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Introduction

When the hardcover edition of Iran’s Deadly Ambition went to press in spring 2015, the nuclear deal between Iran and the countries of the P5+1 (the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, and Germany) had not yet been concluded. Back then, the substance of what was being negotiated behind closed doors in Vienna, Austria, and Lausanne, Switzerland, was the subject of extensive coverage in the media and the topic of even greater speculation in Washington and assorted foreign capitals. But the true extent of the compromise that was eventually reached over Iran’s nuclear ambitions wasn’t yet known.

Now it is. In July 2015, with great fanfare, the Obama administration formally unveiled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the nuclear deal with Iran is formally known. With its release, the American public got its first real glimpse at the extent of the diplomatic bargain struck with Iran.

We have discovered that the agreement is not as bad as it was initially believed. It’s actually much worse.

While the JCPOA can be said to include some beneficial elements—short-term constraints on Iranian uranium enrichment, a reduction in the number of centrifuges operated by the Islamic Republic, and a delay of the regime’s “plutonium track”—it is materially deficient in at least three key respects.

First, the new nuclear deal does not dismantle Iran’s nuclear capability, as originally envisioned by the United States and its negotiating partners. Contrary to the Obama administration’s pledges at the outset of talks in November 2013, the JCPOA does not irrevocably reduce Iran’s nuclear potential. In fact, it does the opposite: under key provisions of the accord (specifically, those contained in the document’s four annexes), the P5+1 nations have actually committed themselves to strengthening and reinforcing Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and processes over the next ten years.¹

As a result, the JCPOA enables a slower but ultimately stronger Iranian nuclear program. And when the agreement expires less than a decade from now, the Islamic Republic will be much closer to a breakout capability than it is today, constituting what some have called a “patient pathway” to the atomic bomb for Iran’s ayatollahs.²

Second, the new nuclear deal incentivizes further proliferation on the part of Iran and its neighbors. Although President Obama has claimed that the JCPOA closes off all pathways by which Iran can acquire a nuclear capability,³ the agreement actually focuses on just one of two such routes: indigenous development (the regime’s domestic facilities, stockpiles, and nuclear know-how). It does not seriously address the parallel track by which Iran can acquire such a capability: clandestine procurement of components from abroad.

This represents a serious oversight, because Iran maintains active proliferation relationships with a range of suppliers, including the regime of Kim Jong-un in North Korea and private commercial entities in the People’s Republic of China. These connections—detailed extensively in Chapter VI—have been essential to Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear advances to date and will enable the Iranian regime to still make progress on its nuclear effort in spite of heightened scrutiny over its domestic activities.

Moreover, Iran’s advances have nudged other countries in the Middle East to accelerate their own nuclear plans in response. Most conspicuously, regional rival Saudi Arabia has threatened to pursue its own nuclear option as a strategic counterweight, likely by leveraging its extensive and ongoing strategic relationship with Pakistan.⁴ As a result, there is significant potential for a destabilizing cascade of proliferation in the region in coming years, the logical end point of which will be the emergence of multiple nuclear aspirants along Iran’s periphery.

Third, and most significant, the nuclear deal has set in motion a fundamental unraveling of the international sanctions regime painstakingly erected over the preceding decade and a half and designed to curtail Iran’s global menace. Through both direct and indirect means, the JCPOA has put Iran on the cusp of an economic windfall of unprecedented magnitude.

THE GREAT SANCTIONS GIVEAWAY

In short order, the United States and its partners in the P5+1 released to Iran some $100 billion in previously escrowed oil revenue. As of “implementation day,” January 14, 2016, Iran received unfettered access to these funds without limitations on their use.

The scope of this stimulus is enormous. It amounts to roughly a quarter of Iran’s annual GDP, which totaled $415 billion in 2014.⁵ That sum rivals the entirety of the European Recovery Program (known as the Marshall Plan) launched by the Truman administration in 1948 in the aftermath of World War II—an initiative that disbursed $13 billion ($120 billion in today’s dollars) to seventeen countries in Europe over the span of four years. The proportional impact of such relief for Iran is analogous to America’s $16.7 trillion economy receiving an infusion of roughly $4.2 trillion—approximately five times the stimulus that stabilized the U.S. financial sector following the 2008 global economic crisis.

