Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Iran Nuclear Negotiations - The Origin Story, with Ambassador Eric Edelman

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

While we are all following the minute to minute developments in Russia-Ukraine, a new international deal with Iran on its nuclear program may be on the cusp of finalization. While there are still key details to be worked out, the broad contours are out there, and the implications are massive. So we wanted to have a conversation with an expert and policy practitioner that could walk us through the history of how we got here, and where it’s going. Ambassador Eric Edelman is Counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He’s also on board of the Vandenberg Coalition. He has served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House. As undersecretary of defense for policy he oversaw the Pentagon’s bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counterproliferation, counterterrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls. He served as U.S. ambassador to Finland in the Clinton administration and Turkey in the Bush administration and was Vice President Cheney's national security advisor. As a diplomat, he has been stationed in Prague and Moscow.

Diplomacy is the adjustment of conflicting national interests without the use of force. But the implication has to be, if you can't resolve them in the instance of something as important as this, that force might in the end have to be applied. While we're all following the minute-to-minute developments in Russia and Ukraine, a new international deal with Iran on its nuclear program is on the cusp of being finalized. While there are still key details to be worked out, the broad contours are out there, and the implications are massive. So we wanted to have a conversation with an expert and policy practitioner who could walk us through the history of how we got here and where it's going. Ambassador Eric Edelman is at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He's also on the board of the Vandenberg Coalition,

an important foreign policy group. He served in senior positions at the Departments of Defense, State, as well as the White House. And as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the George W. Bush administration, where I first got to know him, he oversaw the Pentagon's bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls, all areas with direct relevance to the issues we're dealing with today with Iran. Previously, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Finland in the Clinton administration and the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey in the Bush administration, and he was Vice President Cheney's National Security Advisor.

He's been stationed as a diplomat in Prague and Moscow. Here's the origin story of the Iran nuclear negotiations. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome my old friend eric edelman the former undersecretary of defense for policy to the podcast how you doing eric i'm good dan it's great to be with you today great to be with you i by the way people get annoyed when i say old time old old friend um long time long time long time i mean both things could be true, old and long time. Yeah, the old part I'm a little sensitive about. Long time. Long time.

Especially because our listeners just heard your impressive bio, and they can do the math when they hear about, you know, in the embassy, U.S. embassy in Moscow in the late 70s and 80s. What years were you there? 87, 89. Sorry, yeah. So our listeners can do the math when they hear what years you were in the U.S. embassy in Moscow.

Anyways, but we're going to call on all that experience, however long time and old it may be. So thanks. uh uh a long time and old it may be so um thanks i want to primarily focus on uh i want to primarily focus on iran uh which is uh in the news right now interestingly not as much in the news as russia and ukraine uh but i i almost worry that that because russia ukraine is understandably dominating the news we're not paying attention to some really troubling things coming out of these negotiations but before we get into the yeah before we get to the current state of negotiations i i just want to really take a step back and and understand how you come at this issue uh can you before we get to 2022 before we get to 2015, the last Iran deal being signed. Can you just walk through why

U.S. policy has been so focused on preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapons capability for so long, even long before the 2015 deal was reached? It's a great question and an important question. and all too often when we talk about things like the The JCPOA the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that was agreed in 2015 We we tend to forget the you know, the sort of secret origin story or the back story And I think it's an important back story to to understand Because it it speaks to I, the importance of the issue.

So first, I think arguably one of the few lasting and great achievements of arms control was the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968. And, you know, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, if you go back in time, President Kennedy was asked at a press conference in the spring of 1963, what was the one issue that kept him up at night the most? And he said, my biggest fear, he said, is that by the end of the decade, it would be 1970, that there won't just be a few nuclear weapon states. Right at that time, there were four, the US, the UK, France, and the Soviet Union. Kennedy was very worried about China, which would detonate a nuclear weapon in the fall of 1964. he said my fear is that we won't have four or five we'll have 10 or 20 or more nuclear weapon states and as a result of that

it will be impossible to control the spread of these weapons and prevent them from ever being used again in anger. And of course, he was less than 20 years from the time of the detonation of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So think about that. That's less time than separates us from 9-11. So it was very, very real in people's memories at the time. And he was reacting to a memo that was done for him by Robert McNamara that basically argued, we have some idea how to maintain a nuclear balance of terror between two countries or two sides of a conflict. But once you start getting into what people in those days call the nth country problem, once you have four or five n countries developing nuclear weapons, it becomes much more uncontrollable. We don't really know how that would work and the odds

that these weapons will be used will grow exponentially. And it will put things out of the control of U.S. foreign policymakers. And that, you know, was in turn based on a memo that was written for McNamara. Well, not for McNamara. It was written by Rand, but put to McNamara early in his tenure as Secretary of Defense. It was actually co-written by one of my distinguished predecessors as Under tenure as Secretary of Defense. It was actually co-written by one of my distinguished predecessors as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the late Freddie Clay. And within a few years, President Johnson,

worrying about this after the Chinese, in fact, tested in 1964, asked the Deputy Secretary of Defense, or just he had just left as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatrick, to put together an interagency committee to decide what the role of nuclear nonproliferation should be in U.S. foreign policy. And the Gilpatrick Committee concluded, after canvassing a lot of alternatives that it really made a lot of sense for the US to make nuclear non-proliferation a very central part of US foreign policy and in fact if you go back and look historically one of my colleagues at Johns Hopkins SAIS where I teach Frank Gavin has I think demonstrated that really from the end of

