Ilan Berman

No sooner had the P5+1 powers and Iran announced on April 2 that they had agreed upon the framework of a nuclear deal than its supporters began to spin the results. To hear the boosters tell it, the preliminary agreement represents a victory for proponents of peace and a defeat for warmongers everywhere. That sort of simplistic rhetoric may play well on a political level, but there are real strategic reasons to be skeptical of the impending deal.

A crisis deferred, not averted. Before the start of nuclear talks in Geneva in November 2013, it was widely understood that the sine qua non for negotiations was at least a temporary halt to the Iranian regime’s uranium enrichment activities. A year-and-a-half later, that demand has been rolled back significantly; under the framework deal, Iran will reduce the number of its operational centrifuges by roughly two-thirds and keep them there for at least a decade. It also has pledged to keep enrichment at “civilian” levels (under 5%) for the same period. It’s a significant concession, but one that will still allow Iran to continue adding to its stockpile of low-enriched uranium. Later it can again ramp up its enrichment to full speed, and refine its enlarged stockpile to higher and higher levels.

Such a bargain makes sense only if, during the decade-long pause, relations between Washington and Tehran undergo a wholesale transformation that makes Iran’s nuclear progress a benign development. That’s the hope of the Obama administration, which clearly believes that the current deal has the ability to pave the way for a broader reconciliation between the two countries.

Their Iranian counterparts, however, do not. As Iran’s top security official, Supreme National Security Council secretary Ali Shamkhani, told the Financial Times back in December, the current negotiations between Iran and the West “are only for the nuclear issue,” and will not lead to a larger rapprochement between the Islamic Republic and the United States. Things may change in coming years, but this agreement is simply kicking the can down the road.

An unraveling sanctions regime. Washington’s interpretation of the new deal is predicated on the notion that, if Iran doesn’t comply with the terms of the agreement, international sanctions will simply “snap back” into place. Yet that idea is likely to be little more than a political fiction. That’s because, while most U.S. sanctions are “hybrid” in nature (encompassing not only Iran’s nuclear-related activities but also its human rights practices and support for terrorism as well) and therefore more resilient, European sanctions are overwhelmingly tied to Iran’s nuclear development.

In the United States the deal will receive considerable oversight in the weeks ahead from a skeptical Congress. No such review will take place in the EU. Rather, European approval of the deal will be both pro forma and rapid, carried out via foreign minister vote at the European Council. As a result, we could soon see a Europe fully re-engaged with Iran — and an Iran out of the sanctions “box,” whether or not it is playing ball with the West.

The devil is in the details. As the initial euphoria surrounding the deal begins to fade, it is becoming apparent that Washington and Tehran might not be on the same page regarding the particulars. Among other things, the United States expects a phased lifting of sanctions, dependent on proper verification and compliance on the part of the Iranian regime. Tehran, on the other hand, has made clear it expects a wholesale removal of all sanctions levied against it as soon as the deal goes into force. Ambiguities also exist over the scope and level of work that Iran will be permitted to carry out at Fordo, a controversial nuclear site. Iran and the United States are at odds over half-a-dozen substantive points of the deal — each of which could end up sinking the agreement.

Trust, but (just try and) verify. During the Cold War, President Reagan approached his dealings with the Soviet Union through the maxim of “Trust, but verify.” That simple phrase encapsulated a complex concept: no matter the diplomatic niceties, no agreement between the U.S. and USSR would be worth the paper that it was printed on if there was not a rigorous inspection regime in place to prevent the parties from cheating on their obligations. That’s good advice to keep in mind in our dealings with Iran, a country where “death to America” remains a popular and widely used regime slogan.

Properly monitoring Iran’s nuclear program, however, is bound to prove exceedingly difficult — if not downright impossible. As former acting UNSCOM chief Charles Duelfer points out, in its day, the regime of Saddam Hussein managed to cheat and obfuscate despite an extraordinarily extensive “all access” inspections regime imposed on a defeated Iraq. There’s no reason to think that Iran will acquiesce to as extensive a monitoring and verification regime as Saddam was forced to. But it’s a safe bet that Tehran has learned from Baghdad’s experience in foiling international oversight — and that these tactics will be used to full effect to prevent full verification of its nuclear activities.

