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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Nuclear Deal and the Sunset Provision

Dismantling hawkish objections to the "sunset" provision in the nuclear deal.
sunset iran

Richard Nephew thoroughly dismantles hawkish objections to a “sunset” provision in the nuclear deal:

Most people currently taking issue with the sunset clause are really just opposed to any deal with Iran. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comments this week were instructive in this regard. His address to Congress suggested that a sunset is not a problem in and of itself but rather that it becomes one because of the nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its foreign policy. As such, he argued that the United States should use negotiations to secure Iranian commitments that are antithetical to the broader Iranian foreign policy approach. Repugnant as many aspects of Iranian foreign policy are, this is still no guide to a negotiation with representatives of the Iranian government. By demanding that these issues be resolved in negotiations, Netanyahu is — in effect — arguing that, unless Iran promises regime change in the future, there can be no deal.

The standard hawkish tactic in arms control debates is to draw attention to details in an agreement that are not really objectionable, but which they think they think they can spin in a way to make the agreement sound worse. One of the preferred misdirections during the New START debate was to say that the treaty was flawed because it “failed” to cover tactical nuclear weapons. That might sound bad if you didn’t know that strategic arms reduction treaties have never included them and wouldn’t include them by definition, but once you know that the complaint doesn’t make any sense. Iran hawks have similarly been drawing attention to all the things that nuclear negotiations were never going to cover because they have nothing to do with the nuclear program itself. Opponents of arms control agreements almost always want to change the subject from what is actually being negotiated to their larger problems with the regime in question. Their other concerns may or may not be valid, but they are usually irrelevant to the negotiations. They are brought in to confuse things and they allow hawks to engage in their own sort of “whataboutism”: “Why doesn’t the deal solve every problem imaginable? It must be a bad deal.”

The sunset provision has become a favorite hawkish target in recent days because they make it sound as if Iran will be entirely free to “get nukes” once the agreement begins to expire. That is simply untrue, and Iran hawks know it to be untrue, but this misrepresentation makes it sound as if the agreement just creates a delay to an inevitable Iranian bomb. But an Iranian bomb isn’t inevitable, and it should be possible to get to a point where Iran is treated like any other member of the NPT. Nephew concludes:

However, the simple reality is that Iran will not accept a deal in which it is a second-class NPT citizen forever and insisting upon it would spell the end of the negotiating process. The sunset provision that the negotiators have in mind would address U.S. national security requirements as well as protect the interests of our allies and partners. We should not jeopardize a sufficient solution for an unachievable ideal one.

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