World War two non-proliferation implicitly or explicitly has been a central element of US grand strategy our you know creation of alliances with a nuclear guarantee an article 5 guarantee NATO alliance, but also our bilateral treaty alliances in the Far East have been predicated, for instance, on Japan and Germany not developing their own nuclear weapons. And that was a sort of, as he puts it, a strategy of inhibition against other people, you know, developing nuclear weapons. We've seen, of course, that in 1968, partly as a result of this work by the Gilpatrick Commission, the Soviet Union agreed. They too didn't want to see those kinds of things get out of hand.

And they had an interest in maintaining a kind of small group of countries with nuclear weapons, and the result was the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and a bunch of different institutions that restricted, along with the treaty, the IAEA and others, the access to the technology that would enable you to make nuclear weapons to countries that don't have, that were not part of the original five nuclear weapon states, including the People's Republic of China. And it has been relatively successful. When you think about it, you know, Kennedy was worried about 10, 20, maybe 30 countries having nuclear weapons in 1963. Today we have nine and and that is actually an enormous achievement on the part of the

international community. But the, you know, the problem is it at the end of the Cold War this started to break down a little bit with the development by North Korea of its own nuclear weapons. And Dan, you'll recall from your time working in the Senate and elsewhere that we spent a lot of time in the 90s worrying about the North Korean nuclear problem. The Clinton administration negotiated the agreed framework. In the Bush 43 administration, we discovered that the North Koreans had been cheating on the agreed framework. And ultimately, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon in 2006. And just yesterday, they tested an intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korea remains a problem and a threat. The question, I think, is if one more country gets nuclear weapons, does the nuclear nonproliferation

treaty survive? I mean, there are countries that develop nuclear weapons who are outside the treaty. That is to say, Israel, reportedly, Pakistan and India, none of them ever signed the NPT. North Korea signed, tried to withdraw, then tested nuclear weapons. Iran is a signatory. And the challenge is that if we allow a signatory to the NPT to develop nuclear weapons the barriers to entry start to fall away because other countries that have been adherence to the treaty will start to reconsider and we run the risk of getting a nuclear cascade that would make you know John Kennedy's nightmare from 1963 come true in our current circumstances.

And the cascade would include countries that presumably feel threatened by Iran getting a nuclear bomb. So suddenly you have like a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. As I'm sure you recall, the late King Abdullah arabia said that iran would not be the only you know muslim country in the middle east with a nuclear weapon and the uae which signed up to the gold standard of nuclear agreements with the united states saying that they would have no enrichment capability as part of getting nuclear power in UAE would, I think, start to take another look. We know that Egypt at one point had a nuclear weapons program of its own and gave it up.

Hard to imagine they wouldn't, you know, look at it again. Turkey is building civilian power reactors and certainly has the scientific infrastructure to move relatively quickly to develop nuclear weapons. So I think the prospect of a nuclear cascade if Iran were to get nuclear weapons, in addition to the fact that Iran has been the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism for 40 years, really, since the Islamic revolution in 1979, I think makes the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, you know, an enormous danger for Israel, for the other Sunni Arab countries in the Middle East, for other Iranian neighbors like Turkey, and for the world, for the U.S. and the world. So fast forward to 2015, which culminated the year in which international negotiation over putting limits on Iran's nuclear program culminated in the JCPOA,

the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. What was the U.S., the P5-plus-1, trying to accomplish with that agreement? Before getting into the holes in the agreement the criticisms of the agreement i just want to just just just analytically lay out what what were they trying to accomplish uh you know iran had shown interest in nuclear power and uh potentially nuclear weapons for a long time i mean there was a a research reactor program under the Shah. People point to this frequently and say, oh, this just shows that the regime of the mullahs is only following in the path that was set by the Shah.

I think more recent research by Ray Takei, who's been a frequent co-author along with me of articles critical of this agreement, has in a recent book on the last Shah, I think pretty well demonstrated the Shah never really had an intention to build a nuclear weapons program. But be that as it may, I mean, there was a research reactor program in the 90s. Iran contracted with Russia to build a nuclear reactor at Bashir, and the Clinton administration raised a lot of proliferation concerns. The Russians assured, you know, the Clinton administration have said repeatedly since then that they would put proliferation proof equipment

in there. But there still was a lot of concern about what, why Iran was developing, you know, a nuclear reactor, why they wanted to have the, seemed to want to have the capability to enrich uranium on their territory. And then in late 2002, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, which is the parent organization of the MEK, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, which had been anti-Shah, but then became anti-clerical regime after the Iranian revolution, brought information forward that the Iranians were enriching uranium at Natanz. And this set off alarm bells, course at least initially concerns about that seemed to be eclipsed by the war in Iraq and the US effort there but the EU began a process of trying to negotiate with Iran to get them to limit their activities.

