Iran Nuclear Deal

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
261

A dialogue:

Iran: Fine, we will do the bare minimum to get the sanctions released.

USA: Thanks. Victory!

Iran: Shortly after that, the money will start flowing, and we will have an enormous influx of investment from nations like China and Russia, who have a completely different geopolitical endgame than the USA, amd frankly would love to see the USA humiliated.

USA: That’s weird. I thought we could totally trust them. In any event, we look forward to you doing the bare minimum in the short-term, and Congratulations on getting crazy rich super fast. Don’t spend any of that new money or non-nuclear arms we let you have on terror elements, say, in Syria, cool?

(a few years elapse)

USA: Hey, you aren’t getting the things done we agreed to fast enough and transparency is lacking. What gives?

Iran: Dismantling reactors and facilities and the like turned out to be harder tjan expected. Just delays. Nothing to get upset about.

(a few years later, but not yet even to the 10 year mark)

USA: Hey, you’re seriously not doing the things you agreed to.

Iran: It is slower and more expensive than expected. You get it.

USA: No. We agreed you would do this stuff, and you haven’t. Add up all the incremental things you haven’t done and this is “significant”.

Iran: No way. “Significant” meant building a nuclear weapon. That is what the parties intended. That’s what the “snap back” penalty is designed for. It’s a last resort punishment for the ultimate crime. We aren’t buildinga nuclear weapon, we just aren’t on the old timeline any more because of practical issues. You get it.

USA: We disagree - non-compliance can be “significant” and we may reconstitute sanctions!

Iran: Good luck convincing anyone else of that. That ain’t what the agreement says. Also, you sure you want to piss us off? Aren’t you relying on us in Iraq and other places?

USA: We are relying on you. But we expected you to honor the things you promised to do.

Iran: Can’t talk right now. Gotta go cash this new check for a gazillion dollars from China. Did you hear we might get the Olympics?

USA: I don’t think you heard us. We think that even though you aren’t building a nuclear weapon, you are in material breach of the agreement and we are about to reconstitute sanctions!

Iran: And? The agreement has a poison pill in it. We’re in material breach, you say? Fine. That means we dont have to comply with any of it. You go ahead and reinstitute sanctions, and we will start building a nuclear bomb the next day. Oh, and who gives a crap about your sanctions at this point? We’re rich, amd China and Russia aren’t going anywhere. So, USA, “snap back” until you’re blue in the face. We’ll have more than enough money without you, and a nuclear weapon, which is exactly where we wanted to be, but first we had to trick you into releasing sanctions, which we did, and the only real cost was time, which we have plenty of. This deal has been sweet.

USA: But we will reinstitute sanctions!

Iran: We’ve already addressed that. See you at the Olympics.

262

[quote]smh_23 wrote:
^ “Baffling claims…” – not necessarily made by you, TB. I am not trying to put words in your mouth. I’m arguing against a narrative (and therefore for a counter-narrative) here. I haven’t been following closely enough from the beginning to cross my t’s and dot my i’s with regard to how the prevailing PWI narrative came to be.[/quote]

No, I understand, and I think you raise very good points. I think Iran has a strong interest to comply and give us what we want, which is beneficial, but only in the very short term. That’s not nothing, but when circumstances change - and Iran is not dependent on the USA and does not care what we think because it os growing rich off of other countries - we won’t be getting what we bargained for.

263

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:
^ “Baffling claims…” – not necessarily made by you, TB. I am not trying to put words in your mouth. I’m arguing against a narrative (and therefore for a counter-narrative) here. I haven’t been following closely enough from the beginning to cross my t’s and dot my i’s with regard to how the prevailing PWI narrative came to be.[/quote]

No, I understand, and I think you raise very good points. I think Iran has a strong interest to comply and give us what we want, which is beneficial, but only in the very short term. That’s not nothing, but when circumstances change - and Iran is not dependent on the USA and does not care what we think because it os growing rich off of other countries - we won’t be getting what we bargained for.

[/quote]

I, too, think you raise very good points. And I don’t deny that the narrative you’ve written out above describes a possible strategy to which the Iranians might adhere, though I don’t think you’d deny that it is also possible that Iran will decide that it isn’t worth the headache – that to prosper and generally abide by the terms is much better than the alternative. This gets into my other point: at any time we choose in that narrative, we have the power to unilaterally re-impose the sanctions to which both China and Russia were subscribed. This is the cleverest and best aspect of the agreement – the inversion of what would naturally have been a single-state veto-power over the “snap back.” Some contracts would apparently be grandfathered in, but this would nonetheless amount to a whole new round of indefinite economic headache, and a freeze on new activity, for the Iranians. If they are enjoying their newfound prosperity, they will have a strong reason to avoid this.

