Gaping Back Door In Iran Deal (Dan 8:4)

  


Text of Deal Suggests Iran May Back Out if Violation Found and Sanctions Re-Imposed
 
by TheTower.org Staff | 07.24.15 6:15 pm

A clause in the nuclear deal suggests that Iran may unilaterally withdraw from the agreement and pursue its military nuclear program if the West attempts to impose sanctions due to violations of the deal, nonproliferation expert Emily Landau of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) wrote today in an op-ed she co-authored in Ha’aretz.

Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)

Landau, who co-wrote the op-ed with Owen Alterman, a research fellow at INSS, referenced the clause in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (.pdf), the official name of the deal, that says, ” if sanctions are reinstated in whole or in part, Iran will treat that as grounds to cease performing its commitments under this JCPOA in whole or in part.” The experts cited Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who called the clause “Iran’s nuclear snapback,” and explained how it could work.

Let’s consider two possible scenarios. The first regards sanctions snapping back in the face of an Iranian violation or lack of cooperation. This is supposed to be a mechanism that keeps Iran in line. And if the international powers initiate snapback sanctions in some future scenario, their intent would most likely be to confront the violation, not to end the deal. But the above clause says that Tehran could decide that the reimposed sanctions mean the deal has ended: for Iran, snapback sanctions are a violation of the deal that would justify its exit.

So, if Iran wants to defect, all it needs to do is violate some aspect of the deal – preferably something ambiguous so it can argue that it is not in fact a violation – and wait for the sanctions to snap back. The next step: immediate exit of the deal. And if sanctions are not reimposed, Iran has still gained from the violation while simultaneously exposing international weakness to confront it. Iran can also use this provision as leverage to keep the international powers from calling it out on violations in the first place, so as not to launch this chain of events that would kill the deal. Iran sanctions specialist Mark Dubowitz has already dubbed this “Iran’s nuclear snapback.”

In the second scenario, Iran might be able to look to the part of the sanctions section that addresses the tension between sanctions set at the national level and at the state levels in the United States. The clause says that the U.S. will take action to encourage officials at the state and local levels to take into account changes in national policy on sanctions. But what if those state and local officials do not adhere? Or if confronting them takes a long time? Again, these sanctions could provide an easy pretext for Iran to defect from the deal.

Landau and Alterman pointed out that Iran has pulled out of similar deals in the past when the country determined that the deal no longer served its purposes. The Obama Administration claims that the JCPOA compels Iran to adhere to its terms largely because of the threat of “snapback” sanctions.

In his opening remarks during Thursday’s hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker (R – Tenn.) referred to this clause as well:

And so what happens—I think all of us figured this out as we went through the deal—right now, we have some leverage, but nine months from now, the leverage shifts to them, because we have a sanction snapback.

What they [Iran] have, if we ever tried to apply that, is what’s called a nuclear snapback.

The way the deal is structured, they can immediately just begin. They can say, “Well, if you add sanctions, we’re out of the deal.” They can immediately snap back. So the leverage shifts to them.
[Photo: TAUVOD / YouTube ]
TT

The Bowls Of Wrath Are Back (Revelation 16)

 

A Frightening Thought: Nuclear Weapons are Back (And So Is Deterrence)

Rod Lyon
July 5, 2015

With nuclear modernization programs under way across a range of countries, Russia asserting its right to deploy nuclear weapons in the Crimea, NATO reviewing the role of nuclear weapons in the alliance, and a recent report in the U.S. arguing for a more versatile arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons, it’s clear the world’s revisiting an old problem: how to build effective nuclear deterrence arrangements.

Since the end of the Cold War, thinking about deterrence issues has been mainly confined to the academic and think-tank world. But policymakers are now having to re-engage with those issues. And the problem has a new twist: we no longer enjoy the luxury of a bipolar world. Indeed, as Therese Delpech observed in her RAND monograph Nuclear deterrence in the 21st century, nowadays “the actors are more diverse, more opaque, and sometimes more reckless.”