They had been first fabricating a yellow cake at Isfahan, which is the feedstock that goes into centrifuges that is then it becomes enriched uranium. And you've got to re-enrich the uranium at several different levels to be able to get it to weapons grade, which is roughly 90, 95, 96, 97% enrichment. And to be clear, you only enrich at that level, 95, 96, 97% if your ambition is a weapon. If you want to build a bomb. Frankly, enriching above 3% or 4% or 5% you don't do unless you're trying to get to 90%. I mean, I was struck a few months ago when the head of the IAEA made two points, that countries that enrich at the levels that Iran is trying to enrich at don't do it for any reason other than a military weapons

a nuclear weapon and countries that that are fiercely obsessive about not allowing international inspections of their nuclear program tend to have nuclear weapons on their mind and Iran is doing both right um Iran has the largest ballistic missile program in the world. No other country that has a ballistic missile program of that scale and scope has not developed a nuclear weapon. So the EU3 began negotiations, which we followed in a series of... That's France, UK, and Germany's France, UK, and Germany. France, UK, and Germany. And that process went on for a number of years.

And it led to... I mean, first of all, the Iranians ultimately did fess up that they were enriching at Natanz, which was a violation of their obligations under the non-proliferation treaty, which they were signatories to, because they hadn't informed the IAE of that activity. And in fact, Iran's been a serial violator of its undertakings under the treaty. And a series of red lines, at first it was, you know, if they put, you know, if they put yellow cake into the, you know, to turn it into uranium hexafluoride to put into

centrifuges, that would be, you know, the red line that would trigger some kind of response. Then it became, if they actually put, you know, the UF6 gas into centrifuges, that would be it. And then it was, if they spin centrifuges, and then it became a numbers game of like, how many centrifuges can they have before people start to worry about this? And in the second Bush term, the U.S. began to get uh in you know involved in in this process uh as i said first indirectly as the eu3 carried it uh the negotiations actually suspended in 2005 by the iranians um and uh you know the the former uh president of uh of iran um has who was the nuclear negotiator at the time, has admitted in his memoirs that they used the negotiations with the EU3 between 2003 and 2005 to work out

some kinks in their enrichment program in order to perfect some of the equipment and the u.s. then was under pressure from Israel during the second half of the bush 43 administration to either take steps ourselves or to help Israel take steps to put an end to the program. And Israel raised a number of concerns about the number of centrifuges. Israel talked about what they called industrial scale enrichment which would allow iran to move more quickly in a direction of getting enriched uranium at the level you and i were just talking about dan to you know have weapons grade uranium to to make a weapon um and they asked for a variety of different military capabilities, which the Bush administration chose not to provide, although there were other efforts underway to try and slow the Iranian program down, which has been reported in the press.

Which is cyber attacks and disrupting scientists working on the program. you know, not to, um, not to pursue it, uh, through any kind of military means, but rather get directly involved with the negotiations. So, uh, the U S actually in the last year, the Bush administration actually sat down, became part of the negotiations. The then undersecretary of state for political affairs, now, uh, director of CIA, Bill Burns, actually became a part of the negotiations, although he wasn't directly, obviously, negotiating with the Iranians. He was part of a larger multilateral group that was engaged in all of this. And the Iranians, that point had deployed a couple of hundred centrifuges. These are IR-1. These are very basic centrifuges.

The Obama administration came into office and wanted, you know, saw this as a very high priority. I mean, President Obama said nonproliferation was one of his highest priorities, actually. And he did have a number of nuclear summits where he put a lot of effort into locking down nuclear fuel around the world. But in the first term, not much progress was made with Iran. And towards the end of the first term, there were some quiet, secret contacts with Iranian officials that went on in Oman, actually. And that set the stage for negotiations for the second Obama term. And several people like Ben Rhodes said that the nuclear agreement with Iran would be Obama's big second term accomplishment to parallel the domestic accomplishment of the ACA, of

the healthcare reform. Correct. So now take us to 2015. So you provide the lead up to this mega negotiation. So where did it land in 2015? What were the contours of the agreement? Well, as I said, the earlier negotiations with the EU3 before the U.S. got involved had been a kind of series of retreats from red lines that had been set. And one of the major concerns that I think a lot of people had as the negotiations with the U.S. involved in the renewed negotiations under the Obama administration, and to the Obama administration's credit, by the way, part of the reason that they got the Iranians to the table in the second term

was that they did get a couple of UN resolutions with some pretty strong sanctions on Iran in 2010 and then subsequently. There had been earlier sanctions votes as well, by the way, under the, um, under the Bush administration. I don't mean to suggest the Bush administration didn't do anything. It chose not to do anything military and kinetic, uh, but, uh, did pursue, uh, sanctions. And, um, we did get a couple of UN Security Council resolutions sanctioning Iran for not, um, not reporting a lot of these activities that I've been talking about to the IAEA. I mean, it was first condemned by the

