Mark Dubowitz

Read part 1 of the podcast.

Cliff May: So where we are right now, and I think I’m using your language on this, is there are two choices that President Trump is considering. One is can the agreement be fixed, and if not, does it need to be nixed? Why don’t you talk a little bit about what would need to be done in order to repair … in order to make this a reasonable agreement. Theoretically at least, the Europeans are charged with trying to come up with these fixes and convince the Iranians to come along. If that doesn’t happen, President Trump is likely to say the agreement hasn’t been fixed, it’s not a good agreement, I’m terminating it. Right?

Mark Dubowitz: That’s correct. January 12th, President Trump says in a statement that this is the last waiver that he’s going to be granting. Every 120 to 180 days under statute, the President has to continue to waive these statutory sanctions that are the most powerful economic sanctions, and he’s provided a number of waivers since he came into office, but very, very reluctantly. In October, he decided to de-certify the deal, where he said look, this deal is a deal where we ultimately got … we got screwed, in the language of Donald Trump. We gave up concessions that were disproportionate to the concessions that we got, and so I’m going to de-certify this deal. And that’s what he did in October. By January, he says no more waivers.

So what does that mean? In practice, it means on May the 12th, when the next waiver is due, Donald Trump is either going to waive or not. If he waives, the deal stays. If he doesn’t, the deal’s gone, and he said very clearly in January, I will waive May the 12th if the Europeans agree to a transatlantic accord that fixes three of the fatal flaws of this agreement: the sunset provisions, Iran’s missile program, and the clear Iranian reluctance to allow the IAEA into military sites. Fix that-

Cliff May: In other words, they can’t … just so you understand, right now there are inspections going on. They’re being called very intrusive inspections, except military sites are off-limits to the inspectors, as if who would be so suspicious as to think that a military site would be someplace to develop military weapons? It’s kind of an odd concept.

Mark Dubowitz: That’s correct. The Iranians have said time and time again, from Khamenei to Rouhani to Zarif to Salehi, all of them have said, “You are never getting into our military sites. Did we stutter? Would you like us to translate from Persian into English for you? You’re never getting into our military sites.” Now, the US position, both under the Obama administration and the Trump administration, as well as the European position, is that’s absolutely not what is allowed under the JCPOA.

The JCPOA actually permits the IAEA to suspect all suspicious sites, and then there’s a whole mechanism that’s set up there. And so we have to get into those military sites, because clearly that’s where Iran is going to conduct clandestine military nuclear activities. How do we know that? Is that speculation? Is that theory? No, we have a decades-long track record where Iran has done exactly that. They’ve developed clandestinely elements of their military nuclear program on Revolutionary Guard military bases.

And so if we don’t get into those military bases, we cannot enforce this agreement. If we can’t enforce this agreement, then this agreement is not worth the paper it’s written on. So that is a demand by this administration, and if the Europeans and the Americans come to an agreement by May the 12th to force inspections on military sites, to constrain Iran’s missile program, particularly missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and eliminate the sunset provisions, then there will be an accord, and the agreement will stay. If the Europeans are not willing to do that, May the 12th, Donald Trump has promised he’s walking away from the deal.

Cliff May: And on that particular provision, something I think a lot of people don’t understand, why aren’t the international inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency, why aren’t the Europeans screaming bloody murder that hey, we’re supposed to be inspecting, we can’t inspect these sites? They haven’t been doing that.

Mark Dubowitz: They haven’t been doing that, and my theory on why they haven’t been doing that is because they don’t want to challenge the Iranians, certainly not this early in the agreement, because the Iranians are saying, “You’re never getting into our military sites.” And if they say, “Yes, we are,” then it creates a standoff, and under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, it begins to initiate a 24-day clock, after which, if Iran has not agreed to allow the IAEA into these military sites, then the United States or some other party can then begin to push, ultimately leading to a unilateral snapback of all of the UN Security Council resolution sanctions, as well as all of the US and European sanctions. And the United States can do that unilaterally. It doesn’t need the agreement of the Russians, the Chinese, or the Europeans.

Well, what does that mean? That means the deal’s over, so this is kind of the nuclear option. So if you’re the IAEA and you want to keep the deal, and you’re the Europeans and you’re desperate to keep the deal, you don’t want to go force an inspection in a military site that you know Iran will reject, therefore initiating a process that ultimately is going to lead to the end of the deal.

