No. of Recommendations: 9
I'm going to assume you're a supporter of the Obama/Biden policy of
1. Make a deal with Iran where they allegedly stop working on enriching uranium for 10 years
2. Pay them with billions of dollars
3. Don't mention their support for international terror groups
4. Ignore their ballistic missile programs altogether.
Is that correct?No. I don't know what the answer is with Iran. I don't think it's wise to ignore their ballistic missile program; but I also don't know how you can
stop a country the size of Iran from having as many ballistic missiles as they want to build. Short of a full on ground invasion
a la Iraq, that is.
Similarly, we don't know how the JCPOA would have worked out if Trump hadn't cancelled the deal. The big explosion in Iranian centrifuges happened in 2022-2023:
Overall, Iran has 12,994 centrifuges installed at all three of its enrichment plants; 5763 advanced centrifuges of various types and 7231 IR-1 centrifuges.
Between February 2022 to February 2023, Iran nearly tripled its annual deployment of advanced centrifuges to over 3500 advanced centrifuges deployed during that time span, compared to the deployment of about 1200 advanced centrifuges observed between February 2022 and February 2021, which itself was double that from the year prior, February 2020 to February 2021, during which roughly 500 advanced centrifuges were deployed.https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/updated-highl....
Since Iran's primary enrichment activities and materials ramp didn't happen during the JCPOA, but happened after it was cancelled, I'm a little more agnostic than you about whether it was possible to bribe Iran out of trying for nukes with a mix of returning their assets, sanctions relief, and promises not to kill them. It very well might not have worked, but we didn't give it a whole of time to see. I'm open to the possibility that they would have kept on enriching uranium after a while anyway.
I'm perfectly willing to admit that I, an ordinary person, do not have the solutions to one of the most complex geopolitical problems in the modern world. Shocking - I know! But I am also refraining from labelling as
folly other people's efforts to find a solution to that problem as well. Just as you are critical of what Obama was trying to accomplish with the JCPOA and convinced it was unlikely to work, I am critical of the current exercise in trying to bomb our way out of this security dilemma
without a ground invasion. I think it is unlikely to work, because I have yet to hear a cogent explanation of
how it is supposed to achieve that goal.
It's one thing to stomp our feet and declare, "X cannot happen!" - but that doesn't mean that any given plan will actually
succeed at stopping X from happening. If technology controls and sanctions can't stop a country from developing a nuclear weapon, then you have to figure out a way to stop the country from wanting the nuclear weapon. That can be bribes, or threats, or going in and actually eliminating the regime that is seeking the nuke. It's hard to see, though, how a mostly aerial and naval engagement that doesn't involve boots on the ground gets you there. At least trying to
induce them to not seek nukes has a possible path for the outcome you want. Here...what's the mechanism by which Iran is no longer able to pursue their nuclear program in six months or a year, when there was no obstacle to them doing so two weeks ago?