There is also the probability, surely not lost on the Iranians, that a stronger (unprecedented, in Iran’s case) U.S. response would follow the dissolution of the agreement.

264

Well that was fast.

And that is despite a 5 year extension of the weapons embargo in the agreement.

265

[quote]pat wrote:
Well that was fast.

And that is despite a 5 year extension of the weapons embargo in the agreement. [/quote]

The Kremlin announced that it would end the ban on S-300 sales to Iran in March 2015. The following is an excellent article on the weapon system and its implications.

It isn’t surprising that Russia promised the sale of a sophisticated air defense system to Iran to incentivize it to reach a final deal. Iran sought an actualized or quasi-nuclear capability primarily to establish nuclear deterrence vis-a-vis the United States. With that element of deterrence off the table until at least 2040, it’s natural for Iran to seek to bolster its air defenses to ward off a potential preventative attack. The sale will complicate such a surgical air campaign by the United States, but would not thwart it. The Israeli military option, which was already untenable for military-technical and political reasons before a deal, is made even more difficult by the S-300. The J-Post is wrong to imply that these weapon systems will find their way to Hezbollah, PIJ, or Hamas. They’re expensive, they require trained personnel, and their use against IAF or Israeli civilian aircraft would invite multilateral military retaliation.

266

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:
A better deal is an illusion. If the United States rejects the JCPOA, its policy vis-a-vis Iran will be limited to a daunting dilemma: war or containment. I prefer an imperfect deal (an ideal deal is an irresponsible fantasy) to either surgical strikes against Iran’s nuclear program or containment, though the latter is preferable to the former.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/iran-deal-rejection-121257.html#.Vc4V8PlViko[/quote]

Then ‘no deal’ would be the better option. An imperfect deal is a better option in this case. [/quote]

Your first and second sentences are logically incompatible. Can you be so kind as to clarify? [/quote]

EDIT:
Then ‘no deal’ would be the better option. An imperfect deal is a worse option in this case.[/quote]

How so? Did you follow the author’s reasoning? [/quote]

I just disagree with it. The deal does more to limit our options. We have to abide by it, while Iran has the option to walk away from it at many points. I disagree that we are out of options as it pertains to curbing their nuclear capabilities. I disagree that it removes the possibility of military strikes against Iran. That may very well happen anyway for other reasons in the following years. I did not see where they agreed to abandon Hezbollah or Hamas. They are perfectly well capable of carrying out hostile attacks that have nothing to do with nuclear technology and thus would not fall under the constraints of the agreement. We do not know what they are going to do. If they were a trustworthy partner, we would have had diplomatic relations with them a long time ago. It’s silly to believe that now they are trustworthy without any evidence.
This deal gives them the ability to be a financial and military powerhouse in the ME where under current pressure they could not be. We have to remember who Iran is and not simply have tunnel vision when it comes to their nuclear program.[/quote]

I have made it clear throughout this discussion that the deal strengthens the credibility, legality, and efficacy of an American surgical air campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities. The same can’t be said if Congress kills the deal, which it is effectively powerless to do because of previous authorizations embedded in the laws that authorized the sanctions regime. War or containment are what remain outside of the JCPOA.

267

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
. . . Obama - so desperate to get Congress on board - very publicly explained that it was this deal or a far worse alternative. [/quote]

The alternatives to the United States’ coercive diplomacy are war or containment, a daunting dilemma to say the least. Critics of the deal (the vast majority of whom hadn’t even bothered to read the text of the JCOPA before voicing their vehement opposition to it) have been unable to articulate cogent policy alternatives. The challenge in Iran policy (as is so often the case) lies not in picking an ideal course but in choosing among lesser evils. Diplomacy is preferable over containment, and containment over war.