IAEA Board of Governors and then referred to the Security Council for votes on sanctions. The concern, however, that I and a lot of other people had was that as these negotiations went forward and the Iranians added more and more centrifuges, as I said, they had a couple of hundred at the end of the Obama first term, they had several thousand, and the question became, would the agreement concede a right to enrichment to Iran? One of the central bargains of the nonproliferation treaty that I mentioned earlier was that the nuclear weapon states made a promise that they would try and lower the level of nuclear armaments which by the end of the cold war they had done significantly because of the various salt and start agreements on strategic nuclear weapons and the inf Treaty on intermediate nuclear forces. And in return, the signatory states got the right to have access to nuclear power because obviously nuclear power was something that in the 1960s people were pursuing and into the 70s as a form of energy generation and in

some in some ways in some European countries more recently they've given up nuclear power as a form of of energy generation which I think was a not a great not a great answer because nuclear power actually, if you're worried about climate change, is one of the most climate-friendly forms of energy generation that we have. And you know all that from working for Senator Abraham. So the question was, will Iran make a claim, and they have claimed, a right to not just access to nuclear power, but to the full nuclear fuel cycle, which would allow them to divert material to develop a nuclear weapon and where the JCPOA ended up was with an agreement that first of all conceded a very large uranium enrichment capability some 6,000 centrifuges imposed limits as to how how much enriched uranium Iran could maintain in terms of kilos of enriched material, low enriched uranium, LEU, and enriched at the 3% level, not above, but also gave them the

right to experiment with more advanced centrifuges that would enable them to enrich uranium more quickly and Go through the process of enriching uranium up to weapons grade level much more rapidly if they deployed them, so although they were forbidden from actually enriching uranium in these

Centrifuges they could spin other they could spin them and they could spin other elements in them, like geranium, and develop the technical capability to do this. And there were a whole set of, inside the agreement, which was about 50 pages long with a number of annexes, a complex agreement, a number of deadlineses is complex agreement number of deadlines of five eight ten and fifteen years of different parts of of the infrastructure that they had and and here's the here's the bottom line as the Institute for Science and International Security, sometimes known as the good ISIS, found in a study they did of the terms of the JCPOA, and I'm quoting now,

after year 10 and particularly after year 15 as the limits on its nuclear program end, Iran could reemerge as a major nuclear threat. And it's the reason why when I testified, full disclosure, I testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee in August of 2015 when they had a hearing on this agreement, I testified against it. And of the panel of outside witnesses of the four, I was the only one who clearly came out against it. Others raised a lot of similar concerns. I'm the only one who said the Senate should actually vote this down. And it was largely because the time limits were too short. Part of the central agreement was we're going to give them this enrichment capability but we're going to make, we're going to get

more transparency from the Iranians. But I found that the verification that they proposed was actually too le too leaky. And the enforcement mechanisms I said in my testimony were suspect. Uh, it wasn't clear that you could really enforce this agreement without basically ripping it up and making it. So transparency was going, it was going to be opaque. The visibility into the program was going to be opaque.

And the timelines you thought were, were too, too short-sighted too short because and didn't president obama basically concede that point there was that interview he gave where he was asked i'm gonna quote it to you oh please i'm gonna quote it to you was it an npr or something in april of 2015 i gave an interview with npr in which he said, in year 13, 14, 15, this is a quotation, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly. And at that point, the breakout times would have shrunk down to almost zero. And again, the ISIS, the Institute for Science and International Security, confirmed that judgment and said

Iran's breakout timelines would shrink to just days at the end of the 15-year period. So just to be clear, so there were different timelines for different sunset clauses, but let's just take the 15-year period. So signed in 2015, so we're talking about 2030. So we're talking about eight years from now. Right, in less than a decade from now, under the 2015 agreement iran would be in a position to be days away from basically flipping a switch correct and that was only and that was if they abided you know by the agreement you know in every single particular right so assuming they wouldn't yeah if if you wanted to you know to quote reagan trust but verify if, if you wanted to be discerning and skeptical, assume that they'd figure out a way to even get in a position to do it before the 15 years.

Correct. And as I said, you know, the presumption in my view always is that you needed very strong verification here because Iran had a record as a, you know, a serial violator of its undertakings. So it wasn't just that I'm by nature a crabbed, suspicious guy. It's that Iran had a record, a track record of noncompliance. This was compounded by the fact that we had pretty good intelligence, not just the U.S., but, you know, 10 other countries, or nine other countries, total of 10, which we supplied to the IAEA, about past efforts by the Iranians to develop military capabilities

that would essentially allow them to weaponize, you know, weapons-grade uranium into a bomb. This material was provided to the IAEA, and I think it was in November of 2011. Don't hold me to that, but I think it was November 2011. The IAEA, which does quarterly reports, put out a series of annexes, which said we have, I think, Annex K of that report that said we've gotten this information from 10 different countries about these past military dimensions, PMD, of the Iranian program.

We're going to need answers for that. And part of the negotiation of the JCPOA was to close the nuclear file. You'll recall that we had a national intelligence estimate that concluded in 2007 that in 2003, the Iranians had, according to the NIE, halted their program. Now that NIE was very controversial and I was still in government at the time. We had a lot of infighting inside the government about exactly how to characterize what had happened here in 2003. So in 2003, you'll recall that the U.S. had military forces in Afghanistan to Iran's west. It had just invaded Iraq and overthrown Saddam Hussein, and you'll recall all that well because you were there.