There goes the neighborhood. Within the Washington Beltway, U.S.-Iranian relations more often than not tend to get treated as a bilateral affair. Yet they are not. The unfolding nuclear deal is of profound importance to Iran’s immediate neighborhood, insofar as it signals a major shift in the regional balance of power. Regional powers are already pushing back. Saudi Arabia, for example, recently signed a nuclear cooperation accord with South Korea, and is now spearheading a military offensive against Iranian-supported rebels in Yemen. Israel, meanwhile, is moving back toward an activist — and potentially unilateral — response to Iran’s nuclear program. Its recently-reelected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, now putting the finishing touches on his more conservative ruling coalition, took to the national airwaves the day after the P5+1 deal was announced to reiterate that “Israel will not accept an agreement which allows a country that vows to annihilate us to develop a nuclear weapon.” All this suggests that the Iran nuclear deal won’t be an alternative to war, as its proponents suggest, but a catalyst for still greater instability in the already-volatile Middle East.

Clearly, the Obama administration has bet big on the Iranian nuclear deal. However, there’s little reason to believe the hype surrounding the agreement and plenty of reasons not to.

All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.

by Melissa Clyne

The chaos in Yemen and around the world is a direct result of President Barack Obama’s idle threats and lack of a “coherent foreign policy,” according to American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar Michael Rubin, who appeared as a guest Thursday on Newsmax TV’s “America’s Forum.”

“Unfortunately President Obama doesn’t understand that empty red lines have consequence, that not really effectively dealing with terrorism has consequence, and trusting regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran have consequence,” said Rubin, author of “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes.”

“We heard Secretary of State John Kerry warn Iran. That’s the equivalent of putting them on double secret probation. The Iranians simply don’t take Kerry or Obama or the United States seriously anymore.”

The United States has a president “who doesn’t seem to be able to think strategically and also has a poor tendency to put himself into a bubble, to listen to what he wants to hear, and not to be able to have the introspection to understand that his own understanding of the world and his own strategy are failing,” according to Rubin.

There is no issue with the Saudis taking on Iran in Yemen, but Rubin said he’s concerned that the situation there is shaping up to be “Syria version 2.0.”

“You have the Iranians on one side and you have the Saudis on the other side and ultimately you have the United States on the sidelines,” he said. “No one trusts us anymore.

“Not even our own allies trust us, because the Obama doctrine is: embrace adversaries and throw allies under the bus.”

Rubin charged that under Obama’s leadership, the world today is “even more perilous” than it was during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, whose tenure included numerous international crises, including the 1979 takeover of the American embassy in Iran.

“What we have now is literally the destruction of policy worldwide,” he said. “The Middle East is only one aspect of it. We have taken our eye off Chinese expansion, the Latin American policy has been weak. All over the world, we do have this problem that our enemies don’t fear us and our friends don’t trust us.”

Once America loses credibility on the world stage, it cannot be restored “with a wave of a wand,” he said.

Obama “doesn’t understand that it’s the proverbial finger in the dike preventing a deluge of chaos. And when you do have that chaos, it’s not going to be multilateralism or the United Nations which are going to fill the vacuum,” Rubin said. “It’s going to be the forces of evil, terrorists, the Islamic Republic of Iran — and that’s what we’re going to be paying the price for.”

Americans have repeatedly failed to hold Obama accountable for his actions, and the resulting global unrest may just be “the tip of the iceberg,” according to Rubin.

“We got what we paid for,” he said, adding that “we’re seeing the real unvarnished Obama now and the question is, what damage can he do in the next 20 months?”

All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.

by Editorial Board

THE “KEY parameters” for an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program released Thursday fall well short of the goals originally set by the Obama administration. None of Iran’s nuclear facilities — including the Fordow center buried under a mountain — will be closed. Not one of the country’s 19,000 centrifuges will be dismantled. Tehran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium will be “reduced” but not necessarily shipped out of the country. In effect, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure will remain intact, though some of it will be mothballed for 10 years. When the accord lapses, the Islamic republic will instantly become a threshold nuclear state.

That’s a long way from the standard set by President Obama in 2012 when he declared that “the deal we’ll accept” with Iran “is that they end their nuclear program” and “abide by the U.N. resolutions that have been in place.” Those resolutions call for Iran to suspend the enrichment of uranium. Instead, under the agreement announced Thursday, enrichment will continue with 5,000 centrifuges for a decade, and all restraints on it will end in 15 years.

Mr. Obama argued forcefully — and sometimes combatively — Thursday that the United States and its partners had obtained “a good deal” and that it was preferable to the alternatives, which he described as a nearly inevitable slide toward war. He also said he welcomed a “robust debate.” We hope that, as that debate goes forward, the president and his aides will respond substantively to legitimate questions, rather than claim, as Mr. Obama did, that the “inevitable critics” who “sound off” prefer “the risk of another war in the Middle East.”