Cliff May: Okay, so fixing the deal means fixing inspections. Fixing the deal means stop testing missiles that can carry nuclear weapons. Fixing the deal means, as you said, an end to the sunset provisions. You better take just a few seconds to explain what a sunset provision is.

Mark Dubowitz: The sunset provisions that are built into the deal are restrictions that expire.

Cliff May: They sunset, right?

Mark Dubowitz: They sunset, they expire, they go away. What you’d want in a deal like this, especially after you’ve conceded enrichment to the Iranians, and you’ve effectively conceded reprocessing of plutonium to the Iranians, after, as I said, decades of policy against this, is if you’ve got a program that is today a small program, you want to keep it small. If the Iranians are one year from breakout, you want to keep them one year from breakout. But under the deal itself, these clear restrictions on Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, stockpile uranium, reprocess plutonium, build new enrichment facilities, build new heavy water reactors, the arms embargo that’s in place on Iran’s ability to acquire fighter jets and attack helicopters and combat tanks and all of the equipment they need to build up a very powerful conventional military, that arms embargo, that UN arms embargo, sunsets. It sunsets in three years’ time.

The missile embargo sunsets in six years’ time. So you have a series of sunsets, both on the nuclear side, on the missile side, and on the conventional weaponry side, where the restrictions are going to go away over the time. And by the way, Cliff, what’s interesting about this is they go away regardless of Iranian behavior. It’s not as if they’re linked to Iranian behavior. It’s not as if we say all right, if Iran moderates, if the hard men of Iran become pragmatic capitalists, if they stop brutalizing their own people and funding foreign aggression, only then will the restrictions go away. No, no. Iran gets to be a nefarious actor, a more nefarious actor, and the restrictions still go away, as long as Iran quote unquote complies with the deal.

So the obsession now in Washington, and has been for a number of years, has been Iranian compliance with the deal. As long as the Iranians aren’t cheating on the deal, then they’re going to be afforded all of these benefits. Now, of course, Cliff, if you’re the Iranians and you’ve negotiated that gives you everything you want over time, all you have to be is patient, and by the way, the things that it gives you, you’re not ready to do today. Your R&D schedule in advanced centrifuges and your technical schedule is designed over time. You’re going to be patient, because you’re not ready to install advanced centrifuges. They’re not ready. So you will be patient. Your incentive to cheat actually is not that high. I mean, you’ll still cheat, because the regime can’t help itself, so it’ll cheat and see how far it can get away with, in order to accelerate the timelines.

But you really have no incentive to cheat. You have every incentive to comply with the deal, and if you comply with the deal, the restrictions go away, and when the restrictions go away, you emerge with this patient pathway to nuclear weapons and ICBMs, and by the way, you also have an economy which in 10 years’ time is double the size, so now you’re an 850, 900 billion, trillion dollar economy. You’ve got hundreds of billions of dollars of European and Asian investment, and Cliff, you know why that’s good, is because in 10 years’ time, with all of that money in Iran, our ability to use snapback sanctions will be severely degraded. It’ll be a harder target, and the Europeans and Asians, with all their money in there, will be even more resistant to the use of sanctions than they are today.

Cliff May: I think it’s worth reminding listeners that Iran has been labeled by every US government for 40 years the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Imagine if in 2001 you or I had predicted that within less than a generation, the US would open a paved pathway to nuclear weapons for the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world. People would have called us crazy, but that’s essentially what this JCPOA does, and it’s what we’re on the road to doing. So let me ask this question. Is this agreement getting fixed by the Europeans? Start with that, and then I’ll go from there.

Mark Dubowitz: In two months we’ll know. I mean, right now our negotiating team is today in Vienna. They were recently in Berlin. They have been in Paris. They’ve been in London, and they’ve been negotiating the Europeans on ways in which to fix the deal. I think they’ve been making some progress, some progress on missiles and inspections. They’ve been making very little progress on these sunset provisions. But negotiations have really just begun, and we’re two months away from finding out whether the Europeans are willing to make these concessions in order to keep the deal and whether, if they make these concessions, Donald Trump will believe these are real fixes, not fake fixes, and be prepared to issue the waiver and keep the deal.

Cliff May: So we now have Rex Tillerson stepping down as Secretary of State. We have Mike Pompeo stepping in. How does that change the equation?

