Arms-control agreements tie the earth-shattering drama of great power politics to a set of vague and highly technical obligations and tradeoffs, the larger significance of which can sometimes only be glimpsed in retrospect. Moreover, they’re meant to last in perpetuity: Just as the Non-Proliferation Treaty is intended to permanently halt the spread of nuclear weapons, Secretary of State John Kerry has said there’s “no sunset” on parts of the nuclear deal, in which Iran has agreed to never develop nuclear weapons. When an agreement is meant to last forever, it’s impossible to say at a given moment whether it’s been a decisive success or failure. It seems fair to predict that the debate over the Iran deal will never end, just as the debates over the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty haven’t ended.
This summer has offered scattered clues as to whether the most important foreign-policy development of Barack Obama’s presidency is working out. So far, most observers agree that Iran appears to be sticking to the letter of its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). At the same time, the past few months have produced plenty of fodder for deal critics, including revelations of a secret deal provision on uranium-enrichment centrifuge development, and news of a $400 million “ransom” payment to the Iranian regime made in unmarked bills in currencies that were not numbered sequentially, and which appear to have wound up in the hands of Iran’s terror-sponsoring Revolutionary Guard. Reporting this week suggests that the actual amount of the cash payments was $1.7 billion.
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