As Robert Jervis writes, “The deal with Iran falls far short of what the United States and its European allies would like. Although the question of whether the West could have gotten a better deal is interesting, much more important is the question of whether the deal was better than the breakdown of the negotiations. It was, and by quite a large margin.” According to the senior RAND analyst Dalia Dassa Kaye, failure to reach a deal would likely have produced one or more of the following: an expanded Iranian nuclear program; an erosion of broad international sanctions without any benefit to regional or global security; heightened potential for military conflict; and the loss of opportunities to work on major areas of common concern to Iran and the United States.
[/quote]

Incorrect, according to the way you have framed it. Diplomacy doesn’t mean “this deal” - it means a deal, which would have many iterations or permutations other than the current one. There is not a choice between This Deal and War or the Status Quo, and there never has been. Well, there wasn’t up until Obama negotiated the deal unilaterally and, as a result, created material terms that set a floor below which Iran will not go in future negotiations.

Obama and the other nations had plenty of other diplomatic cards to play. Iran really, really, really wants sanctions lifted in the short-term - knowing that, why not negotiate scaled penalties for lower level malfeasance, which doesn’t include the birth of a nuclear weapon, but is surely to happen?

“Snap back” is a non-starter - countries that have begun to establish deeper commercial relationships (which they want desperately) are unlikely to engage in that for Iran’s misdeeds. Scalable penalties needed to be part of any deal, but the agreement in left toothless in this space.

There was plenty of additional thing to get from Iran through diplomacy. It wasn’t achieved. That was a failure if diplomacy because it was a failure to negotiate from a place of strength to better secure international security.

With more time, a better deal could have been reached. We had leverage to get more out of Iran.

This canard of “This Deal or War” is and always has been a false choice and nothing more than a marketing strategy to impugn the motives of critics of the deal. Enough.
[/quote]

If you read my posts more carefully, you’ll see that I never put forth that false dicotomy. Outside of the JCOPA (reached through coercive diplomacy), the remaining cogent American policy options are a preventative war or containment.

268

Iran deal increases chance of armed conflict…agree, disagree?

269

[quote]Gkhan wrote:

Iran deal increases chance of armed conflict…agree, disagree?[/quote]

I found the VFW leader’s argument rather sloppy and emotive. By his logic, the US shouldn’t have engaged in diplomacy with the USSR, which accumulated far more “American blood on its hands” than Iran could ever hope to. The absence of a deal certainly increases the likelihood of armed conflict.

270

The following is an open letter issued on August 11, 2015 from a group of 36 retired U.S. flag and general officers in support of the international agreement on Iran?s nuclear program.

Similar letters have been issued by eminent nuclear scientists, diplomats, arms-control wonks, and international relations .

271

Iran’s leader not happy about American cultural knock offs invading Iran.

To quote Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, a leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps:

“We thought that they would bring Boeing technology, but they want to bring McDonald?s,”

So, is he saying they would be open to trading technology with the West?

Let’s say we give them Boeing technology, what’s to stop them from using it to update their war machine, much like the Russians used licensed built copies of the Rolls-Royce Nene engines to power their MIG’s during the Cold War?

272

[quote]Bismark wrote:
The following is an open letter issued on August 11, 2015 from a group of 36 retired U.S. flag and general officers in support of the international agreement on Iran?s nuclear program.

Similar letters have been issued by eminent nuclear scientists, diplomats, arms-control wonks, and international relations . [/quote]

For some reason the letter in the link you provided did not load for me.

273

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
. . . Obama - so desperate to get Congress on board - very publicly explained that it was this deal or a far worse alternative. [/quote]

The alternatives to the United States’ coercive diplomacy are war or containment, a daunting dilemma to say the least. Critics of the deal (the vast majority of whom hadn’t even bothered to read the text of the JCOPA before voicing their vehement opposition to it) have been unable to articulate cogent policy alternatives. The challenge in Iran policy (as is so often the case) lies not in picking an ideal course but in choosing among lesser evils. Diplomacy is preferable over containment, and containment over war.

As Robert Jervis writes, “The deal with Iran falls far short of what the United States and its European allies would like. Although the question of whether the West could have gotten a better deal is interesting, much more important is the question of whether the deal was better than the breakdown of the negotiations. It was, and by quite a large margin.” According to the senior RAND analyst Dalia Dassa Kaye, failure to reach a deal would likely have produced one or more of the following: an expanded Iranian nuclear program; an erosion of broad international sanctions without any benefit to regional or global security; heightened potential for military conflict; and the loss of opportunities to work on major areas of common concern to Iran and the United States.
[/quote]

Incorrect, according to the way you have framed it. Diplomacy doesn’t mean “this deal” - it means a deal, which would have many iterations or permutations other than the current one. There is not a choice between This Deal and War or the Status Quo, and there never has been. Well, there wasn’t up until Obama negotiated the deal unilaterally and, as a result, created material terms that set a floor below which Iran will not go in future negotiations.