The White House has tried to minimize the significance of this concession. Early on, administration officials argued that the Iranian regime would use any windfall overwhelmingly for benign activities, such as improving domestic conditions or strengthening its economy.⁶ More recently, they have argued that the economic benefits—while indeed extensive—remain largely unrealized by the Islamic Republic. Thus, in his April 2016 speech before the National Gala dinner of J Street, a liberal political action group that supports the Iran deal, Secretary of State John Kerry noted that Iran had so far received just $3 billion of the overall total.⁷

Both characterizations are deeply misleading. Iran can indeed be expected to utilize a significant portion of the economic relief rendered by the P5+1 for domestic purposes. But the sheer volume of unblocked funds means that the Iranian regime will be able to significantly augment its expenditures on everything from supporting international terrorism to modernizing its military, with detrimental effects for both regional and American security. At the same time, Iran’s delay to date in accessing the totality of this aid is a reflection of political choices in Tehran rather than of real-world constraints. Simply put, the Iranian regime can use the entire sum of more than $100 billion. It just has not chosen to do so—at least not yet.

Nor is it accurate to say, as some have argued, that adverse global economic conditions will wipe away any benefit that the Iranian regime might receive from sanctions relief.⁸ While Iran’s initial windfall is indeed somewhat dampened by the low world price of oil, the Iranian regime is adapting by revising its budget downward, focusing on non-oil exports, and significantly expanding domestic taxation.⁹

Additionally, the stimulus enshrined in the JCPOA will invariably be augmented by the benefits of expanded post-sanctions trade between Iran and countries in Europe and Asia. The agreement will also greatly strengthen the inevitable reintegration of Iran into global institutions from which it was previously proscribed, such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT).¹⁰

In the meantime, America is proffering still more economic carrots to the Islamic Republic. In the months since the passage of the JCPOA, in response to dissatisfaction in Tehran about its anemic economic recovery so far, the Obama administration has sought to provide the Iranian regime with ever-greater sanctions relief. The justification propounded by top administration officials is that Iran has yet to reap real benefits from the deal, and therefore a further sweetening of the pot is necessary to ensure that Iran continues to abide by the agreement’s terms.

In the service of this goal, the White House launched an effort in the spring of 2016 to facilitate Iranian access to the U.S. dollar.¹¹ The initiative touched off a political firestorm on Capitol Hill, with irate members of Congress protesting that the plan effectively reneged on promises made by the White House last summer in its attempt to sell the nuclear deal to a skeptical Congress. Among those was Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s pledge to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 2015 that, irrespective of the provisions of the new nuclear deal, the administration was committed to keeping existing, and extensive, trade restrictions in place.¹²

Congressional pressure, as well as the risk that direct Iranian access to the U.S. economy would violate provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which mandated that the White House “block and prohibit” Iranian assets if those funds “come within the United States, or are or come within the possession or control of a United States person,”¹³ conspired to thwart the administration’s initial plan. Nevertheless, the administration appears to be actively examining workarounds that would allow Iran the ability to exploit the strength of the U.S. dollar, possibly through the creation of an offshore clearing facility for facilitating previously prohibited U-turn transactions utilizing the dollar.¹⁴ The White House is doing so, moreover, even though such a step would fundamentally compromise the integrity of the global sanctions regime by allowing Iran’s tainted money to permeate U.S. financial institutions.

The Obama administration has even become a direct investor in Iran’s nuclear program. As part of an agreement hammered out between Washington and Tehran in late April, the United States has committed to purchasing 32 tons of heavy water—a key byproduct of nuclear development—from Iran. The $8.6 million deal will help Iran fulfill one of the conditions of the JCPOA, which stipulates that Iran gets rid of the substance as a way of ensuring that it is not later used to help create nuclear weapons. But the agreement isn’t simply a security measure. It is also intended as an economic signal to other potential economic partners of the Islamic Republic that it is acceptable to invest in the regime’s nuclear program. “The idea is: Okay, we tested it, it’s perfectly good heavy water. It meets spec. We’ll buy a little of this,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz explained to the Wall Street Journal.¹⁵ “That will be a statement to the world: ‘You want to buy heavy water from Iran, you can buy heavy water from Iran. It’s been done. Even the United States did it.’”

