Senate Democrat: Nuke deal less enticing than in 2015, but no agreement a ‘disaster’
As talks to revive Iran nuclear agreement in home stretch, Chris Murphy says US doesn’t have luxury of bringing back conditions under which accord was signed due to Trump pull-out
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
A senior Democratic senator acknowledged that the conditions under which the Biden administration hopes to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran are less favorable than they were when the original accord was signed, but that a failure to resuscitate the deal would ensure a reality far more dangerous for the United States.
“[Former president] Donald Trump put us in this position where we now can only get an agreement that has shorter breakout times than the original [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action],” Sen. Chris Murphy said in an interview Wednesday with The Times of Israel as negotiations between world powers in Vienna aimed at a joint US-Iran return to compliance with the JCPOA entered their final stage.
Indeed, Western diplomats have long indicated that even if they managed to resurrect the JCPOA, the amount of time Iran will need to produce enough enriched uranium material for a single nuclear bomb will be under the one-year benchmark set by the original agreement when it was signed in 2015.
But Murphy, who is one of the most ardent supporters of the JCPOA in Congress and is closely aligned with the Biden administration’s position on the matter, argued that the current reality in which the accord is not in place leaves Iran’s breakout time to “within weeks.”
“My reality is that we are in a world today where without a deal, Iran could have a nuclear weapon by the end of the year, and that is unacceptable to me,” he said. “It’s why I would much rather get back into the deal.”
The Israeli government has come out ardently against US efforts to return to the JCPOA, which traded sanctions relief for curbs to Iran’s nuclear program. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has maintained the position of his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu that the agreement simply allows Iran to buy time with its nuclear pursuits as it enjoys billions of dollars from the release of sanctions that have strangled Tehran’s economy.
Jerusalem was one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders when he pulled out of the agreement in 2018 and subsequently launched a maximum pressure sanctions campaign targeting the Islamic Republic, which responded by increasingly violating the terms of the nuclear accord and shrinking its breakout time in the process.
Throughout the conversation with The Times of Israel, Murphy defended the JCPOA against Israeli criticisms while acknowledging that he appreciated Bennett’s decision to avoid publicly campaigning against the US effort the way Netanyahu did in the lead-up to the 2015 signing of the accord.
Playing whack-a-mole against knowledge
Murphy, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia and Counterterrorism, called Trump’s decision to pull out of the JCPOA “the biggest foreign policy mistake America has made in the last 10 years.”
“We were in a deal that was working, that Iran was complying with, that kept them over a year from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he said. “What we need to do now is make a decision as to whether the deal on the table is better than no deal. No deal is a disaster.”
Murphy said that a particularly worrying impact of Trump’s withdrawal was that it led Iran to make advancements in its nuclear research and development.
“The problem is that you can’t destroy knowledge and all of the additional research Iran did since Trump pulled out of the deal can’t be shoved back into the barn,” he said. “You can’t erase that knowledge with a diplomatic agreement, but you also can’t erase that knowledge with a military strike.”
Israel has vowed to continue its efforts to thwart Iran, regardless of whether a deal is signed in Vienna, as Jerusalem is not a party to the agreement.
But Murphy noted, “I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that Israeli efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program have done anything except expedite it.”
Asked whether he would support future Israeli attacks, the senator declined to indulge the hypothetical.
With a revived JCPOA, he argued, the US will at least be able to push Iran’s breakout time much further out than it currently is.
‘Permanent visibility’
The Democratic senator went on to reject the claim that Iran will be free to pursue a nuclear weapon once the JCPOA sunsets, saying that deal’s inspections regime will remain in place well beyond 2030 when other restrictions on the program will expire.
“The permanent visibility that we get on Iran’s nuclear program through the JCPOA inspections regime is part of what protects us against a potential decision by the Iranian regime to race to a weapon,” Murphy said.
He went on to argue that rather than negotiating a follow-up agreement that addresses Iran’s ballistic missile program and nefarious regional activity, the Biden administration is forced to spend its time negotiating a re-entry into the existing agreement, thanks to Trump’s withdrawal.
Iran, for its part, has insisted that it has no interest in negotiating what the Biden administration has called a “longer and stronger agreement” — a deal that even the White House has stopped discussing publicly in recent months.
Did JCPOA pull-out lead to the Abraham Accords?
While Israel has been steadfast in its opposition to the agreement, many of its Gulf neighbors have changed their tune regarding Iran after supporting Trump’s more hardline stance.
Many in the Trump administration even credited the decision to withdraw from the JCPOA for initiating a domino effect that saw the Gulf states warm to Israel as the US built a more united front against Iran.
But Murphy argued that the fact that Gulf countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia are now supportive of Biden’s efforts after lobbying against the deal before it was signed in 2015 dispels the notion that their warming to Israel had anything to do with Trump’s 2018 decision.
Respectful disagreements
Despite disagreements with Israel over the JCPOA, Murphy said dialogue with Jerusalem on the matter has been “much more constructive and much more functional than it was during the Obama administration.”
“I thought it was a catastrophic mistake for Netanyahu to come to the United States and publicly oppose the president in the way he did,” he said, referencing the former premier’s speech before a joint session of Congress, which was organized behind the back of former president Barak Obama as part of an unsuccessful effort to turn the legislative branch against the executive months before the JCPOA was signed.
Murphy spoke on the phone with Israeli Ambassador to the US Mike Herzog earlier on Wednesday. “They’re not backing down at all from their position, but they’re doing it in a way that’s respectful and in a way that allows us to continue to work together on many other areas of coordinated interest.”
Those areas include the Palestinian issue which Murphy admitted has been a source of disappointment.
“I think the premise of this [new Israeli] coalition for Palestinians has not necessarily lived up to some initial expectations,” he said.
While refusing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, Bennett’s government has taken a series o steps aimed at improving the Palestinian economy, which hasn’t been seen in years. These include thousands of entry permits for Palestinian merchants to work in Israel along with building permits for Palestinians in Area C of the West Bank and IDs for undocumented Palestinians.
“I know this coalition is a diverse one, I know it’s very fragile, but I do worry that a lack of more meaningful progress on living conditions in Gaza and the West Bank is going to lead to a restart of violence,” Murphy said, clarifying that the Palestinian Authority shares part of the blame and that Ramallah’s decision to cancel elections last year “was a disaster.”