Obama and the other nations had plenty of other diplomatic cards to play. Iran really, really, really wants sanctions lifted in the short-term - knowing that, why not negotiate scaled penalties for lower level malfeasance, which doesn’t include the birth of a nuclear weapon, but is surely to happen?

“Snap back” is a non-starter - countries that have begun to establish deeper commercial relationships (which they want desperately) are unlikely to engage in that for Iran’s misdeeds. Scalable penalties needed to be part of any deal, but the agreement in left toothless in this space.

There was plenty of additional thing to get from Iran through diplomacy. It wasn’t achieved. That was a failure if diplomacy because it was a failure to negotiate from a place of strength to better secure international security.

With more time, a better deal could have been reached. We had leverage to get more out of Iran.

This canard of “This Deal or War” is and always has been a false choice and nothing more than a marketing strategy to impugn the motives of critics of the deal. Enough.
[/quote]

If you read my posts more carefully, you’ll see that I never put forth that false dicotomy. Outside of the JCOPA (reached through coercive diplomacy), the remaining cogent American policy options are a preventative war or containment.[/quote]

You say you didn’t make the false choice, but then you do so in your last paragraph.

No, there are more choices than This Deal or War or Containment! - there is the option of a…wait for it… better deal.

Which we could go back and get, but for President Obama’s personal need to get this done now.

274

Smh,

“If they are enjoying their newfound prosperity, they will have a strong reason to avoid this.”

Yes, and that has been my point all along. This is the hope the agreement is predicated on. It isn’t based on smart carrots and sticks - it’s based on the idea of let Iran open, let it liberalize, and surely after enjoying neo-Western levels of affluence and prosperity, Iran will surely abandon any designs on power projection in the Middle East, elimination of Israel, etc.

You have your fingers crossed that Iran does this. Let’s all hope they do. But hope isn’t a national security strategy, as Senator Menendez noted.

Nor does recent history provide any support for such hope. The same liberalization theory was attempted with China. Did it abandon its ambitions? Of course not. China simply opened its society and markets, patiently bided its time, grew rich off of access to world markets, and is now bristling with shiny new armaments that would make Imperial Japan blush.

Iran will be China 2.0.

275

And one other point. So many critics of Bush and the neoconservatives was that they suffered from a naive Wilsonian view that democracy and polite civil society can’t be exported to countries - in their case, through war, but the philosophy was paramount regardless of means: such a view is naive and our foreign policy can’t be based on such a view.

Obama may be not using war here (although he has, see Libya), but his foreign policy is barely any different and no less naive. He thinks Iran will turn into a kind of capitalist democracy if we’d only reach out to them and be a partner rather than a skeptic.

276

Oops…

277

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
. . . Obama - so desperate to get Congress on board - very publicly explained that it was this deal or a far worse alternative. [/quote]

The alternatives to the United States’ coercive diplomacy are war or containment, a daunting dilemma to say the least. Critics of the deal (the vast majority of whom hadn’t even bothered to read the text of the JCOPA before voicing their vehement opposition to it) have been unable to articulate cogent policy alternatives. The challenge in Iran policy (as is so often the case) lies not in picking an ideal course but in choosing among lesser evils. Diplomacy is preferable over containment, and containment over war.

As Robert Jervis writes, “The deal with Iran falls far short of what the United States and its European allies would like. Although the question of whether the West could have gotten a better deal is interesting, much more important is the question of whether the deal was better than the breakdown of the negotiations. It was, and by quite a large margin.” According to the senior RAND analyst Dalia Dassa Kaye, failure to reach a deal would likely have produced one or more of the following: an expanded Iranian nuclear program; an erosion of broad international sanctions without any benefit to regional or global security; heightened potential for military conflict; and the loss of opportunities to work on major areas of common concern to Iran and the United States.
[/quote]

Incorrect, according to the way you have framed it. Diplomacy doesn’t mean “this deal” - it means a deal, which would have many iterations or permutations other than the current one. There is not a choice between This Deal and War or the Status Quo, and there never has been. Well, there wasn’t up until Obama negotiated the deal unilaterally and, as a result, created material terms that set a floor below which Iran will not go in future negotiations.

Obama and the other nations had plenty of other diplomatic cards to play. Iran really, really, really wants sanctions lifted in the short-term - knowing that, why not negotiate scaled penalties for lower level malfeasance, which doesn’t include the birth of a nuclear weapon, but is surely to happen?