Done properly, deterrence is a contest in threats and nerve, or—to use Thomas Schelling’s phraseology—“the manipulation of risk.” (The chapter so titled in Schelling’s Arms and influence is a great starting point for anyone wanting to think through the broader deterrence problem.) That helps explain why some thought the concept ‘ugly’. It’s hard to make a policy threatening massive damage to societies and civilians sound noble and aspirational. Still, the bad news is that the alternatives are worse. And if deterrence is going to remain the dominant approach in nuclear weapon strategy, we need to fit the strategy to the contemporary geopolitical environment.

Historical experience of the deterrence problem is greatest in relation to two competing superpowers, separated by intercontinental distances, endowed with the resources to manage challenges, and both knowing well the costs of major war. We’ve had relatively little experience of nuclear deterrence in contests between giants and midgets (US v North Korea), between established and fast-rising powers (US v China), and amongst players in a multipolar system. Even our understanding of the role nuclear deterrence plays in relations between regional rivals (think South Asia) remains under-developed. It’s entirely possible that the old superpower deterrence model might not fit those new challenges well. Indeed, maybe the old model doesn’t even fit the US–Russian strategic relationship well these days: Russia’s no longer governed by a sclerotic CPSU.

Some years back INSS’ Elaine Bunn (now a senior official in the Obama administration) wrote a paper unpacking the notion of ‘tailored’ deterrence introduced in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review. True, deterrence has always been characterized by particular strategic wrinkles, but Bunn’s paper was an attempt to bring those wrinkles to the fore in relation to the possibility of a nuclear-armed North Korea, Iran, or transnational terrorist group. Her exploration of three different forms of tailoring—tailoring to specific actors and specific situations; tailoring capabilities; and tailoring communications—helps to illustrate the growing complexity of the deterrence challenge.
It now seems likely that we’re headed back into a set of complicated deterrence debates. A strategy that might make sense in one strategic setting—for example, a degree of restraint by a giant engaged in a conflict with a midget—might well risk flagging unintended messages in another. In the giant–midget case, almost any crossing of the nuclear threshold by the giant risks imposing a set of desperate choices on the midget’s leadership, and desperate choices tend not to be good ones.
Deterrence in the context of an established power versus a fast-rising power has a different wrinkle. One effect of a deterrence-dominated world is to reward passivity over initiative. As Schelling notes, in the world of the arthritic, passivity tends to be the default choice. But fast-rising powers aren’t arthritic. Turning one aside from a revisionist agenda will probably be more challenging than deterring another established player.

Multipolarity brings its own wrinkles, including a more mixed set of adversarial relationships, asymmetrical contests, inadvertent signalling, and third-party exploitation of bilateral rivalries. Capability issues become more vexed: actors require the capabilities to deter and defend against another, but also the residual capabilities to remain a player in other contests. The pressure must surely be towards larger rather than smaller arsenals. And reputational issues become more dominant: just as Margaret Thatcher fought the Falklands War in part to show the Soviet Union that the West wouldn’t buckle in the face of force, so too players in a multipolar nuclear world will want to show resolve in one contest because of its implications for others.

Finally, and perhaps most controversially, deterrence turns upon a credible threat to cross the nuclear threshold if push comes to shove. During the 1960s the U.S. advocated a doctrine of flexible response, arguing for a model of deterrence that would fail in small packets rather than in one catastrophic breakdown. Notwithstanding the giant–midget problem outlined above, there’s usually good sense behind such a doctrine: it makes deterrent threats more credible, avoids global annihilation in any initial crossing of the nuclear threshold, maintains a degree of ‘intra-war deterrence’ from the options still on the table, and optimizes prospects for negotiated war termination. But historically the doctrine invited questions about the relative balance between usability and credibility in US nuclear policy—questions buried rather than resolved by the end of the Cold War.

Tailoring, messaging, usability, credibility, and thresholds: I suspect policymakers will soon be thinking about all those questions again, across a range of deterrence relationships.

The Cold War Is Back (Daniel 7:7)

Nuclear Deterrence Is Relevant Again

The New Cold War

Geopolitical Diary

MARCH 13, 2015 | 01:11 GMT

U.S. Adm. William Gortney, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, warned Congress in written testimony Thursday of the threat posed by Russian bombers and missiles. Having written yesterday about the uncertainty in Moscow surrounding the status of Russian President Vladimir Putin, we deemed it worthwhile to consider Gortney’s testimony more seriously than we might under other circumstances.

