For all the bluster and thundering certitudes of President Obama's critics, no one really knows for sure if Iran's new government is serious about pursuing a nuclear weapon. Thanks to the deal struck in Geneva last weekend, we are likely to find out sometime in the next six months.
The agreement is intended to test Iran's willingness to neuter its nuclear program in exchange for a way out of its deepening economic and political isolation. It is probably Tehran's last chance to avoid a U.S. or Israeli military strike aimed at destroying its nuclear facilities.
Although fairly modest in scope, the Geneva deal carries some obvious risks. Relaxing economic pressure now may sap the international community's will to maintain stiff sanctions on Iran indefinitely. And if the deal succeeds, Iran will gain a measure of international legitimacy without having to relent on its harsh internal repression, support for terrorism or hostility toward Israel.
Nonetheless, the worst outcome of all -- for the United States, for Sunni Arab states terrified of Shiite Iran's regional ambitions and for Israel -- is an Islamic Republic with nuclear weapons. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are trying to stave off that strategic calamity without resorting to war.
Giving the president zero benefit of the doubt is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who denounced the deal as "bad and dangerous." For him, the agreement confirms growing suspicions that Obama will never resort to the one option -- force -- that can neutralize Iran's nuclear threat, despite the president's repeated vows to keep that option "on the table." In fact, the deal effectively gives Iran six month's immunity from an Israeli military strike.
Also convinced that the mullahs have taken Obama to the cleaners are U.S. conservatives. They complain that the agreement doesn't require Tehran to stop all enrichment as a condition for sanctions relief. That's true; it's an interim agreement that slows down Iran's nuclear program for six months, during which time a comprehensive resolution is supposed to be reached. Applying the same sledgehammer logic that led to the government shutdown debacle, Republicans evidently believe anything less than Iran's immediate and unconditional surrender constitutes appeasement.
Meanwhile, some influential Democrats aren't showing much enthusiasm for the Geneva deal either. Senators Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, have vowed to keep pushing for new sanctions on Iran anyway. Rather than turning the screws on Iran, though, this would likely shift the onus of intransigence from Tehran to Washington, embolden Iranian hardliners who oppose any bargain with the Great Satan, and undermine Obama's negotiating leverage. Why should Iran's comparatively pragmatic new president, Hassan Rouhani, take any risks for a peaceful resolution of the standoff if Obama can't deliver on his commitments?
Now there's talk on Capitol Hill of passing sanctions that won't kick in for six months. But it's almost always a mistake for Congress to try to micromanage foreign policy, especially delicate negotiations between two feuding nations that haven't talked directly to each other since 1979.
Besides, the idea that layering on new sanctions will force Iran to capitulate totally misreads what motivates its rulers. Yes, the sanctions have inflicted growing economic pain, and Rouhani is eager to reduce that pressure. Tehran urgently needs hard currency, and it needs to sell its oil on global markets again. But Iran has added centrifuges, stepped up enriching and moved steadily closer to a nuclear breakout even as the international community has ratcheted up the economic and political pressure. The Islamic Republic, for which opposing American "imperialism" is not just a policy but a founding principle, isn't going to cave in to demands from a U.S.-led coalition.
It might be induced, however, to embrace a face-saving formula in which the United States and its P5+1 partners tacitly acknowledge Iran's "right to enrich" in exchange for a verifiable dismantling of its capacity to develop enough weapons grade uranium or plutonium to make a nuclear weapon.
Skepticism toward Iran is perfectly rational, given its deceptive behavior over the past decade, but creative statecraft demands more than straight-line extrapolation from previous experience. Sometimes, with imagination and courage, bitter antagonists do break through the crust formed by decades of profound mistrust, and find a new modus vivendi. That's what happened during Nixon's "opening" of China in 1972, at Camp David in 1979, in the Reagan-Gorbachev 1988 "walk in the woods" and the 1998 Easter accords that pacified Northern Ireland.
Under the interim deal, Iran will dilute or otherwise render harmless its highly enriched uranium and halt further enrichment above 5 percent. It will also stop fuel production for the heavy water reactor at Arak, which by producing plutonium could give Iran a second route to the bomb. In return, the coalition is offering about $7 billion relief from economic sanctions.
At a minimum the deal sets the clock back on Iran's ability to acquire nuclear weapons. If we're lucky, it will trigger a dynamic of horse-trading and incremental trust-building that could make bigger breakthroughs possible in six months. If not, then we'll know that Tehran is once again stringing the international community along, and we'll react accordingly.
In either case, the deal will clarify at last Iran's real intentions -- and the course America should pursue.