And also that we had gotten Muammar Gaddafi to admit, we caught him with his hand in the cookie jar, that he had been developing centrifuges and had his own nuclear program, which he gave up. And the result was that the Iranians took note of this. Now, the question was, when they stopped engaging in military activities, the question was, was that a halt or was that something less? Was that a, I said it should be, you know, regarded as a freeze or, you know, a suspension because we also knew that Mosen Fagrizadeh, who was the late Mosen Fagrizadeh, who met an untimely death a year or two ago, was agitating to get the program going again.

But in light of all the fuss about the Iraq WMD intelligence, the intelligence community refused to change its judgment and said that the program had been halted. But in light of all that, to me, one of the most important deficiencies of the JCPOA was that it didn't make the Iranians fess up and come clean about their past military dimensions. The agreement allowed for them essentially to mail it in and say we didn't do it and That would quote close the nuclear file, which is what happened in 2015 except in 2018 the Israelis in a amazing feat of intelligence managed to capture and Exfiltrate from Tehran Fakhrizadeh's nuclear archive,

which has all the detail of these past military dimensions of their activity, which Iran still to this day has not accounted for. And that's one of the issues now that's actually kind of bedeviling the negotiations they were supposed to they made they made a deal with uh rafael grossi the head of the iaa to give access to some of these facilities that have come up as a result of the fakrizadeh archive um and then they failed uh this past weekend to produce anything in terms of answers to the IAEA questions. So that's still at issue.

Okay. So let's talk about the Trump administration's withdrawal from the JCPOA. What were they seeking to accomplish in getting out of the agreement? Well, I think the Trump administration had a view that I share, which was that this was a very, very bad agreement. The problem was that a number of our allies had invested a lot, the British, the French, the Germans, as you mentioned, had invested, the EU had invested a lot in getting this agreement in place. And at least according to the IAEA inspections that continued after the agreement was signed the Iranians appeared to be abiding by the agreement I'm not terribly surprised that they were abiding by the agreement because as

you and I have just been discussing it was an agreement that was incredibly favorable to them the Trump administration mean, my own view is that I don't fault them for abrogating the agreement, pulling the United States out. I do fault them a little bit for the manner in which they handled it. I don't think they handled the alliance piece of this very effectively. That was one of the Trump administration's I would say major deficiencies was alliance management in general but they did do something I think nobody thought they could do which was launch a program of maximum pressure with unilateral U.S. sanctions to put pressure on the Iranian economy, which they did very successfully for a couple of years, basically 2019 and 2020.

And I think they succeeded beyond what almost anybody thought they could in really ratcheting up pressure on the Iranian regime. You'll recall that there were several instances of riots in Iran as a result of deteriorating economic conditions there in 2019 and into 2020. So the pressure was definitely having an effect on Iran, and had it been maintained, whether you could have gotten Iran to sit down and actually negotiate a more serious agreement, it's an open question anyway. So now the Biden administration comes in and they're looking and they seem to be saying after the US pulled out of the JCPOa iran began enriching uranium to higher and higher levels and they worried that iran was getting closer and closer to to a nuclear bomb

nuclear capability nuclear weapons capability and right and everyone agreed that there needed to be limits on enrichment so they their approach to getting limits on enrichment were to try to reconstruct the JCPOA or a version of it. Right. So I mean, first, interesting factoid, which is that for the first year after the Trump administration pulled out of the deal and started to ratchet up the economic pressure, Iran stayed pretty much inside the four corners of the deal, which is interesting. I mean, I think they did it in part because, as I said earlier, the deal was so favorable to them. I mean, they were continuing to do the research on the more advanced IR- know, IR6s and 8s and 9 centrifuges. They, you know, were anticipating that as happened in the fall of 2020, some of these

timelines began to come into effect, you know, the 5, 8, 10, 15 year timelines. And one of them was, for instance, an end to the arms embargo on Iran, conventional arms embargo that expired in October 2020. After eight years, the embargo on their ballistic missile program would have come to an end. So that's actually next year so for a year they uh abided by uh the agreement in the hope i think that the other uh parties the eu and france britain and germany would put sufficient pressure on the trump administration to get them to come back into the agreement. But they did, after a year, having failed to get the Trump administration back into the agreement,

decided to go outside the boundaries of the agreement, start enriching uranium, first up to 20%, which they had done in the past, before the JCPOA, and then up to 60%, which is really getting close, because this is not an arithmetic progression. This is geometric when you start spinning these centrifuges.

So when you get up to 60%, you're kind of one or two, you're maybe two steps away from getting up to the weapons weapons grade area so this was pretty serious stuff and as you say this is what prompted the uh biden administration to want you know president biden as candidate biden said i want to get back into the jcpoa although um the democratic platform um and then uh Blinken, when he went through his confirmation hearing, acknowledged that there had been some deficiencies in the 2015 agreement and that these expiring sunset clauses. With the timelines.

