The Key to Obama’s Iran Deal Might Not Actually Work

Despite US Secretary of State John Kerry's broken femur, the signing of a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran appears to be on track.

Despite his continued vitriolic rhetoric, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has likely given his negotiating team permission to step down from hardline demands. These include negotiating leeway on International Atomic Energy Agency access to nuclear scientists, the phased yet front-loaded removal of nuclear-related sanctions.

So the most imposing barriers to a nuclear agreement have already been cleared. But it's still uncertain how a critical mechanism for ensuring a deal's long-term success will actually work.

A nuclear deal is predicated on the assumption that the US and its partners can quickly reestablish economic leverage over Iran in case the country fails to fulfill its obligations under the agreement.

Without the ability to quickly re-impose UN economic sanctions, the US and its negotiating partners, which include the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany (the P5+1) will be left with unilateral sanctions, military action, or paramilitary measures (a Stuxnet-like computer bug, for instance) to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.

Rapid sanctions re-imposition, or “snapback,” is important for deterring Iranian misbehavior without forcing P5+1 members to resort to that kind of escalation. Just as importantly, it allows the US and its allies to punish Tehran within the framework of a deal.

Snapback is designed to be a coercive mechanism that won't wreck the entire deal. When President Barack Obama says a deal won't be made solely on the basis of trust, snapback is part of what he's talking about.

But there's one huge problem: The key to ensuring Obama's biggest second-term policy priority may not be as workable as the president says it is.

If Iran violates the agreement, UN sanctions can be ramped up without having to go through the contentious and time-consuming process of passing a new United Nations Security Council resolution.

The question is how to ensure this will actually happen since Russia and China are concerned that a snapback mechanism that calls for automatic sanctions re-imposition circumvents their UN Security Council vetoes.

So, according to a May 31st Reuters report, the sides are working towards a compromise: “As part of the new agreement on sanctions snapback, suspected breaches by Iran would be taken up by a dispute-resolution panel, likely including the six powers and Iran, which would assess the allegations and come up with a non-binding opinion.”

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For Iran sanctions expert Mark Dubowitz, this recommendation is already red flag as it would likely still allow anti-sanctions P5+1 members like Russia and China to delay or even veto a snapback, making it something other than an automatic punishment.

“I don't think the Russians spent 70 years seriously protecting their veto power at the UNSC to now all of a sudden in any way surrender it to any Western-designed mechanism,” Dubowitz, Foundation for Defense of Democracies executive director, told Business Insider. “

“You have to assume that if the Russians agree to this it's because they figured out a way to game it in order to protect their interests … and to ensure that this doesn't become a precedent for any future snapback sanctions regime.”

Dubowitz sees the snapback compromise as a way of getting around possible divisions between the US and its partners, while making it seem as if the US can still pressure Iran.

But Dubowitz doesn't think it accomplishes either, calling it an “illusion.”

“It's an attempt by the administration to persuade Congress and the American people that they believe in the use of economic coercion, when snapback would run against China and Russia at the Security Council, and it would run up the against the wall of the marketplace,” he said.

The wall of the marketplace is based on the idea that Iran is likeliest to cheat on an agreement at a time when its economy recovers from the worst effects of the current round of sanctions. At that point, international banks and business interests possibly belonging to P5+1 or EU countries will have reentered the Iranian market — meaning that in a snapback scenario, the P5+1 would be effectively sanctioning their own companies.

And this would happen at a point, years after the deal is signed, when the Iranian economy would be equipped to absorb the blow of any sanctions snapback anyway.

“In the early stages, if Iran engages in a substantial violation, I see sanctions snapback as potentially a viable instrument of peaceful coercion to enforce the deal,” Dubowitz says. But he doesn't think snapback will have much sting 10 or even 5 years into an agreement that's meant to permanently prevent Iran from going nuclear.

“The real test is if a snapback sanction is viable is if a US president is willing to snapback sanctions against major European financial institutions and energy and industrial companies in a scenario where the Europeans disagree with a US president over how significant an Iranian violation has been,” Dubowitz said.

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