Mark Dubowitz: Mike Pompeo coming in as Secretary of State I think changes the dynamic in two fundamental ways. The first is, if you had any doubt that Donald Trump was prepared to walk away from this deal, you should have no more doubt. He is now a Secretary of State who is 100% aligned with the President. Mike Pompeo, when in Congress, led the charge against the Iran deal. Mike Pompeo, in Congress, was one of the most articulate members on the nature and gravity of the Iranian threat. Mike Pompeo, as CIA Director, put the Agency on a very aggressive footing against the Iranian regime, using covert action and the authorities that are afforded to him. Mike Pompeo is coming in with a very clear-eyed view of how dangerous the regime is and how dangerous this deal is, so he will be at the table advising the President, not someone like Rex Tillerson who will be trying to find a way to restrain the President on the Iran issue.

But interestingly enough, Mike Pompeo, because of his impeccable credentials in recognizing the nature and gravity of the Iranian threat and how fatally flawed this deal is, is actually in a better position than Rex Tillerson to sell a fix to the President. If Mike Pompeo believes it’s a real fix, and he advises Donald Trump that this is a good deal with the Europeans, he has much more credibility to persuade the President to accept that fix. I think that any fix that Rex Tillerson had presented the President would have been looked at skeptically by the President and the White House. So again, if the Europeans are willing to play ball, if they’re willing to negotiate a transatlantic fix, I think there’s a greater likelihood that Donald Trump will accept it with Mike Pompeo as his Secretary of State.

Cliff May: You know, a lot of people think, while we’ve got this terrible crisis with Iran, at the same time we’ve got this very separate crisis with North Korea. What you point out, along with FDD’s Rich Goldberg in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, is that actually these are not two separate crises, they’re intricately linked, and they’ll work out, in a way, the same, because we’re talking about what it is we’ll allow rogue regimes to do. You can’t tell everything in that op-ed. People should find it and read it, but maybe you want to just talk a little bit about why these are interlaced.

Mark Dubowitz: They’re interlaced because number one, Iran and North Korea are interlaced. The three-decade nexus between these two rogue regimes, these two rogue regimes have cooperated extensively on missile develop. There are tantalizing hints in the public record of nuclear cooperation. They’ve cooperated on illicit financial activities. And they have learned from each other. As each country has run a playbook against the United States, they’ve learned how to play the United States. The North Koreans started this in 1994 with the Agreed Framework, and they’ve been playing us since, taking a patient pathway to nuclear weapons. The Iranians watched the North Koreans, took pages from their playbook, and in 2013 negotiated a deal that gives them patient pathways to nuclear weapons. So the Iranians watch the North Koreans, the North Koreans watch the Iranians, and they cooperate extensively across the field.

Now, what’s really important from a negotiating perspective is on May the 12th, Donald Trump is going to decide whether to fix or nix the Iranian deal. Sometime at the end of May, or maybe sometime in the summer, there’s going to be a big summit between Donald Trump and the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un. Now, if Donald Trump strikes a serious deal with the Europeans on Iran, that will be a message to Kim Jong-un that the United States of America today is not prepared to strike fatally flawed deals, give up massive concessions up front, and enable a rogue regime to take these pathways to nuclear weapons and ICBMs. So what he does in Iran is very important in signaling to Kim Jong-un that he is serious.

If on the other hand, he folds on May the 12th, it’s a weak fix, it’s a fake fix, Kim Jong-un will interpret from that that Donald Trump is a paper tiger and that he can be rolled. And I can assure you the North Koreans will do everything they can to roll this administration when they get them in the same room. So very, very important that there be a real fix or, if there’s no real fix, Donald Trump walks away from this deal. No punting, no diplomatic tar sand, no excuses. Fix the deal. If you can’t fix it, nix the deal, and then send a message to the North Koreans that this is a administration that is serious about negotiating using leverage and using all instruments of American power.

Cliff May: Final question, for now at least, is if the deal is not fixed, can’t be fixed, then it is terminated. What plays out after that?

Mark Dubowitz: It’s a great question, and we could spend an entire podcast on that question.

Cliff May: And we may have to later on.

Mark Dubowitz: We may have to. I support a fix, a real fix, not a fake fix. I think that if we nix the deal, it’s a whole new game. The United States has got to be prepared to deal with the fallout. We have to have a plan in place to deal politically, militarily, economically, through cyber, through covert action, in order to deal with the Iranians. If they escalate on the nuclear side, if they escalate regionally, we have to be able to deal with the Europeans, and we have to have a plan in place to make sure that banks and companies around the world understand that if they go back into Iran, they’ll feel the force of American financial and economic power.