“Snap back” is a non-starter - countries that have begun to establish deeper commercial relationships (which they want desperately) are unlikely to engage in that for Iran’s misdeeds. Scalable penalties needed to be part of any deal, but the agreement in left toothless in this space.

There was plenty of additional thing to get from Iran through diplomacy. It wasn’t achieved. That was a failure if diplomacy because it was a failure to negotiate from a place of strength to better secure international security.

With more time, a better deal could have been reached. We had leverage to get more out of Iran.

This canard of “This Deal or War” is and always has been a false choice and nothing more than a marketing strategy to impugn the motives of critics of the deal. Enough.
[/quote]

If you read my posts more carefully, you’ll see that I never put forth that false dicotomy. Outside of the JCOPA (reached through coercive diplomacy), the remaining cogent American policy options are a preventative war or containment.[/quote]

You say you didn’t make the false choice, but then you do so in your last paragraph.

No, there are more choices than This Deal or War or Containment! - there is the option of a…wait for it… better deal.

Which we could go back and get, but for President Obama’s personal need to get this done now.
[/quote]

The myth of a better deal is based upon magical thinking: analysis and prescriptions resting on unrealistic assumptions, unspecified causal relationships, inapt analogies, and a dearth of supporting evidence. Is the deal perfect? No, far from it. But it’s close to the best the US could hope for given the current international milieu (the world that is). Your ideal deal (the world as it ought to be) could only be imposed in the wake of a decisive American military victory over Iran. Outside of that, seeking a “better” deal is a dangerous illusion. Rabbits pulled from small and threadbare hats don’t make for effectual foreign policy.

278

[quote]Gkhan wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:
The following is an open letter issued on August 11, 2015 from a group of 36 retired U.S. flag and general officers in support of the international agreement on Iran?s nuclear program.

Similar letters have been issued by eminent nuclear scientists, diplomats, arms-control wonks, and international relations . [/quote]

For some reason the letter in the link you provided did not load for me.
[/quote]

It may be your browser. The Washington Post and New York Times also have articles that quote the paper.

279

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
. . . Obama - so desperate to get Congress on board - very publicly explained that it was this deal or a far worse alternative. [/quote]

The alternatives to the United States’ coercive diplomacy are war or containment, a daunting dilemma to say the least. Critics of the deal (the vast majority of whom hadn’t even bothered to read the text of the JCOPA before voicing their vehement opposition to it) have been unable to articulate cogent policy alternatives. The challenge in Iran policy (as is so often the case) lies not in picking an ideal course but in choosing among lesser evils. Diplomacy is preferable over containment, and containment over war.

As Robert Jervis writes, “The deal with Iran falls far short of what the United States and its European allies would like. Although the question of whether the West could have gotten a better deal is interesting, much more important is the question of whether the deal was better than the breakdown of the negotiations. It was, and by quite a large margin.” According to the senior RAND analyst Dalia Dassa Kaye, failure to reach a deal would likely have produced one or more of the following: an expanded Iranian nuclear program; an erosion of broad international sanctions without any benefit to regional or global security; heightened potential for military conflict; and the loss of opportunities to work on major areas of common concern to Iran and the United States.
[/quote]

Incorrect, according to the way you have framed it. Diplomacy doesn’t mean “this deal” - it means a deal, which would have many iterations or permutations other than the current one. There is not a choice between This Deal and War or the Status Quo, and there never has been. Well, there wasn’t up until Obama negotiated the deal unilaterally and, as a result, created material terms that set a floor below which Iran will not go in future negotiations.

Obama and the other nations had plenty of other diplomatic cards to play. Iran really, really, really wants sanctions lifted in the short-term - knowing that, why not negotiate scaled penalties for lower level malfeasance, which doesn’t include the birth of a nuclear weapon, but is surely to happen?

“Snap back” is a non-starter - countries that have begun to establish deeper commercial relationships (which they want desperately) are unlikely to engage in that for Iran’s misdeeds. Scalable penalties needed to be part of any deal, but the agreement in left toothless in this space.

There was plenty of additional thing to get from Iran through diplomacy. It wasn’t achieved. That was a failure if diplomacy because it was a failure to negotiate from a place of strength to better secure international security.

With more time, a better deal could have been reached. We had leverage to get more out of Iran.

