The Painfully Stupid Hawkish Opposition to the Nuclear Deal

 

The JCPOA is not a step towards the creation of an authoritarian axis.

by Daniel Larison 

Posted onMarch 23, 2022

It didn’t seem possible, but Iran hawks’ arguments against the nuclear deal are becoming dumber than ever. Here is Bret Stephens peddling false information and drawing the most absurd conclusions about the possible revival of the agreement:

But with or without the deal, Moscow will be able to build nuclear power plants in Iran, irrespective of the sanctions over the war in Ukraine. And Beijing – which in 2021 signed a 25-year, $400 billion strategic partnership with Tehran – will be able to conduct a lucrative business in Iran with little concern for U.S. sanctions.

Combined with February’s “no limits” friendship pact between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, an Iran deal represents another step toward a new antidemocratic Tripartite Pact.

Stephens has been dead-set against any agreement with Iran from the start, and his arguments against it have always been shoddy. When the original interim agreement was reached in 2013, he declared that it was “worse than Munich.” Now here we are almost ten years later and he is still making bizarre Axis references to attack a nonproliferation agreement that was doing exactly what it was meant to do until the US started trying to destroy it.

One of the weirdest and most frustrating aspects of the debate over the nuclear deal is the idea promoted by hawks that an agreement that restricts Iran’s nuclear program is actually a great gift to the Iranian government. Yes, Iran will receive sanctions relief in exchange, but that is an inevitable part of any agreement and it is hardly a gift to permit the resumption of normal commerce and trade. All that it means is that the US would no longer be strangling the Iranian economy.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2022/03/23/the-painfully-stupid-hawkish-opposition-to-the-nuclear-deal/