Cliff May: This is a critical issue for America’s future. It’s a complex issue. I think you’ve helped unravel it a little bit today, and we’ll want to have you back to talk about it a couple of months down the road. Thanks so much, Mark Dubowitz for being with us on “Foreign Podicy”.

Mark Dubowitz: Thank you, Cliff.

Cliff May: Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of “Foreign Podicy”. For more of Mark Dubowitz’s analysis, look him up on FDD’s website. That’s DefendDemocracy.org. As always, you can find and subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. If you liked this week’s episode and have feedback for us, please consider leaving us a review on iTunes. We’d appreciate your thoughts, your comments, even your criticisms. We hope you’ll join us again in the near future. Until then, I’m Cliff May, and you’ve been listening to “Foreign Podicy”.

Listen to the full Foreign Podicy interview on FDD’s website. 

Cliff May: President Obama, I think it’s fair to say, had one overriding priority in foreign and national security policy: to conclude a deal with Iran, one that he promised would prevent the Islamic Republic from becoming nuclear-armed. Now, Mark Dubowitz, you followed closely the development of this policy over a period of years. Initially, you were both supportive and optimistic, weren’t you?

Mark Dubowitz: Cliff, I was. I mean, I very much supported a negotiated agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons program and supported a program of very tough sanctions to support that diplomacy. So when President Obama came into office in 2009, he promised this dual-track policy. We’re going to engage with the Iranians, we’re going to talk to our enemies, but at the same time, we’re going to use American financial economic power, and we’re going to have all options on the table, including military force, to make it very clear to the Iranians that we would prevent them from developing a nuclear weapon. It didn’t quite work out the way I had hoped, but we can discuss why.

Cliff May: We’ll explore that. Now, initially the Iranians were not terribly eager to negotiate with the US. People should recall we didn’t have relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran after the revolution of 1979, the seizure of our embassy, the taking of our diplomats as hostages, no relations. There were secret talks going on from time to time, but not in a public place. What brought the Iranians to the table?

Mark Dubowitz: What finally brought them to the table were years of very, very tough sanctions. Initially they were put in by the Bush administration, by the US Treasury Department under the leadership of Stuart Levy, and then into the Obama administration, the US Congress really got in on the action and starting passing multiple bills with very tough secondary sanctions, which targeted those international companies and banks that do business with Iran. These were powerful sanctions that really hit the economy. They went after Iran’s oil sector, its central bank, its entire financial system, its auto sector, its ability to really transact internationally, and those sanctions really brought the Iranians to the verge of economic collapse. They were four to six months away from a Venezuela-type economic crisis in 2013.

Cliff May: So at that point they said, “Okay, we’ll talk,” but at what point were the sanctions lifted? At what point was the pressure released?

Mark Dubowitz: Well, Cliff, interestingly enough, it was exactly the time when the Iranians said, “We’re willing to talk” that the Obama administration started to relax the sanctions. They blocked additional Congressional sanctions that were designed by a bipartisan Congress to put more pressure on Iran as the administration went into negotiations. They signed an interim agreement with Iran …

Cliff May: That was what year?

Mark Dubowitz: … in 2013, which suspended some of the key oil sanctions and auto sector sanctions and precious metals sanctions. It gave Iran initially about $7 billion, but more importantly, it began to relax the pressure. It changed the psychology, both in the marketplace with respect to international companies and banks, and it changed the Iranian psychology, that all options were not on the table. Not only was the military option not on the table, and President Obama made it very clear that he wasn’t interested in using military force, and he certainly undercut the Israeli ability to use military force, but he had taken the financial leverage off the table. So they signed an interim agreement in 2013. They negotiate for two years, eventually reach the final agreement in 2015, and the terms of the agreement just got worse and worse and worse.

Cliff May: In that period, 2013 to 2015, one, the Iranians pretty much knew that they were not threatened with a big stick. There was not going to be any military action, even if the negotiations collapsed, even if there was no agreement. That wasn’t a real threat. I think we can assume the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, got that. Did they also think that if the negotiations faltered or if they refused to make concessions in that period between the interim agreement and the final agreement, the JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that there’d be new sanctions pretty quick and that the pressure would be back on?