This canard of “This Deal or War” is and always has been a false choice and nothing more than a marketing strategy to impugn the motives of critics of the deal. Enough.
[/quote]

If you read my posts more carefully, you’ll see that I never put forth that false dicotomy. Outside of the JCOPA (reached through coercive diplomacy), the remaining cogent American policy options are a preventative war or containment.[/quote]

You say you didn’t make the false choice, but then you do so in your last paragraph.

No, there are more choices than This Deal or War or Containment! - there is the option of a…wait for it… better deal.

Which we could go back and get, but for President Obama’s personal need to get this done now.
[/quote]

The myth of a better deal is based upon magical thinking: analysis and prescriptions resting on unrealistic assumptions, unspecified causal relationships, inapt analogies, and a dearth of supporting evidence. Is the deal perfect? No, far from it. But it’s close to the best the US could hope for given the current international milieu (the world that is). Your ideal deal (the world as it ought to be) could only be imposed in the wake of a decisive American military victory over Iran. Outside of that, seeking a “better” deal is a dangerous illusion. Rabbits pulled from small and threadbare hats don’t make for effectual foreign policy.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2015/07/21-iran-sanctions-illusion-of-a-better-bargain[/quote]

Your logorrhea aside, quite obviously you do subscribe to false choice theory that you claim you don’t.

But more substantively, of course we could have gotten (and can get) a better deal. We have leverage - as lomg as sanctions remain in place. Iran desperately wants the sanctions to go, as do its potential commercial partners. As long as these remain in place, these parties will come to the table. To say otherwise is to badly misunderstand the nature of how bad these parties need the good things they get from the deal.

Here is the fundamental miscalculation of this deal - we don’t need it more than Iran does, or even as bad as Russia and China, etc., but we negotiated it as if we do. As such, we left very important money on the table and enabled Iran to get pretty much everything it wants.

Forget grading the negotiations in an academic sense - that’s just poor national security policy. We could have secured a number of things by simply waiting longer and letting their desperation turn into important concessions. Like scalable penalties for wrongdoing, or more robust verification processes.

But this is what happens when the third-wheel factor of My Legacy infects the legitimate process.

280

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Smh,

“If they are enjoying their newfound prosperity, they will have a strong reason to avoid this.”

Yes, and that has been my point all along. This is the hope the agreement is predicated on. It isn’t based on smart carrots and sticks - it’s based on the idea of let Iran open, let it liberalize, and surely after enjoying neo-Western levels of affluence and prosperity, Iran will surely abandon any designs on power projection in the Middle East, elimination of Israel, etc.

You have your fingers crossed that Iran does this. Let’s all hope they do. But hope isn’t a national security strategy, as Senator Menendez noted.

Nor does recent history provide any support for such hope. The same liberalization theory was attempted with China. Did it abandon its ambitions? Of course not. China simply opened its society and markets, patiently bided its time, grew rich off of access to world markets, and is now bristling with shiny new armaments that would make Imperial Japan blush.

Iran will be China 2.0.

[/quote]
You have provided no evidence that the deal is predicated on democratic peace theory. I don’t believe the nature of Iranian domestic politics will dramatically change, and I while I cannot speak for him, I haven’t seen any indication that SMH does either. Nor does the Obama administration, for that matter. The charge of "naive idealism is little more than a canard. Besides maintaining the non-proliferation regime, the deal seeks to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state because of the odious nature of the clerical regime. While many would welcome rapprochement, very few expect it. In regard to “newfound prosperity” affecting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, that outcome wouldn’t be improbable. One could argue that it is likely, even. I believe that statement was based less on the supposed pacific effects of economic interdependence than on the regime’s record of moderating its behavior when the costs of maintaining course outweigh the benefits. It’s likely that Iran will calculate that its interests would be better served by shifting attention and resources to other components of its deterrent strategy.

Iranâ??s deterrence strategy has four components.

  1. The first is developing the means to fight an asymmetric, low-intensity war, inside and outside the country.
  2. The modernization of Iranâ??s weapons systems is the second component of its deterrence strategy. Decades of arms embargos have led to the development of an indigenous military-industrial complex controlled and financed by the state.
  3. Developing indigenous missile and antimissile systems is the third leg of Iranâ??s deterrence strategy.
  4. The fourth component of Iranâ??s deterrence strategy is its nuclear program.

A bit off topic, but in regard to China and Iran, the two cases are quite different and that the foundations of the theocratic regime are already less than firm.