Gortney wrote: “Russian heavy bombers flew more out-of-area patrols in 2014 than in any year since the Cold War. We have also witnessed improved interoperability between Russian long-range aviation and other elements of the Russian military, including air and maritime intelligence collection platforms positioned to monitor NORAD responses.” The patrols help to train Russian air crews, but some are “clearly intended to underscore Moscow’s global reach and communicate its displeasure with Western policies, particularly with regard to Ukraine.”

“Russia is progressing toward its goal of deploying long-range, conventionally-armed cruise missiles with ever increasing stand-off launch distances on its heavy bombers, submarines and surface combatants,” Gortney said. “Should these trends continue, over time NORAD will face increased risk in our ability to defend North America against Russian air, maritime, and cruise missile threats.
We are again focusing on the changing concerns and rhetoric of all parties. Statements such as this would have been unthinkable a few years ago. While we understand that the head of NORAD is charged with monitoring the threats — and that may distort his outlook — and while we accept that testimony to Congress involves the important matter of the budget, it is still important to take this statement seriously.

The question is how seriously? The Russians still have their nuclear capability from the Cold War. We will assume that at least some, perhaps most, of the missiles and warheads have been maintained in operational condition. In any case, the Russians retain a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile capability, and can strike the United States, with the only counter being a strike on Russia. 
A Russian Foreign Ministry official reminded the world of this fact in a comment to Russian media outlet Interfax on Wednesday. Referencing Moscow’s right to deploy nuclear weapons in Crimea, Mikhail Ulyanov, head of the ministry’s Department on Arms Control, said, “I don’t know if there are nuclear weapons there now. I don’t know about any plans, but in principle Russia can do it.”
It has long been taken for granted that the nuclear balance was not relevant, and indeed it hasn’t been. During the Cold War, the most likely scenario for the use of nuclear weapons would have been that the Soviets would have attacked Germany, overwhelming it and moving toward the channel ports. With no conventional option for the United States in response, the United States would have lived up to its pledge to protect Europe with nuclear weapons.

There were other scenarios for nuclear war, including the spasmodic launching of all missiles in each arsenal. That was unlikely, however, because it invoked mutual assured destruction. It was never clear to us why a nuclear strike at the Soviet Union would have stopped a Soviet advance, or why it would not have triggered a spasmodic Russian strike. Indeed, it was never clear that the United States would have used nuclear weapons under any circumstances. Charles de Gaulle used to argue that the United States could not be relied on to risk American cities to protect Europe. He may well have been right.
For Russia’s part, there were also discussions of using nuclear weapons to facilitate a conventional advance. Russian ground forces during the Cold War practiced intensively, and in fact still do occasionally, on operating in contaminated areas following a nuclear strike that would have severely weakened enemy positions. In such a case, of course, a conventional conflict would quickly have escalated by inviting a nuclear response from the United States.

The point of it all was that the Soviets could not be certain of what the Americans would do in response to a nuclear strike, so the U.S. nuclear threat served, along with other factors, to deter a Soviet invasion. The Russians are now concerned, rightly or wrongly, that a U.S. presence in Ukraine might threaten Russia’s territorial integrity. The U.S. response — that the United States does not intend to insert massive force into Ukraine in the first place, and in the second place does not intend to invade Russia — does not soothe Russian war planners. They see the United States much as the United States sees Russia: unpredictable, ruthless and dangerous.

To assure themselves that they can deter the United States, particularly given their conventional weaknesses, they have several times publicly reminded the Americans that in engaging Russia, they are engaging a peer nuclear adversary. The various missions that Gortney has cited simply represent an extension of that capability.

We have come a long way to reach the point where Russia chooses to assert its strategic nuclear capability, and where the commander of NORAD regards this capability as a significant risk. But the point is that we have come far indeed in the past year. For the Russians, the overthrow of the government in Ukraine was a threat to their national security. What the Russians did in Ukraine is seen as a threat at least to U.S. interests. 

In the old Cold War, both sides used their nuclear capability to check conventional conflicts. The Russians at this point appear to be at least calling attention to their nuclear capability. Unconnected to this, to be sure, is Putin’s odd absence. In a world where nuclear threats are returning to prominence, the disappearance of one side’s commander-in-chief is more worrisome than it would be at other times.