The Iran Deal Will Likely Be as Effective as the North Korea Deal

In the past, the U.S. signed agreements with North Korea (1994) and Libya (2003) stipulating that those countries would give up their nuclear-weapons programs. While the Libyan deal succeeded, that with North Korea has been a spectacular failure. Which one, asks Max Boot, does the recent agreement with Tehran most resemble?

Though Iran has agreed to reduce the number of operational centrifuges from 9,500 to 6,000, to shrink the amount of low-enriched uranium in its possession from 10,000 kilograms to 300, and to make changes at several facilities to prevent them from being used to create nuclear weapons, all of these steps are reversible. Iran is not destroying its nuclear-weapons infrastructure as [Libya] did. Nor is it giving up ballistic missiles, renouncing terrorism, or making restitution for past attacks. It is only freezing its nuclear program, as North Korea did.

Monitoring Iran’s compliance will require onsite IEAE inspections. . . . There will be continuous monitoring of a few declared nuclear sites, but Iran will be able to delay inspections of disputed facilities for at least 24 days, which would give it time to sanitize a site. The larger problem, [however], is that, like North Korea, Iran is a big country: if the government wants to hide something, it will likely succeed. . . . Perhaps Iran will cooperate, but so far, it has not come clean with the IAEA about twelve existing “areas of concern” regarding the “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear program.

That is not a good sign. It suggests that Iran, like North Korea (or, for that matter, Iraq during the 1990s), is likely to play a game of cat-and-mouse with inspectors—and that if it does cheat, as North Korea did, the world will again discover it is too late to do anything about it.

Read more at Los Angeles Times

More about: Iran nuclear program, Libya, North Korea, Nuclear proliferation, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Foreign policy

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF