Washington Wednesday - Striking a deal with Iran

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: It’s Wednesday, March 23rd, 2022.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Paul Butler.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Washington Wednesday.

Today, reviving the Iran nuclear deal.

Former President Trump pulled the plug on the controversial 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But the Biden administration and other world powers are working to revive it.

Negotiators recently said they are close to a deal that supporters say would delay Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon. And they argue that there’s no time to waste.

BUTLER: The UN’s atomic watchdog agency says Iran is now just weeks away from having enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb.

But many analysts question whether a renewed agreement would really accomplish what supporters say it will.

Among them is Michael Rubin. He’s a former Pentagon official and an expert on Iran who lived in the country after the revolution. He has written and co-written several books on Iranian history.

REICHARD: And he joins us now. Michael, good morning!

MICHAEL RUBIN, GUEST: Good morning.

REICHARD: Reportedly, the last big hangup here in the nuclear talks is that Iran wants the United States to remove the terrorism designation for Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard.
No one in Washington is excited about doing that, but there are some who suggest it may be the lesser of two evils when weighed against the specter of a nuclear Iran. What do you say to that?

RUBIN: Well, the reason why this issue about the de-designating of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is so controversial, is while in the American press and in the American public mind, the Revolutionary Guard is often associated with its terrorism. There's another side to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They rose to prominence during the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. When that war ended, they didn't want to go back to the barracks and so they started investing in the civilian economy. Without any moral equivalence, what the Revolutionary Guards economic wing is today, imagine taking the Army Corps of Engineers, merging it with KBR, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Walmart. And so by designating the Revolutionary Guard, what we were also doing is showing not only our European allies, but also China and Russia, that if they were to go into business with this group, they too could be subject to sanctions and so there's a huge economic question mark, and potential windfall over designation or de-designation of this group.

REICHARD: Just to give voice to the other side of this argument here—the supporters of reviving the Iran deal. If Iran is as close to a nuclear bomb as the UN says they may be, does it not make sense to at least try to slow down Iran’s progress here?

RUBIN: Well, there's two issues here. First of all, the Revolutionary Guard is most involved in the military aspects of that. So if we go back to that previous question, about de-designating the Revolutionary Guard, are we actually going to be resourcing the group that has consistently and covertly pushed forward issues such as warhead design, which the revived Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action doesn't actually address? It's mostly in agreement about enrichment. But then there's the broader issue about whether the steel would fundamentally undercut the precedent of nonproliferation. You know, there's been several nonproliferation crises over the decades. When the Soviet Union collapsed, you had the legacy programs in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, and we agreed to remove those weapons altogether, actually, to the benefit of Russia. Then in South Africa in 1991, they had covertly built six nuclear weapons. They decided to come in from the cold. Nelson Mandela became president in 1994 and it still took 16 additional years for the International Atomic Energy Agency to give them a clean bill of health. When Muammar Qaddafi came in from the cold in 2003, we physically dismantled his program. Now with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and this revived proposed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, what we're doing is leaving Iran with more centrifuges than Pakistan had when Pakistan built not a bomb but its arsenal.

REICHARD: Supporters of the Iran nuclear deal and the effort to renew it argue that, for whatever its flaws, President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign failed. What is your response to that?

RUBIN: I actually will disagree with this as well. If we want to take a broader picture, when President Barack Obama started negotiating, Iran’s economy was in the tank. Iran's GDP had actually declined 5.4 percent in the year previous to when President Obama started his negotiation. So we had a great deal of leverage. Now, a lot of the criticism with regard to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was it actually allowed Iran to fill up its coffers with hard currency. And we saw a lot of bad Iranian behavior with regard to terrorism, sponsoring regional instability, and insurrection and so forth. Now, with regard to President Trump's maximum pressure campaign, we saw Iran's hard currency reserves plummet from more than $100 billion or so down to about $5 billion. I can think of times in Iranian history where maximum pressure did work. At the same time, I can't think of any examples where resourcing an opponent's military actually led to peace.

REICHARD: Michael, you wrote an op-ed in which you argue that how we dealt with North Korea shows exactly how another nuclear deal would fail. Elaborate if you would?

RUBIN: Well, there's a couple different issues with regard to North Korea. One of my criticisms of American policy is that we tend—regardless of administration—to stovepipe. We are negotiating with Iran and we have our blinders on so we only see Iran. Now it can be fairly hard to hide an enrichment program, simply because you can't dismantle it if the inspectors suddenly knock on the door. But when it comes to other things, which we know that Iranians had been involved with in the past, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example, warhead design, working with detonators, and that sort of issue, which would only have a place in a bomb program, that can be done in a relatively small lab in a small office. What’s to stop Iran from doing this in North Korea? When I lived in Tehran, I was at a Persian language school working on my dissertation. There were North Koreans there. And we know that there's been Iranian engineers in North Korea and North Korean witnesses when Iran does its missile launches. And so you have this, if you will, this symbiotic relationship between these two so-called rogue regimes, which this deal does nothing to address. And so I would argue that, simply put, we need to be a little bit more holistic.

There's another issue with regard to the North Korea agreed framework which President Bill Clinton signed in 1994. On one hand, it was meant to eliminate the possibility that North Korea would build nuclear weapons, but we saw that North Korea continued cheating and today they have nuclear weapons. What evidence do we have that Iran isn't simply trying to follow the North Korea path? At the same time, what we had decided to do back during the Clinton administration is incentivize North Korea with heavy oil shipments, with food, and they had diverted it disproportionately to their military, which I mean, simply increased the strength of their military relatively. We don't want to get into a situation where we don't see the forest through the trees.

REICHARD: So if you had to sum up what you think is the correct answer to keeping a nuclear weapon out of the hands of Iran, what would you say?

RUBIN: I have no problem negotiating with Iran. I think what we need to do is focus on a way to ensure that any resources that are given to Iran don't fall into the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. At the same time, we are at our best strength as a nation when we act in a bipartisan fashion. The fact that so much of this negotiation has been kept secret even from Congress, the fact that we're not ratifying this as a treaty makes me very, very nervous about its staying power. And that ultimately is I think we need to deal with some of the issues on our home front. And honestly, I have more faith in the centrist Republican, centrist Democrats to actually work together to help agree to have a common consensus for a good deal than perhaps some of the Twitterati have, and the political pundits on cable talk shows.

REICHARD: Final question, Michael: If all else fails, could you envision the United States, Israel or any country taking military action to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran?

RUBIN: I can't imagine the United States doing this willingly. Now, a military action against Iran isn't easy. In 1981, Israel struck at Iraq, and it was a one off strike on a single target. The same thing repeated back in 2007, in Syria, but Iran is six times the size of the United Kingdom. Even if the Israelis went in with surprise, they couldn't leave with surprise once they drop their bombs. And so they'd have to take out command and control centers, enemy airfields, and so forth. You're talking, at a minimum, more than 1,000 sorties. And this is why it's such a mess. Now, the nightmare scenario is that Israel would start something expecting other regional states to clean up the mess if they weren't able to finish it. What I worry about is by pursuing this deal without adequately addressing the concerns of not only Israel but some of our Arab allies, we're actually setting a course where they're going to be incentivized to take unilateral action because they don't feel that they can live with the outcome of this deal.

REICHARD: Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Michael, thanks so much!

RUBIN: Thank you.

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