Mark Dubowitz: They probably assumed there would new sanctions, but I think what they understood is they had President Obama and Secretary Kerry’s number. They understood that Obama and Kerry desperately wanted an Iran deal. They understood that the administration wasn’t prepared to use all instruments of American power against Iran, and so they knew that as long as they kept the administration, as long as they kept Secretary Kerry and his deputies at the negotiating table, they could continue to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze for new concessions. I don’t believe there’s any Iranian fear that this administration at that time was willing to walk away from the table.

Cliff May: So in point of fact, between 2013, the interim agreement, and 2015, the final agreement, did the Iranians make any significant concessions, and did the US make significant concessions?

Mark Dubowitz: Well, people will say that the Iranians did make concessions. You know, they gave up about 14,000 of their first-generation centrifuges, which were taken out of the enrichment facilities, and they were put in storage with a lock on them. They agreed to cap the level of low-enriched uranium stockpiles. They agreed to cap heavy water. They agreed to put cement in the colander of the heavy water reactor in Iraq. They agreed to certain concessions, but Cliff, what’s really important to understand is the concessions that they agreed to were on technologies that they had already perfected, in order to buy time for technologies that they hadn’t perfected.

Now, that’s not just me saying that, that’s Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran, a former nuclear negotiator, someone who had negotiated with the Europeans between 2003 and 2005, and at that time had written in his book and had talked about publicly that his whole negotiating strategy was exactly that. “I’m willing to make concessions to suspend technologies that we know how to do in order to buy the time to work on technologies that we don’t know how to do.” And so that was very much the game plan of the negotiation in 2013 to 2015, and when you look at the interim agreement and when you look at the final agreement, that’s exactly what the Iranians did.

They gave up on technologies that they had perfected, and what they did is they found time to work, over the next decade to 12 years, on those technologies that they needed, advanced centrifuges, long-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and eventually to buy the time to work on the military nuclear aspects of their program, warhead designs and triggers, which they hoped to do in the clandestine facilities, the military facilities, which they repeatedly say the IAEA, the UN weapons inspectors, are not getting into.

Cliff May: What you just told us is astonishing, so I want to focus on it for a minute, because one could imagine if the intelligence community had come back to John Kerry, Secretary of State, and President Obama and said, “Look, we’ve got a memo. We stole it, and it gives their negotiating strategy. We know exactly what they’re planning to do to you.” But the intelligence community, you’re saying, didn’t need to, because it all published in a book. It shouldn’t have fooled them, and yet, despite them knowing what the strategy was, they kind of went along and did exactly what Rouhani wanted them to do, which is to say, “We’re only going to restrict you on what you already know, and we’re not going to restrict you on what you need to develop in order to have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to targets anywhere in the world.”

Mark Dubowitz: They didn’t even have to read the book. All they had to do, actually, was follow Hassan Rouhani’s election campaign in 2013. See, Rouhani was getting beaten up by the Revolutionary Guards and some of the other candidates in that election for having been too soft with the Europeans when he was a nuclear negotiator between 2003 and 2005. So Rouhani said, “I wasn’t too soft. I had a strategy, and my strategy at that period of time was to do exactly what I’ve described. I negotiated with the Europeans, we suspended certain parts of our program that we knew how to do it, in order to buy time to work on other aspects of the program that we hadn’t perfected.”

So Rouhani’s bragging about this during the election campaign. You didn’t have to read his book, you didn’t need any classified information from the US intelligence community, you just had to sit there and read what Rouhani was actually saying in this election campaign. So you just had to translate from Farsi into English his strategy. The other thing he said at the time was, “My strategy is also to divide the Europeans from the Americans and the West from the Chinese and Russians.” And I think that’s also important to keep in mind as we consider the administration’s options going forward with this nuclear deal, with a looming deadline on May the 12th.

Cliff May: This is sort of an unfair question, but if it was clear what the negotiating strategy was, if it was clear what the Iranians wanted to get out of these talks, why wasn’t there on the American side either the will or the knowledge to say we’re not going to let them get that?

Mark Dubowitz: It’s a question that I ask myself every day. I mean, the US had incredible negotiating leverage. The US had basically brought the Europeans on board. There were powerful sanctions. Iran was down to its last $20 billion in foreign exchange reserves for a $400 billion economy. Inflation was officially at 40%, unofficially at 80%. GDP was negative 6-1/2%. Oil revenues had dropped off a cliff, really. The rial had collapsed. Iran was four to six months away from a balance of payments crisis, where the economy could have ended up like Venezuela’s. So you think with all that negotiating leverage, you would go in, first thing you would do is you’d make sure you had bad cops. Always need bad cops. So if Obama and Kerry want to be the good cops, you need Congress and the Israelis as the bad cop, because Ali Khamenei was the bad cop.

So when Hassan Rouhani and Zarif went to negotiate this agreement, they could keep saying, “We’re reasonable guys. We would take those concessions, but I got the Supreme Leader thundering back in Tehran, and if I give you those concessions and I go back to Iran and tell him that, I could be hanging from a crane.” Barack Obama and John Kerry had bad cops. They had the Israelis, who were making a lot of noise, public noise about their willingness to use military force. They had Congress, which had moved bipartisan legislation with deadline-triggered sanctions, that if the Iranians did not agree to certain terms by a certain date, there would be even more powerful sanctions that would snap on them.

So what did John Kerry do? What did Barack Obama do? They basically took their bad cops and they shot them. They completely undermined both Congress and the Israelis. Congress, they said we will veto any new legislation that imposes any types of sanctions, whether they be today or in the future, whether they be deadline-triggered or they be imposed for no reason. And the Israelis, they constantly leaked publicly that Israel was preparing for the use of military force, and they made it very clear to the Israelis that if the Israelis used military force, America would not be with them.

So boom, boom. Congress was gone, the Israelis are gone, and they’re walking into negotiation without any bad cops, without any clear red lines that they’re willing to defend, and they’re negotiating against Hassan Rouhani and Zarif, who have forgotten more about nuclear physics than Kerry ever learned. And the Supreme Leader, again, back in Tehran thundering away, defining his red lines and proving inflexible on all of them.

Cliff May: It’s an odd way to run negotiations. Do you recall at what point you became disenchanted? At what point did you recognize that this is not going to end well, that essentially John Kerry sat down with a guy named Doc in a bar to play cards?

Mark Dubowitz: I became very disenchanted when I learned that there were actually back channel negotiations taking place between Iran and the United States in Oman, and that coming out of those secret back channel negotiations that none of us knew anything about, they had agreed on certain parameters that were then going to inform the agreement in 2013 that became the interim agreement, the Joint Plan of Action. I became incredibly disenchanted when I learned that John Kerry had given up the most valuable concession to Iran, not at the end of negotiations, when you actually want to save the most valuable concessions for the end of negotiations, but he had given the most valuable concessions up front, before the negotiations even had begun.

What were those concessions? Well, the first one was on enrichment. There had been international policy, US policy, multiple Security Council resolutions that Iran, this Iranian regime, could not have domestic enrichment. Domestic enrichment’s important. Why do you need domestic enrichment? Because that’s the fissile material that you need to produce a nuclear device. There were multiple UN Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to suspend all of its enrichment. He gave it up. No reason to give that up. There are 20 countries that have civilian nuclear programs that don’t have domestic enrichment or plutonium reprocessing. There are a list of countries that do have domestic enrichment or plutonium reprocessing. They actually have nuclear weapons. And Iran, given its nuclear mendacity over decades, was certainly not a country that should be in a club of domestic enrichment and reprocessing, given the nature of this regime. He gave that up.

The second thing he gave up is what has now haunted us, is this issue of the sunset provisions, that any restrictions on Iran’s program would not be permanent, that they would go away over time, that regardless of Iranian behavior, these restrictions would disappear, and that is now what we’re left with in this agreement. Iran has domestic enrichment, it has plutonium reprocessing that it will get over time. It will be in a position to emerge with an industrial-size nuclear program. That program will be powered by advanced centrifuges, which are smaller, more efficient and easier to hide, so therefore giving Iran an easier clandestine sneak-out. It will have a massive enrichment program, be able to produce hundreds of thousands of kilograms of enriched uranium in a near-zero nuclear breakout. And it will have a long-range ballistic missile program and cruise missile program, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. That’s what Iran gets by following the deal.

Cliff May: John Kerry was not, I think it’s fair to say, an experienced negotiator. Rouhani, Javad Zarif, the Iranian side, they had skilled and very experienced negotiators. But John Kerry had some experienced negotiators on his team. The problem is, in the negotiations they had conducted in the past hadn’t been very successful either.

Mark Dubowitz: Listen, certainly there were people on the team, like Wendy Sherman, who had been involved in the North Korea negotiations. She wasn’t a negotiator for the 1994 Agreed Framework, but she became very involved in the implementation of the Agreed Framework and in subsequent negotiations with the North Koreans. But I don’t want to … Cliff, I want to be very clear here. There were great people on that team. There were really smart people who understood the technical issues, who understood the risks and the dangers, and not just on the US team. If you looked at the French negotiating team, in many respects they were even better. This was a group of people who had worked together very closely on the Iranian issue, had been negotiating with the Iranians since 2003, had been lied to by the Iranians repeatedly with respect to the nuclear program, who understood their file. They were nonproliferation experts. They were sanctions experts.

And they really tried to hold the line in these negotiations, because remember, these were not negotiations just between the United States and Iran. These were negotiations between Iran and what’s called the P5+1, so the United States, China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany. In particular, the French were very tough at the table, trying to convince Kerry and the US negotiators to hold the line on key issues, and in some respects they got some positive changes into the interim and then the final agreement, but they weren’t able to hold the line against an American President and his Secretary of State who were desperate for a deal and weren’t going to let anybody get in their way.

Cliff May: There were concessions made that we didn’t know about at the time, outside the deal, weren’t there?

Mark Dubowitz: There were concessions made. There were side agreements reached with the Iranians that we learned about later. There may be additional side agreements we don’t even know about today, that haven’t even been publicized, that have been classified. There were additional agreements that gave Iran even more concessions. In fact, there were understandings reached after the JCPOA, changes that were made by the Obama Treasury Department, by the Obama State Department, that actually gave the Iranians even more concessions.

And what’s worth talking about, Cliff, is not just what the concessions were, but how were the concessions given and why were they given? I want to get back to the Iranian perspective on this, because it’s really interesting to think about this from an Iranian perspective. How does a country, internationally isolated, with 80 million people, with a tiny economy, under massive sanctions, both US and international sanctions, come to the negotiating table and manage to turn the tables? Turn the table on the United States, the great superpower, and the international community, get itself out from under these powerful nuclear sanctions, and walk away with a nuclear deal that essentially gives them a patient pathway into nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles? How does a country do that?

I think a country does that because the Iranians walked in with a negotiating strategy, part of which we’ve talked about today, but what they did was they sat down with their technical experts and the head of the Iranian nuclear program, a guy named Salehi, and they said, “All right, Salehi, what we want you to do is tell us how long it’s going to take to perfect the advanced centrifuges. How long will it be before we can be in a position to have a delivery vehicle, a long-range ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead? How long will it take you to be in a position where we can actually start to do the kind of military nuclear work that is essential in order to take fissile material, put it in a warhead, and affix it to a missile?”

So Salehi sat down and he gave them the timelines, the technical timelines, and so they started with the technical timelines that were based on the Iranian R&D schedule and capabilities, and they negotiated a deal around that. So they walked in with a real clear sense of what they wanted to get, and then they did what they do all the time, which was they used nuclear blackmail, and the blackmail was very simple. You either give us those concessions or we will walk away from the table. If we walk away from the table, we will expand our nuclear program. You will have no choice but to concede us a nuclear weapon or use military force to forestall that. So in other words, this deal or war. That was the Iranians saying that and using a nuclear blackmail.

And then a guy named Ben Rhodes, who was Barack Obama’s chief communications strategist and had a fancy title, Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes went out there and in selling the deal, just echoed the Iranian blackmail threat, which essentially became, “You, Congress, if you block this deal, then you have a choice: this deal or war.” And it became actually quite an effective way to browbeat many Democrats to supporting that deal. So an Iranian negotiating strategy, an Iranian communications strategy, a political strategy, the Iranians were very good in understanding American weakness and understanding American desperation for a deal, and that’s how they played us, and that’s why we are left with a fatally flawed nuclear agreement.

Cliff May: I only want to mention this briefly. There’s another kind of concession that took place, and those were a recognition and respect for various Iranian equities around the world, such things as stopping American intelligence and law enforcement from preventing Hezbollah from continuing to involve itself in drug trafficking in Latin America. They were kind of called off. In Syria, you had a recognition that Bashar Assad, the dictator, is an Iranian guy. We can’t really interfere with what he wants to do, which led to the civil war, which has cost a half million lives so far. There were a lot of other equities that were going to be respected that were outside the deal but still, if I’m correct … and you tell me if I’m not … President Obama didn’t want to upset the Iranians outside the deal in any way.