THE LIMITS OF NORMALIZATION

For the moment, relief has yet to kick in in earnest. That is at least partly because Iran’s rickety economy suffers from serious structural problems. The International Monetary Fund concluded after a May 2016 visit to the Islamic Republic that the country will need to undertake significant internal reforms on issues such as money laundering and terror financing in order to alleviate investor jitters and facilitate full integration into the global economy.¹⁶ But, over the long term, the cumulative impact of these measures will be nothing short of transformational.

Slowly but surely, Iran’s trading partners are beginning to reengage with Iran. In early 2016, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited Tehran and concluded a sweeping 25-year plan to broaden bilateral relations, including a strategy to expand trade between the two countries to $600 billion over the next decade.¹⁷ More decisive still was the May 2016 state visit to Iran of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, which netted a dozen new pacts on trade, telecommunications, and transportation—including a multiyear, $500 million deal to build and administer two cargo terminals at the southern Iranian port of Chabahar, a project that will effectively make the Islamic Republic a key player in India’s future export strategy.¹⁸ And, during a whirlwind spring 2016 trip to Tehran, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini made clear that Europe, which once ranked as Iran’s most substantial trade partner, accounting for 38 percent of Iran’s exports and 31 percent of its imports, is eager to reclaim that mantle once again now that sanctions have been lifted.¹⁹

Eager corporations are starting to do the same. In June 2016, in what represents the first major Western deal with post-sanctions Iran, Boeing concluded a “historic” $25 billion agreement to provide Iran Air, the country’s national carrier, with 100 new commercial airplanes.²⁰ While congressional pressure so far has helped stall implementation of this agreement, it nonetheless represents a sign of the times, as hungry multinational firms begin to dip their toes back into the Iranian market in earnest.

All this has unmistakably placed Iran on the road to sustained recovery. As evidence of this fact, the World Bank now estimates that Iran’s GDP—which constricted by nearly 7 percent in 2012 and a further 3 percent in 2013 as a result of Western sanctions—will grow by nearly 6 percent this year alone.²¹ Further into the future, Iran’s economic horizons look brighter still.

The JCPOA has not, however, yielded a fundamental change in Iran’s political outlook. Contrary to the fervent wishes of the Obama administration, the agreement has not fostered a kinder, gentler polity in Iran. While the White House lobbied heavily in favor of the agreement based on the argument that it would help empower moderate forces within Iran, nothing of the sort has happened.

This was evident in Iran’s parallel elections in February 2016. The first of these was to appoint representatives to the country’s unicameral legislature, commonly known as the Majles. The second was to select officials for the Assembly of Experts, the powerful clerical body that selects and oversees the performance of the country’s top religious authority, its supreme leader.

Ahead of the elections, conventional wisdom held that the twin outcomes would be resounding victories for Iran’s reformists.²² In truth, however, the results were far less than met the eye. Mass disqualifications of progressive candidates in the weeks leading up to the vote ensured that those “reformists” who could still stand in the elections were not true moderates—they were overwhelmingly compliant to the regime. In the final calculus, observers were forced to concede that the election results amounted to nothing short of a rout of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s political allies and a resounding reaffirmation of the conservative status quo in Iranian politics.²³

The Iranian regime’s core anti-American animus, too, remains intact. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recently warned that the United States was using the nuclear deal as a strategic tool in order “to be able to reinstate their previous hegemony” over the Islamic Republic.²⁴ And in mid-May, Iran’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to approve a bill demanding compensation from the United States for “spiritual and material damage” inflicted on Iran over the past six decades as a result of its policies.²⁵ The message of these and myriad other signals is unmistakable: Iran may have profited handsomely from the nuclear deal, but it has no interest in a more pacific relationship with the country principally responsible for making it possible.

What the JCPOA has succeeded in doing, however, is reinvigorate Iran’s global appetite. After laboring for years under international sanctions and with limited means to make its foreign policy vision a reality, the Islamic Republic is now positioned for a landmark global expansion. The pages that follow sketch what that expansion will look like and why a rising Iran represents a major and enduring threat to American interests and the safety and security of U.S. allies abroad.

It is a danger that has only grown more acute since this book was first written.