An article in the Washington Post says former WH security advisor professor Raymond Tanter, at Foreign Policy looks at what a hypothetical post-mortem would look like if the Iran talks fail. As he notes, even the president has given talks only a 50-50 chance, so the exercise isn’t merely academic. He concludes we will find that in rebuffing a sanctions bill conditioned on failure to reach a final deal the postmortem would conclude that we didn’t give Iran enough of an incentive to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
I’m more interested in another question: What is Obama’s back-up plan? I mean, given his own odds, he should have one.
But Iran could make a horrible error, for example, if it rebuffed the Obama team on the theory that the first six months would be followed by another six months of negotiations.
There is no rational theory for not telling Iran the alternative to its refusal to comply with our demands. It isn’t good enough to say “all options” remain on the table. That is hopelessly vague, and no one believes it anyway. If we want to persuade Iran to act, Iranian officials would need to hear that the sanctions would come back (or whatever the Obama team’s plan is). Right now all of the Iranians see is the president’s threat to veto sanctions.