The timelines in particular, the sunset clauses, which as I had testified in 2015 were too short, were starting to come up pretty quickly. I mean, they had the conventional arms embargo had expired. The ballistic missile one was coming up. They were going to start being expiration after 10 years of some of the limits on enrichment. So they pledged to get a deal that would be not only get back into the JCPOA, but negotiate a deal that would be longer and stronger. The challenge, however, is that Iran has no interest in a deal that's longer and stronger. They like the deal that they've gotten. Not only that, they like that pretty soon they're going to be weeks away from being able to turn on a program, weeks or months. So why do they need to get in a deal that puts more limits on them?

Of course. And they also like the fact that they've now had a lot of experience enriching up to 20 and 60%. That's knowledge that you can't take back. And so they want to go back to not something that's longer and stronger, but something that's weaker and at best the same duration. Okay. So

where do you think we are now? I know you're relying on news reports and news analysis, so it's somewhat speculative, but it does feel like if the news is to be believed, they're getting closer and closer to a new deal. What do you know of it? What do you think it could look like? Well, so first, the administration, from the time it came into office said that there was limited time to get a deal and that time was going to run out, the clock was going to run out. They started saying this in the spring of 2021. My colleagues at JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,

have a terrific timeline which quotes all the statements from administration officials saying time is running out. And it looks like a game of chutes and ladders because the line zigs and zags from the spring of 2021 down to the present time, when they're still saying time is running out. When you tell people that time is running out, but you're still willing to sit and agree with them, it suggests you're more interested in getting an agreement than they are, and it gives them all the negotiating leverage. So what appears to be the case, and I want to be careful because we haven't seen the agreement, we only are getting press reports, we seem to have an agreement that's about 20 pages and has three or four annexes,

which even if it were returned to the JCPOA now would be a problem because of all the things we've discussed, the additional experience that they have, the experimentation that they've done, the um with the more advanced centrifuges, etc. The failure to address all the additional material we have about past military dimensions of their activity, um you know all of that is is going to lead to a weaker agreement, and they're going to get enormous benefits from the lifting of sanctions. And the one issue that seems to be really, I mean, there are two issues that seem to have held things up. One was a Russian demand that they get written assurances from the U.S., which they now claim they have that no US sanctions would be

applied to not just their activities with Iran within the scope of the deal so it's been a source of speculation that a lot of this 20 and 60 percent enriched uranium will be shipped to Russiaussia so that the iranians don't hold it physically anymore presumably the russians will get compensated by somebody for that right um so just while we're isolating russia economically we're blessing a deal where they get paid by iran to implement deal. Or somebody, yeah. Right. So, again, we don't know all the details,

but it's a little bit hard to square with everything else we're doing right now with Russia and Ukraine. That's been one issue that's held things up. And the other has been the Iranian demand that the Biden administration rescind the Trump administration's designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the Pazderan, which has been the agent of Iranian proxy surrogate and terrorist activity throughout the region, and not just the region, but beyond in places like Argentina. Right. So the IRGC was led by, commanded by Soleimani.

Correct. Well, the Quds Force, right. Yeah, the Quds Force, right. And so the IRGC is a key instrument of terror throughout the region, throughout the world, as you're saying. The Trump administration designates them as a foreign terrorist organization, and then therefore is subject to the sanctions that anyone on that list is subjected to, any organization. And the Iranians...

Which has nothing to do with the nuclear deal, by the way. Right. And the P5-plus-1 is being pressured to get the U.S. to remove the IRGC from that list. And it sounds like the Biden administration is considering it. They're considering it now. Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, said the other day when just before President Biden left biden left for the nato summit and his meetings in europe that um you know the administration was considering several issues but there wasn't a deal

yet and this clearly is is one of them and i i suspect that for a lot of people in the administration this can be very hard to swallow i mean the negotiator rob malley has been very anxious to get a deal several members of his team have resigned and reportedly according to the wall street journal reporting on this some of it has to do with concerns that he's offered too many concessions to the iranians and i cannot imagine that this is going to go down very well with the Congress, which under the laws passed in 2015 in regard to the original agreement require the administration to submit any agreement or amended agreement to the Congress for up or down vote. And so I think this is not going to sit well frankly if if the administration agrees to do it yeah with with members of with members of congress i think it's including democrats including including not just a number of

democrats including the chairman of the senate foreign relations committee the senate majority leader chuck schumer who voted against or said he would vote against the deal the first time. There never was a vote because of the filibuster rule. And also the second ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Cardin of Maryland. And I suspect there might be others. I suspect Manchin might have trouble swallowing this. So it's going to be a real, I think, interesting exercise in executive legislative relations, let's put it that way. The Soviet diplomat at these negotiations, or one of them, Mikhail Yulianov, was quoted as saying, I'm absolutely sincere in this regard when I say that Iran got much more than it could expect,

much more, he says, in these negotiations. So Russia is in the middle of this war with Ukraine. It is isolated internationally, led by the U.S., obviously isolated in part by Europe. And yet, Russia is at the negotiating table saying, we, Russia, who are basically on the same side as Iran, effectively in these negotiations, think that Iran is getting a better deal than anyone could expect. So what's that about? Is it about this nuclear fuel deal being sent to Russia? What exactly is he referring to? Well, again, because we haven't seen what's in the 20 pages and the annexes it's hard exactly to to know what Ulyanov's talking about.

