Speaking of things I am not qualified to say much about. . .
1. The key dynamic is the coalition of countries sanctioning Iran. That was a difficult coalition to assemble. It is a difficult coalition to hold together. My guess is that one of the factors that helped hold it together was that Russia, as an oil exporter, probably was happy to see Iran hampered in its ability to sell oil. But in general, you expect these sorts of coalitions to break down, for well-known cartel game-theoretic reasons.
2. To the extent that you believe that the sanctions coalition could not hold together, you would tend to support almost any deal. In other words, if the coalition was fragile, then Iran was in a strong bargaining position. I have not seen any analysis that makes this point. Again, knowing nothing but the game theory of cartels, I am inclined to think that Iran was in a strong bargaining position. Of course, we are not going to hear the Administration say, “This is as good a deal as we could get, because the sanctions coalition was starting to unravel.”*
3. Of all of the technical details of the deal, the one that will interest me the most is Iran’s obligation to get rid of some its enriched uranium. It takes a lot of time and effort to enrich uranium. If much of the enriched uranium will be handed over to other parties that will take it out of Iran and not give it back, then I think that pretty clearly reduces Iran’s ability to produce a bomb in the short run. As to Iran’s ability to produce a bomb in 5 or 10 years, the effect of this deal depends on what you think the alternative was. Again, I am not very optimistic about what the alternative was.
4. Even if the deal sets back Iran’s nuclear program, it could be that the situation in the region will be worse a year from now than it would have been had the sanctions coalition held together longer. It is hard to anticipate the consequences of these things.
5. I am not sure what Congress has to do with anything at this point. They cannot put the sanctions coalition back together.
6. What would Iran have to do to encourage the sanctions coalition to get back together? My guess is that it would take some really major, flagrant violations of the agreement, and perhaps not even those would be sufficient.
*As usual, I wrote this post more than 24 hours ago and scheduled it for this morning. Meanwhile, it turns out that President Obama at his news conference said something quite close to this.
Does paying off countries to stop having enriched uranium become a cobra effect?
While I would have preferred honesty from the administration, I think it clear this was really the only “deal” they could get, and Kling’s point are spot on- the alternatives were unrealistic.
If I’m pursuing your logic correctly, the decline in oil prices may have been source cause of this whole sequence. That is, if oil prices stayed around their pre-recession peak, the expected cost of violating the cartel would have been sufficiently high to maintain compliance (or a reasonable probability of compliance into period t+1).
I’ve seen point 2 made plenty of times in pro-deal commentary. Definitely on TheAmericanConservative.com and Vox.com.
On point 6, the written agreement is that if there’s a supposed violation, a UN resolution must be passed to continue sanctions relief. So the US can veto sanctions relief instead of Russia or China vetoing reimposed sanctions. However, I don’t know if that sort of official default rule matters.
Andrew’, sanctions were imposed on Iran because of the nuclear program, and having those sanctions taken off was the payment for the restrictions. Iran’s nuclear program definitely brought economic harm. If the sanctions coalition held together, they could have imposed unconditional sanctions on Iran for however long a period of time, increasing the harm and hopefully the disincentive to other countries, at the expense of Iran having no incentive to accept restrictions on its nuclear program.
The most helpful analysis I’ve seen of the Iran deal.
The best analysis I’ve seen was a youtube video of President Clinton announcing a similar agreement with North Korea. You had to fill in the blanks after that.
This agreement is good for years 0-5. Then you are playing with fire. Obama kicked the can down the road. He got an opportunity to claim a win and left the consequences to be dealt with later. Very short sighted, very juvenile.