Geoffrey Aronson
National Interest, Aug. 10, 2022
“Diplomacy will not stop [Iran]. The only thing that will stop Iran is knowing that if they continue to develop their nuclear program, the free world [aka the United States] will use force. The only way to stop them is to put a credible military threat on the table.”
A new strategic era is dawning in the Middle East, marking an end to two decades of diplomacy aimed at preventing the appearance of another nuclear weapons state in the region. In its place, a new type of nuclear diplomacy, led by Tehran, Washington, and Jerusalem, is trying, against the odds, to construct a twenty-first-century framework of nuclear stability in the Middle East.
Since Israel’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear pretensions were first aired in the 1990s, diplomatic efforts have focused on establishing limits aimed at preventing Iran from obtaining the components necessary to produce nuclear weapons, with a focus on uranium enrichment.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was the most successful effort in this direction. The Trump administration repudiated the 2015 deal in 2018. In its place, it chose to apply a policy of “maximum pressure” against the government in Tehran.
The Biden administration in turn has sought to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. But, in an era when everything has changed except the terms of the 2015 agreement, those efforts have come to naught. Brett McGurk, President Joe Biden’s Middle East coordinator, recently acknowledged that the European-led effort to resuscitate the agreement was “highly unlikely” to succeed.
Geoffrey Aronson, a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute, is former security and political advisor for the EU in Palestine who has written widely on strategic issues in the Middle East.