Part of the problem here of course is that the Iranians refuse to meet directly with Americans. So these negotiations in Vienna have been the P4 meeting with the Iranians, and Ulyanov has apparently been the key member of that group conducting these negotiations. The Russians traditionally have lawyered relentlessly for the Iranians in the Security Council, in the IAEA, in the P5 plus one talks that led to the JCPOA, just as they did for, you know, Saddam in the Security Council during the run up to the Gulf War. So this is a long standing Russian slash Soviet diplomatic practice. You know, but I take Lyonov at his word. I believe in the higher naivete. If someone tells you something publicly, unless you have reason to disbelieve it, you ought to take them at their word. And it suggests that, you know, they got some concessions on perhaps the

advanced centrifuges or some other, you know, element of the deal that is very favorable to the Iranians. And so we'll only know when we actually get to see the texts and see what's been conceded here, but that the Biden administration negotiators have been so anxious to get a deal that they've made excessive concessions. And if absent this deal, given the concerns that Iran could be weeks away from racing to a nuclear weapons capability soon, what would be your proposal absent this agreement? You think the agreement is flawed? I think it's flawed, or what we think is in the agreement is flawed. So if Ambassador Edelman were testifying now on Capitol Hill, you would be advocating for what in lieu of this agreement or looming agreement? I think there are two elements that are missing here. One is that the Biden administration, rather than pressing its advantage with the sanctions that the Trump administration had put on and which had caused

so much economic grief to the Iranians, began to turn a blind eye both to sanctions evasion and enforcement of the sanctions. You'll recall that at the outset of the administration, Dan, they, among other things, lifted the designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization in the hope that that would help facilitate negotiating an end to the violent and terrible civil war that has been going on in Yemen for a decade, and which has involved the UAE, all of the have pulled out of Yemen, but Saudi Arabia, which continues to fight in Yemen because the Saudis have been attacked by ballistic missiles. Even though the UAE is no longer fighting in Yemen, the Houthis, however, responded to the Biden administration's you know act of largesse by by targeting

Abu Dhabi and Dubai with both ballistic missile attacks and swarm attacks of drones so rather than facilitating negotiations those concessions to the Houthis who are a proxy a surrogate for the Iranians has only inspired more more violence on the part of of the Houthis we haven't even talked about the Iranian missile strikes in their bill very close to U.S. facilities there can you talk a little about that? Because that was really in the last few weeks while these negotiations are going on. Right. I mean, it basically symbolizes that what's been going on for almost a decade now, the United States has been not holding Iran to account for its activities, malign activities in the region, because it didn't want them to disturb these negotiations about the nuclear file.

All that is done, in my view, is just invited more Iranian bad behavior. And we see it with the strikes on Erbil, even as the negotiations are supposed to be at their most sensitive point. And so I think what's been missing diplomatically is using the sanctions tool to its maximum effect, turning the tourniquet as tight as you can to put maximum pressure on the economy, while at the same time not publicly restraining Israel as we constantly do, but rather basically telling the

Iranians, you know, we can help the Israelis and we're not going to hold them back. If you want to, you know, if you want to make a deal, we're happy to make a deal, but it's got to be a serious deal. Otherwise, you're on your own and, you know, we're going to strangle your economy. And oh, by the way, the Israelis might just fly in one day and take out most of your program. Now, it admittedly is a very tough military target to take out the program. It probably would require not just one raid, but kind of multiple raids and, you know, going back, you know, multiple times, but, you know, that's not, you know, impossible. But I think without the threat of military force, as well as the pressure of sanctions, it's almost certain that you're going to get a bad deal. George Kennan once gave a lecture at the U.S. National Defense University

it was then the National War College in which he said you have no idea how much more constructive and congenial diplomacy is if you have a little quiet military power sitting in the background and I think in this instance the potential of military action was what was missing. And some members of the Obama administration in their more candid

moments have admitted to me that that was one of the problems that they had with the negotiation. When I asked various members of the administration during the time when this was being negotiated between 2013 and 2015, why they were conceding so much, you know, to the Iranians, for instance, why give them, you know, all of these centrifuges? It was because, well, because the Iranians won't, you know, give them up, you know, it was just, and it reminded me of something won't you know give them up you know it was just and it reminded me of something that you know the historian E.H. Carr once said which is in politics the belief that certain facts are unalterable or certain trends irresistible commonly reflects a lack of desire or lack of interest to change or resist them and And I think in this instance, you know,

you would ask them, well, why didn't you get, you know, why don't you get full accounting of past military dimensions? Well, we couldn't get that. Well, why didn't you get, you know, you know, no enrichment? Well, couldn't get that. Why did you let them have 6,000 centrifuges? You know, why couldn't you get them down to 2, 2000? Well, because we couldn't get that. Because in the end of the day, what became more important was getting an agreement than the substance of the agreement. And looking back at this 10, 15, 20 year saga, meaning when the negotiations began in earnest, what to you is the central lesson or lessons of of the twists and turns of these last couple decades as it relates to iran's nuclear program and the efforts to negotiate a limits on it i

