Hello, and happy Tuesday. Have you forgotten that the world is teetering on the brink of nuclear war? The Doomsday Clock wants you to remember: Last month, its creators, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, announced that because of expanding nuclear programs around the world, humanity remained just 100 seconds away from a midnight of global catastrophe, the closest it’s been since 1947.

That prospect was surely weighing on President Biden’s mind when his administration extended an offer last week to rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Billed by President Barack Obama as “our best bet by far to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon,” the deal was gutted by President Donald Trump and has lingered at death’s door ever since, kept alive only by the efforts of its European parties.

Is it wise for Biden to try to revive it now? Here’s what people are saying.
The birth and near-death of a diplomatic breakthrough

The product of years of stop-and-start negotiations, the Iran nuclear deal — formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — required Iran to shutter much of its nuclear program and open its facilities to more extensive international inspections for at least a decade, if not longer. In exchange, world powers agreed to loosen the stranglehold of sanctions on Iran’s economy.
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Since its inception, critics of the deal — which include several prominent Democrats — faulted the Obama administration for failing to extract more concessions from Iran. It did not place any constraints on the country’s ballistic missile program, for example, nor did it make any demands of the government to cut back on its sponsorship of proxy conflicts abroad or its human rights abuses at home.

[Read More: “Biden Must Not Lead from Behind on Iran”]

But supporters maintained that the deal’s purpose of staving off nuclear war was a worthy goal in itself, as well as a necessary first step toward further diplomacy. The alternative was not a better agreement, in their view, but rather no agreement at all.

[Read More: “The Tired Old Opposition to the Iran Nuclear Accord Rears Its Head”]

The deal officially went into effect in January 2016, and Iran complied with it for almost three and a half years. But in 2018, Trump withdrew and began a “maximum pressure” campaign to cripple Iran’s economy. Iran, in turn, began compiling and enriching nuclear fuel beyond the negotiated limits, shortly before the Trump administration’s “targeted killing” of Iran’s top security and intelligence commander last January.
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The return of the skeptics

As in 2015, the deal’s critics are calling on the president to extract more concessions from Iran. They’ve been quick to point out that just last week, a militia group believed to have ties to Iran launched a rocket attack on an American military base in northern Iraq that killed a civilian contractor and wounded an American service member, prompting Secretary of State Antony Blinken to describe the United States as “outraged.”

“The State Department vowed that the U.S. would ‘hold accountable those responsible,’” The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes. “Yet the U.S. has responded with a major concession on Iran sanctions that will help empower such groups. Tehran will reasonably think Mr. Biden is so eager for talks that he’ll ignore attacks on Americans.”

As long as Iran’s proxies engage in such attacks, some think Biden would do better to retaliate, not negotiate. Eli Lake argues in Bloomberg that he could learn something from Trump, whose administration did not make distinctions between Iran and its various proxies when deciding whether to respond to attacks on U.S. forces.

“Biden is not Trump, of course,” he writes. “But if he wants to calm tensions in the region, he must convince Iran and its proxies that he, too, is willing to escalate and respond to their provocations. If Iran concludes that it can obtain sanctions relief while sowing further chaos, then Biden will be returning the Middle East to a status quo of dangerous instability.”
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Even those who support rejoining the deal say it has deficiencies that need to be addressed, according to Sanam Vakil, the deputy director of Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Program, who interviewed 210 experts on the subject. Most told her that the United States should re-enter the deal, but with a clear plan for resolving regional conflicts that might ensue, recalling how Iran expanded its influence in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria after signing in 2015.

“The Biden administration should therefore come back into the agreement with a clearly delineated plan for the parallel, multilateral, regional processes that will swiftly follow,” she writes. “By creating those parallel conflict resolution tracks, our respondents indicated, the Biden administration can show that it is charting its own course rather than repeating history.”
In defense of the deal

Supporters of the Biden administration’s move argue that America’s “maximum pressure” campaign has been a moral and strategic failure. In September, Iran argued before the International Court of Justice that U.S. efforts to seal off the Iranian economy from the rest of the world were “ruining the lives of millions of Iranians,” especially during the pandemic: Food prices in the country have skyrocketed, rents have surged, and the supply of essential medicines, from epilepsy medication to chemotherapy drugs, has dwindled. That’s why Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, has called the current U.S. approach “s***** masquerading as foreign policy.”
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And yet for all that suffering, Iran hawks are no closer to getting what they want, argues Assal Rad, a research fellow at the National Iranian American Council. “Despite four years of ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran under the Trump administration, which included unprecedented sanctions, extrajudicial assassinations, sabotage, threats, and belligerent rhetoric, the Islamic Republic continues to stand — as it has done in the face of enormous pressure over several decades — and the domestic movement for human rights in Iran has been weakened,” she writes for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “And while sanctions have brought unjust hardship to millions of ordinary Iranians, Iranian officials remain unscathed.”

With nowhere else to go now but war, rejoining the Iran deal would bolster U.S. leverage for future negotiations, not forfeit it, argues Mahsa Rouhi, a research fellow at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies. “By returning to the deal, the United States would both retain the leverage it has built by demonstrating the devastating economic effects of its unilateral sanctions and use its leverage through sustained diplomacy and multilateral efforts to produce more desirable policy outcomes,” she writes for Foreign Policy. “Restoring the deal would also put the Biden administration in a much stronger position moving forward to negotiate a follow-on agreement that addresses other issues and concerns, such as Iran’s missile program and destabilizing activities abroad in a regional forum.”

But perhaps the simplest case for rejoining the Iran deal is fairness: Iran complied with a deal the United States brokered, the United States broke the deal, and now the United States must be the one to fix it.

“Iran, for its part, has declared on numerous occasions that it is ready to return to the obligations initially agreed under the nuclear deal and expeditiously reverse the measures we have taken since, if all of the sanctions are withdrawn that were imposed and reimposed by the Trump administration after its illegal withdrawal from the accord,” writes Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, in The Times. “Any halfhearted or partial fulfillment of the United States commitments will undermine what Mr. Biden has promised.”
The New York Times