Mark Dubowitz: Well, exactly right, and President Obama didn’t want to upset the Iranians because, remember, the Iranians were using blackmail. They kept saying, “If you pressure us, both inside the deal and outside the deal, any more sanctions, you push back against us in Syria, you start pushing back against our equities in Iraq, in Yemen, if you start going after Hezbollah in Lebanon, if you start going after our networks, terror networks, illicit financial networks and drug trafficking networks globally, if you do anything that we don’t like, we will walk away from the table. And if we walk away from the table, Barack Obama, you’re not getting your nuclear deal. And if you’re not getting your nuclear deal, we are going to escalate, and we know, Barack Obama, you’re not prepared to escalate. In fact, we know one thing about you is you want to get out of the Middle East. You want to pull out of the Middle East, pivot to Asia, and leave behind this troubled region. We’re not pulling out of the Middle East. We’re not pivoting to Asia. We want to own the Middle East.”

And so as they pushed forward regionally, as they began to push forward in Iraq and in Syria, in Yemen, in Lebanon, both directly and through proxies, they pushed forward and forward, and instead of encountering American steel, they encountered American mush. And they just kept pushing and pushing and pushing, all the while negotiating this deal, getting these nuclear concessions, and trying to negotiate their way out of this economic and financial vice grip that the United States had put on it.

Cliff May: If I wanted to be generous to Barack Obama, might I say the following, that he was running an experiment, that he thought that we had been bellicose towards the Iranians for way too long, that if he simply showed respect to the Islamic Republic, to the Supreme Leader, if he showed that he respected their equities around the world, their ambition to be at least a leader in the Middle East, if not the hegemon, he sort of thought … and oh, also if he got them involved in international commerce, supported their economy, well, moderation would be the inevitable result of this process, that that was the experiment he was running. And I think now that the experiment has been run, assuming that it was his experiment, we know the answer. It’s a failure. It didn’t happen. There’s no moderation that’s taken place, and there’s no moderation we can see over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years that’s the life of this agreement, which we need to talk about. Is that a reasonable theory?

Mark Dubowitz: Yeah, look, I think there’s two theories in defense of Barack Obama’s decision here. The first theory is yes, let’s seduce the hard men of Iran to become pragmatic capitalists. Let’s integrate them into the global financial system. That will in turn moderate them, and again, if we’ll respect their equities in the Middle East, we’ll pull back from the Middle East. As he said, we’ll let the Iranians and the Saudis share the Middle East. They can divide the Middle East. We’ll be an offshore balancer against the Saudis and then against the Iranians, as one or the other becomes more powerful. So that was one theory of the case, and I think, Cliff, that’s exactly right. I think that theory has proven to be wrong. If anything, the Iranian regime has gotten more repressive and more aggressive, not more moderate.

The second theory of the case, which I think was actually a viable theory, is that Barack Obama was prepared to do a limited arms control deal with the Iranians. The Iranian regime had gotten to a breakout time of about two to three months. He wanted to extend that breakout time to a year, which is what the nuclear agreement accomplished. It was a limited agreement. It was an agreement that didn’t cut off every pathway to Iran’s nuclear weapons. It was an agreement that at the end of the day had some serious flaws into it and required a follow-on agreement, and the agreement itself would solve a very narrow problem, and the Obama administration would continue to push back aggressively against all other forms of Iranian malign behavior.

So a limited nuclear agreement with a comprehensive policy to push back against Iran’s malign behavior. That would be an objective that I think I could have supported. The problem that I had with the Obama administration’s agreement and the way they sold it is they sold this as a comprehensive nuclear agreement that quote unquote cut off all pathways to nuclear weapons. Well, that’s just nonsense. If you read the agreement, it doesn’t cut off all pathways, because all the restrictions go away over time, and those pathways actually are paved to an Iranian nuclear weapon. It is also in the context of an Obama administration Iran policy where the deal itself paralyzes that policy. The administration, as you clearly articulated, on other multiple fronts of Iranian and Hezbollah malign activity, doesn’t push forward, they retreat back.

So in other words, they create a space for Iran to become even more aggressive, even more threatening to US interests and the interests of our allies. Again, a limited agreement, sold in a limited way with an understanding that there would be multiple follow-up agreements to address these flaws while we continued to build leverage, would have made some sense, but they went the opposite way.

Listen to the full Foreign Podicy interview on FDD’s website.