As he moves to return America to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Iran nuclear accord, Joe Biden faces what should be an alarming reality. Iran isn’t simply in breach of that accord; it is shredding the deal.
On Wednesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Iran has accumulated an enriched uranium stockpile 12 times larger than what it agreed to accrue under the nuclear deal. Yes, you read that right. Twelve times. But alarming as it is, this news shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, Iran has spent the past year undermining its commitments to the remaining JCPOA signatories. Namely, Britain, China, France, the European Union, Germany, and Russia. Not only has Iran massively increased its enrichment activity; it has steadily escalated its noncompliance with IAEA inspections.
While Biden wants to rejoin the JCPOA as soon as he can, his responsibilities as president will require him to act prudently. That will mean Biden’s recognition of Iran’s movement toward a base of enriched material that would allow its scientists to develop a nuclear weapon quickly. As an extension, Biden will also have to consider the likelihood of Iran being able to fire a nuclear warhead at Israel or Europe within the next four years. This development flows from Iran’s steadily improving ballistic missile program. Veiled under the guise of civilian satellite activity, Iran has invested significant sums and effort in reaching a nuclear strike capacity. While U.S. and Israeli covert action has disrupted some of this activity, Iran’s ballistic missile program poses a very real near-term threat, one that Israel is likely to view through an increasingly urgent and existential prism.
The question, then, is whether Biden grapples with the Iran of January 2021 or deludes himself with the imagined Iran of 2015.
Iran’s recent conduct has shown that the safeguards applied to the original agreement were neither sufficient in coverage nor robust in enforcement. The simple truth is that Iran has been able to break compliance with the deal but avoid any significant riposte by the JCPOA’s remaining members. Biden can get caught in that same game as president, allowing Iran to play the world for a fool. But if he does so, it will mark his legacy in ways that are deeply problematic for U.S. security and that of our allies. For one, Biden’s refusal to address the agreement’s weakness is very likely to spark a nuclear arms race between the Shiite theocracy and its Saudi Arabian nemesis.
There is a way to address these concerns. Were Biden to continue enforcing the Trump administration’s sanctions and demand improvements to the 2015 agreement in terms of ballistic missile restrictions, strengthened inspections protocols, and centrifuge limits, Iran would have little choice but to return to the negotiating table. Internal pressures in Iran are now highly significant, and the collapse of the Iranian economy threatens to undermine the regime’s monopoly of force.
Biden thus faces a critical choice. He can be the president who gets Iran back to the table and into a serious nonproliferation posture, or he can be the president who risks one or more of three far less pleasant outcomes. First, a nuclear arms race between two paranoid powers that despise each other for religious and historical reasons. Second, Israeli military strikes on Iran that risk a regional war. Third, Iran’s replication of North Korea’s nuclear path and its ability to launch nuclear weapons against the U.S. homeland.
