It’s quite common for senators from both parties to participate in closed-door briefings with intelligence officials. It’s far less common when members exit the briefings and confess to feeling stunned. Politico reported yesterday:
Top Biden administration officials warned senators on Wednesday that Iran could produce enough material for a nuclear bomb in as little as two months, bolstering lawmakers’ concerns that the window for a diplomatic solution is rapidly closing. The assessment, delivered in a classified briefing and described by one senator as “sobering and shocking,” comes as President Joe Biden’s diplomats are racing to strike a deal with Tehran that would prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
It was Sen. Chris Murphy, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s panel on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism, who described the briefing as “sobering and shocking.” It was also the Connecticut Democrat who delivered remarks on the floor yesterday, urging the Biden administration to revive the original international nuclear agreement with Iran.
Except some of the senator’s colleagues who heard the same briefing don’t quite see it that way. From the Politico article:
[L]awmakers disagree over the best way to achieve that goal. Most Democrats urge a swift rebirth of the 2015-era Iran nuclear deal that former President Donald Trump ripped up, arguing it’s the only viable option. Republicans, meanwhile, argue for a return to Trump’s “maximum-pressure” doctrine that included imposing devastating sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program, support for terrorist groups in the region and other malign activities.
Look, I can appreciate the fact that geopolitical debates over counter-proliferation policy can be complicated, but common sense suggests officials should want to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Circling back to our coverage from several weeks ago, it was Joe Cirincione, whose expertise in international nuclear diplomacy has few rivals, who wrote a piece for NBC News last spring explaining that international negotiators have been tasked with trying to “undo the damage Donald Trump caused when he left an agreement that had effectively shrunk Iran’s program, frozen it for a generation and put it under lock and camera.”
I continue to believe this is an underappreciated truth. As we’ve discussed, the Iran deal — formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (or JCPOA) — did exactly what it set out to do: The agreement dramatically curtailed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and established a rigorous system of monitoring and verification. Once the policy took effect, each of the parties agreed that the participants were holding up their end of the bargain, and Iran’s nuclear program was, at the time, on indefinite hold.
And then Trump took office.
One of my favorite stories about the Iran deal came a few months into Trump’s term, when the then-president held a lengthy White House meeting with top members of his national security team. Each of the officials told Trump the same thing: It was in the United States’ interest to preserve the existing JCPOA policy.
The Republican expected his team to tell him how to get out of the international agreement, not how to stick with it. When his own foreign policy and national security advisers told him the policy was working, Trump “had a bit of a meltdown.”
Soon after, he abandoned the deal anyway, not because it was failing, but because Trump was indifferent to its success. The effective policy was soon replaced by a new strategy known as the “maximum pressure” campaign.
Iran almost immediately became more dangerous, not less.
In Republican circles, it’s simply assumed that the Obama-era Iran deal “failed.” That gets reality backwards: The real failure is the policy Trump tried to implement, not the policy he replaced. When GOP senators argue in support of Trump’s approach, what they’re advocating is a return to a policy that demonstrably failed — and was responsible for the mess that left members of both parties rattled yesterday.
Meanwhile, international negotiations are ongoing in Vienna, and no one seems especially optimistic about the outcome. Murphy added yesterday that a possible agreement is “in sight,” but “significant gaps between the two sides” remain.