The proposed accord will provide Iran a huge economic boost that will allow it to wage more aggressively the wars it is already fighting or sponsoring across the region. Whether that concession is worthwhile will depend in part on details that have yet to be agreed upon, or at least publicly explained. For example, the guidance released by the White House is vague in saying that U.S. and European Union sanctions “will be suspended after” international inspectors have “verified that Iran has taken all of its key nuclear related steps.” Exactly what steps would Iran have to complete, and what would the verification consist of?

The agreement is based on a theoretical benchmark: that Iran would need at least a year to produce fissile material sufficient for a weapon, compared with two months or less now. It remains to be seen whether the limits on enrichment and Iran’s stockpile will be judged by independent experts as sufficient to meet that standard.

Both Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry emphasized that many details need to be worked out in talks with Iran between now and the end of June. During that time, the administration will have much other work to do: It must convince Mideast allies that Iran is not being empowered to become the region’s hegemon, and it must accommodate Congress’s legitimate prerogative to review the accord. We hope Mr. Obama will make as much effort to engage in good faith with skeptical allies and domestic critics as he has with the Iranian regime.

All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.

by Editorial Board

AS THE Obama administration pushes to complete an agreement-in-principle with Iran on its nuclear program by Tuesday, it has done little to soothe concerns that it is rushing too quickly to settle, offering too many concessions and ignoring glaring warning signs that Tehran won’t abide by any accord. One story incorporates all three of those worries: Iran’s failure to deliver on multiple pledges to answer questions about its suspected research on nuclear warheads.

The United States believes that, prior to 2003, Iran conducted extensive studies and tests on building a bomb and mounting it on a long-range missile — belying its claims that it has pursued nuclear technology only for peaceful purposes. U.S. intelligence was long ago turned over to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, starting in 2006, have ordered Iran to cooperate with the IAEA in clarifying these “possible military dimensions.”

Twice, in 2007 and in 2013, Iran agreed with the IAEA on a “work plan” to clear up the military research issues. In both instances, it then stonewalled inspectors, refusing to answer questions or permit access to sites. After the agency sought access in 2011 to a military complex called Parchin, where warhead detonation tests may have been carried out, satellite surveillance revealed that Iran had demolished buildings and excavated ground in an apparent cover-up operation.

In frustration, the IAEA published an extensive report detailing what it already knew about the illicit bomb work and listed 12 outstanding issues. Two years later, in the hope of sealing an interim deal allowing the partial lifting of sanctions, the government of Hassan Rouhani agreed on a “step-by-step” plan to answer the questions.

But instead of implementing the plan, the regime went back to stonewalling. IAEA chief Yukiya Amano told The Post’s Steven Mufson this week that Iran had provided information on just one of the 12 issues. On two others, Mr. Amano said, it had given “very limited” responses, and the remaining nine had not been addressed at all.

An appropriate response to this blatant violation of agreements would be to insist that Iran complete the IAEA work plan before any long-term accord is signed or any further sanctions lifted. Inspectors need their questions answered so that they will be able to determine later whether Iran has violated the controls on its nuclear research expected to be part of a deal. Furthermore, it is vital to establish that Tehran will deliver on its commitments and that it will be held accountable if it does not.

Remarkably, however, negotiators — including the supposedly hard-line French, who have taken the lead on the “military dimensions” issue — have reportedly agreed to let Iran’s noncompliance slide. The IAEA’s unanswered questions will be rolled over and rebundled into the new agreement, with a new time line. That means that Iran will have some sanctions lifted before it complies with a commitment it first made eight years ago.

The question this raises was articulated months ago in congressional testimony by nuclear weapons expert David Albright: “If Iran is able to successfully evade addressing the IAEA’s concerns now, when biting sanctions are in place, why would it address them later when these sanctions are lifted?” In its rush to complete a deal, the Obama administration appears eager to ignore the likely answer.

All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.

by Editorial Board

AS THE Obama administration pushes to complete a nuclear accord with Iran, numerous members of Congress, former secretaries of state and officials of allied governments are expressing concern about the contours of the emerging deal. Though we have long supported negotiations with Iran as well as the interim agreement the United States and its allies struck with Tehran, we share several of those concerns and believe they deserve more debate now — before negotiators present the world with a fait accompli.