think the central lesson is that you know you you need to have if you have red lines that you set out you need to stick to them you can't keep retreating from them because that only incentivizes you know people to think that there are more concessions to be had at the well you know that there's no bottom to it and you have to be able to have a credible threat of you know the use of force diplomacy is the adjustment of conflicting national interests without the use of force. But the implication has to be, if you can't resolve them in the instance of something as important as this,

that force might, in the end, have to be applied. And to me, that's the central lesson. Right, that no one has believed that we're willing to use force. And it's not to say we should use force or we should have used force. It's that we should talk less about what we won't do and just leave the perception out there that the threat is real to influence decision-making of negotiators and decision-makers on the other side? You need to create uncertainty that, as you say, helps change their calculus of decision. Pressure and uncertainty about the military side of it, I think, might have changed the calculus at various points in Tehran. But since there was never a credible threat of force,

and since the economic pressures were intermittent, you know, I think that undermined our ability to secure, you know, the best agreement that we could. We did the same thing with North Korea, by the way. And just before we wrap, just bringing it to the current crisis in Russia, do you think there's parallels here in terms of the lengths that the Biden administration goes to convey that we will not escalate in any way militarily? Again, whether or not we should or shouldn't is a debatable point. It's a big debatable point.

But do you think they've gone too far in saying what we won't do to the point that it weakens our hand? Absolutely. I think I give the Biden administration a lot of credit for rallying the alliance and for putting together a lot of a set of sanctions much stronger than I think people anticipated, certainly much stronger than the Kremlin anticipated. I think the Kremlin thought that they had sanctions proofed themselves with this large accumulation of $600 billion plus of foreign reserves. And the Biden administration, to its credit, made it impossible for them to really use that, which is to the good. but constantly talking about what we won't do

I think has been a major mistake and that's not to say that we should You know either You know willy-nilly rush in with US forces or NATO forces Or that we shouldn't take you know potential nuclear threats that Putin has been making very very very seriously. When it comes to nuclear weapons, you have to take everything very seriously. But we've just, I think, fundamentally forgotten an important lesson that Thomas Schelling taught during the Cold War about nuclear deterrence, that the ultimate deterrent is what he called the risk that leaves something to chance. The notion that you must leave in your adversaries' minds that if they continue to pursue a course of action, things might get so out of hand that you end up in the worst of all possible

worlds. Without doing that and without being able to credibly do it, you lose whatever leverage you have. Rather than spending all the time worrying about what might provoke Putin, now that he's gone in, now that he's using indiscriminate fires to reduce cities like Mariupol to ashes, and potentially, according to the administration's own briefings, using chemical, biological weapons,

or arranging some kind of radiological incident by attacking nuclear power plants, which they've done, you know, rather than worrying about what provokes him in this context, we ought to be doing things that make him worry about what he might do that would provoke us. And that's, I think, what's missing from the Biden administration's approach. And I would just add that there's no evidence that there's a correlation between us reining in what our intentions may be in terms of how we communicate it to Putin in the world and Putin behaving more responsibly. If anything, the more we've said we won't, that the threat of force isn't there, he's just escalated more and more.

It's not like, you know what I mean? It's not like we've restrained our rhetoric and he has reigned in his behavior. We've restrained our rhetoric and he's just kept escalating. I think he interprets restraint as weakness, and I think it actually elicits precisely the behavior we are presuming our restraint will, you know, will prevent. And you can see that in both what he's done, but also in, you know, the rhetoric that you see coming out of state media in Russia that are sort of known to be, you know, mouthpieces for the kremlin so you know when jen saki says uh repeats what the president says that we're going to defend every single inch of nato territory that gets translated into well ukraine's not in nato moldova's not in nato georgia's not in nato can we have a free hand there but it also you know translates into threats that you know we could uh you know

obliterate warsaw in 30 seconds uh you know threats uh veiled and not so veiled of nuclear weapons use against nato allies and poland and the baltics that's what that's what's appearing on russian state media right now and i think a lot of that is because they they see a lot of restraint and i thought actually uh eve le drian the french foreign minister former french defense minister uh you know was quite right when uh you know putin was putting his nuclear forces on alert he basically said russia's not the only nuclear power you know there's some of us who had nuclear weapons as well, and he'd be well to remember that. Again, I don't think you want to be, you know, unnecessarily provocative, but I think the administration has erred way too much on the side of restraint as opposed to the other direction.

Eric, we will leave it there. Thank you for a masterclass on the history of the Iranian nuclear challenge. We will have to have you back another time because there are more topics to hit with you, but this was extremely illuminating. So thanks for taking the time. We kept you longer than we negotiated for. So I appreciate it. I showed too much restraint in negotiations, Dan, obviously. And there was no credible threat of force. So I- You took advantage of me.

I crossed a lot of red lines. It was my pleasure to be with you. That's our show for today. To follow Eric Edelman's work, go to the Vandenberg Coalition's website. We'll post it in the show notes, but it's vandenbergcoalition.org. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.