add new comment