The problems raised by authorities ranging from Henry Kissinger, the country’s most senior former secretary of state, to Sen. Timothy M. Kaine, Virginia’s junior senator, can be summed up in three points:

●First, a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and temporarily restrict that capability.

●Second, in the course of the negotiations, the Obama administration has declined to counter increasingly aggressive efforts by Iran to extend its influence across the Middle East and seems ready to concede Tehran a place as a regional power at the expense of Israel and other U.S. allies.

●Finally, the Obama administration is signaling that it will seek to implement any deal it strikes with Iran — including the suspension of sanctions that were originally imposed by Congress — without a vote by either chamber. Instead, an accord that would have far-reaching implications for nuclear proliferation and U.S. national security would be imposed unilaterally by a president with less than two years left in his term.

The first and broadest of these problems was outlined by Mr. Kissinger in recent testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. The talks, he pointed out, began as a multilateral effort headed by the European Union and backed by six U.N. Security Council resolutions intended “to deny Iran the capability to develop a military nuclear option.” Though formally the multilateral talks continue, “these negotiations have now become an essentially bilateral negotiation” between the United States and Iran “over the scope of that [nuclear] capability, not its existence,” Mr. Kissinger said.

Where it once aimed to eliminate Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, the administration now appears ready to accept an infrastructure of thousands of Iranian centrifuges. It says its goal is to limit and monitor that industrial base so that Iran could not produce the material for a warhead in less than a year. As several senators pointed out last month during a hearing of the Foreign Relations Committee, the prospective deal would leave Iran as a nuclear-threshold state while theoretically giving the world time to respond if Tehran chose to build a weapon. Even these limited restrictions would remain in force for only a specified number of years, after which Iran would be free to expand its production of potential bomb materials.

Mr. Kissinger said such an arrangement would very likely prompt other countries in the region, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, to match Iran’s threshold capability. “The impact . . . will be to transform the negotiations from preventing proliferation to managing it,” he said. “We will live in a proliferated world in which everybody — even if that agreement is maintained — will be very close to the trigger point.”

A related problem is whether Iran could be prevented from cheating on any arrangement and acquiring a bomb by stealth. Mr. Kaine (D) underlined that an attempt by the United States to negotiate the end of North Korea’s nuclear program failed after the regime covertly expanded its facilities. With Iran, said Mr. Kaine, “a nation that has proven to be very untrustworthy . . . the end result is more likely to be a North Korean situation” if existing infrastructure is not dismantled.

The administration at one time portrayed the nuclear negotiations as distinct from the problem of Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism, its attempts to establish hegemony over the Arab Middle East and its declared goal of eliminating Israel. Yet while the talks have proceeded, Mr. Obama has offered assurances to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that the two countries have shared interests in the region, and the White House has avoided actions Iran might perceive as hostile — such as supporting military action against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

For their part, the Iranians, as Mr. Kaine put it, “are currently involved in activities to destabilize the governments of [U.S.-allied] nations as near as Bahrain and as far away as Morocco.” A Tehran-sponsored militia recently overthrew the U.S.-backed government of Yemen. Rather than contest the Iranian bid for regional hegemony, as has every previous U.S. administration since the 1970s, Mr. Obama appears ready to concede Iran a place in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and beyond — a policy that is viewed with alarm by Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey, among other allies.

Former secretary of state George P. Shultz cited Iran’s regional aggression in pronouncing himself “very uneasy” about the ongoing negotiations. “They’ve already outmaneuvered us, in my opinion,” he told the Armed Services Committee.

While presidents initiate U.S. foreign policies, it is vital that major shifts win the support of Congress and the country; otherwise, they will be unsustainable. Yet Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested in Senate testimony that the administration intends to postpone any congressional vote on a deal indefinitely, meeting its commitments to Iran by using provisions allowing it to suspend legislatively enacted sanctions. Mr. Blinken conceded that the Iranian parliament would likely vote on any accord but said that Congress should act only “once Iran has demonstrated that it’s making good on its commitments.”

Such a unilateral course by Mr. Obama would alienate even his strongest congressional supporters. It would mean that a deal with Iran could be reversed, within months of its completion, by the next president. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Mr. Obama wishes to avoid congressional review because he suspects a bipartisan majority would oppose the deal he is prepared to make. If so, the right response to the questions now being raised is to seek better terms from Iran — or convince the doubters that an accord blessing and preserving Iran’s nuclear potential is better than the alternatives.

All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.