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The Absurdity of a ‘Better’ Nuclear Deal

One major flaw in all of the proposals for "improving" the nuclear deal is that no one can explain why Iran would ever accept any changes.
us iran negotiations

The Bloomberg editors think the U.S. should try to make more demands of Iran:

To get real concessions from Iran over its nuclear program, however, Washington will need the cooperation of the European nations that helped broker the deal. That will be difficult, since they all opposed the U.S. decertification. At the same time, they acknowledge that the deal is not perfect.

A stronger agreement isn’t hard to envision.

Some version of this argument has become so common that I don’t think most Americans appreciate how arrogant it is to think that the U.S. should unilaterally revise the terms of a multilateral agreement. Imagine if the positions were reversed. Two years into the agreement, imagine that the Iranian government begins threatening to renege on its obligations and expand its nuclear program again unless the U.S. agreed to lift all of our government’s non-nuclear sanctions and make other concessions to them in our conduct of foreign policy in the region. Maybe they demand that we stop selling weapons to the Saudis and Israelis because it destabilizes the region, or maybe they insist that we remove all of our forces from Iraq and Syria for the same reason. Instead of waiting for 10 or 15 years for some of the restrictions on the nuclear program to expire, they insist that it should just be 2 or 3 years.

Would anyone here take those demands seriously and be willing to consider them “improvements” to the agreement, or would we all view these new demands as proof of the other side’s bad faith? Obviously, we would say the latter, and that would be correct. When people on our side make similarly far-fetched and unreasonable demands to revise the deal after it has been completed, there is a tendency for our media outlets to treat it as a legitimate and even desirable course of action. It isn’t, and it is important to keep this in mind going forward.

The editors say that “a stronger agreement isn’t hard to envision,” but envisioning it isn’t the issue. Freed from all realistic constraints and the agency of others, one can conjure up all sorts of agreements that would “solve” international problems. None of these new agreements would be realized because the other parties to existing agreements won’t accept them. One major flaw in all of the proposals for “improving” the nuclear deal is that none of the proponents of these changes can explain why Iran would ever accept any of them. Trying to “fix” the deal now amounts to calling for a do-over on what is probably a once-in-a-generation diplomatic breakthrough. It’s preposterous, and moreover it’s a dangerous distraction from the sabotage of the agreement that the supposed advocates of a “better” deal truly want.

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