Iran is neither the first nor will it be the last country that has covertly sought to develop a nuclear program. And while White House talking points trumpeted the unprecedented safeguards inherent in the deal hashed out by Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the opposite is true. With the exception of the 1994 Agreed Framework, ironically negotiated in part by Wendy Sherman, Kerry’s undersecretary and assistant on the Iran talks, every previous nuclear agreement was more intrusive and achieved more permanent, irreversible results.
In 1991, for example, South Africa sought to come clean on its past and opened 20 years of its books to IAEA inspectors; even then, it took well over a decade for inspectors to certify the country in full compliance. Then, in 2003, Libya sought to come in from the cold and agreed to the dismantlement of its nuclear infrastructure. Even then, government officials scrambled to dismantle and ship out of Libya the most sensitive material and infrastructure before the mercurial Muammar Qaddafi could change his mind. Against the backdrop of that precedent, in 2015, President Obama and Kerry reworked the entire baseline for a nuclear agreement. Rather than forcing suspect countries to come clean on past work, they can now treat their signature as the basis for a blank slate. And now, with the Associated Press revelation that Iran can inspect itself, not only have Obama and Kerry acquiesced to potential cheating on a vast scale, but they have also set the new baseline for all future agreements.
In 1993, the European Union took the lead on the Iran nuclear portfolio to save the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) may, in effect, render the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) meaningless in the future. No country violating the NPT or suspected of violating the NPT will settle for anything less than self-inspection based on an international double-pinky swear.
Obama has from the very beginning played Russian roulette with Congress. He deflected any criticism of the deal as it was negotiated, arguing that critics could not possibly judge it since the details were still being hashed out. Then, he presented it, as a fait accompli arguing that to walk away would undermine American standing in the world and that if Congress rejected the deal the only alternative was war.
As more details leak out, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that it would be a historic mistake to defer to the president. Not only does the deal fail on its merits, but its passage would also open the floodgates to nuclear cheating and undermine the effectiveness of any diplomatic remedy when future regimes challenge the NPT. If Congress broadly and Congressional Democrats truly seek a solution to nuclear uncertainty, it becomes more crucial to recognize the diplomatic damage and loss of face that walking away will incur, and walk away anyway, for the reverberations of a bad deal would be worse.
