Imagine for a moment that Tehran’s representatives contacted US Envoy Steve Witkoff and offered full dismantlement of their nuclear enrichment program, reliably verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and a commitment to forego any steps to build or acquire a nuclear weapon. The price? The United States would lift sanctions on Iran, unfreeze funds, and permit Iran to trade freely through the global financial system. Iran might also require assurances that its nuclear sites would face no further attacks by the United States or Israel.

After more than two decades of frustrating effort, an elusive national security goal would finally be at hand: an end to the Iran nuclear threat. How could the United States say no?

And yet, for many good reasons, “no” is the only acceptable answer. Here are five:

First, Iran has never seriously adopted the goal of becoming a nuclear weapons state. The Soviet Union and the United States took six years to build an atomic bomb more than a half-century ago. Others did it in a dozen years or less. Iran, however, has been enriching uranium for 37 years, sometimes edging nearer to the weapons threshold, provoking headlines and official attention in Western capitals, but making sure never to trigger a crisis response. Tehran obviously finds the enrichment program useful even without a bomb.

Second, a major consideration for Iran is that Saudi Arabia has, since 2008, made clear that if Iran obtains the bomb, Saudi Arabia will do the same. After decades of pledging “death to Israel,” the supreme leader would face two unpalatable options if he had a deliverable nuclear weapon: either disregard the religious “duty” in whose name hundreds of thousands of Iranian regime security forces, mine-clearing children, and imprisoned dissidents (not to mention Hamas fanatics) have been sacrificed; or risk a suicidal nuclear escalation with Israel, one where the leader of Twelver Shi’ism could end up destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque, site of the Prophet’s “night journey” and Islam’s third holiest site.

Third, Iran does not deserve a ransom for agreeing not to damage the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. If any country profits by threatening international peace and security, that is a failure of policy. The right goal here is deterrence. There is clearly a bipartisan consensus in the United States that Iran must never have the bomb. This is, effectively, a national security doctrine, although never promulgated by an American president.

Fourth, in any case, the United States already paid Iran for its restraint on this issue. President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear accord in 2018. Did Iran return the $1.7 billion payment ($400 million in currency delivered on pallets) made in 2016? No, nor did Tehran ever look back in capitalizing on two other major concessions by the United States: lifting the UN Security Council’s prohibition on Iran’s ballistic missile development and its arms embargo on Iran. These “sweeteners,” offered to gain Tehran’s agreement to the JCPOA in 2015, led to deadly ballistic missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and Israel.

Fifth, rewarding Iran on the nuclear issue would exonerate it for unforgivable crimes. This is the untold story that Tehran has tried to suppress, with much success. But now the true history of the regime’s darkest crimes is being uncovered. US policy must admit its past failures and, with allies, treat this dictatorship as a hostile threat to US interests.

A potent if unfounded belief shaping decades of US policy on Iran has been that, with the right policy posture in Washington, fundamentalist Iran will temper its hostility and cease its destabilizing activities. On June 22, Vice President JD Vance, appearing on Meet the Press, articulated a version of such a policy approach toward Iran:

“We believe very strongly that there are two pathways; there is a pathway where Iran continues to fund terrorism, continues to try to build a nuclear program, attacks American troops—that’s the bad pathway for Iran … There’s another pathway on the table here; there’s a pathway where Iran integrates itself into the international community, stops funding terrorism and stops trying to pursue a nuclear weapon.”

Offering Tehran this choice seems eminently sensible, but the vice president and his advisors may not realize that Washington policymakers have floated this same proposition for a very long time. Twenty years ago, soon after The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) revealed Iran’s secret nuclear enrichment program, former Ambassador and Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman, with coauthor Ray Takeyh, wrote that Iran’s leaders needed to recognize that they face “a stark choice—they can have nuclear weapons or a healthy economy, but not both.” Three years later in 2008, as the late General Qasem Soleimani and Iran’s Qods Force were busy arming and directing non-state militias to kill over 600 U.S. military forces deployed in the region, and as Tehran’s diplomats “bought time” for the enrichment program by misleading Western envoys seeking verifiable curbs on Iran’s nuclear efforts, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote this in Foreign Affairs:

“Iran must make a strategic choice … about how and to what ends it will wield its power and influence. Does it want to continue thwarting the legitimate demands of the world, advancing its interests through violence, and deepening the isolation of its people? Or is it open to a better relationship, one of growing trade and exchange, deepening integration, and peaceful cooperation with its neighbors and the broader international community?”

A year later, as the Iranian people took to the streets in protest following the blatant fraud accompanying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection, regime forces fired on their fellow citizens, with the death of 29-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan dramatically captured on video. Demonstrators demanding change—dubbed the “green movement”—nearly overwhelmed security forces in the capital city. On February 14, 2013, with Arab Spring protests erupting in Syria after deposing autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt, a senior Iranian cleric, Mehdi Taeb, was overheard warning a gathering of Bassij units that if they “lost” Damascus—if the repressive regime of Bashar al-Assad were to fall—they could not “hold” Tehran.

Thus began Iran’s massive deployment of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) troops, Qods Force operatives, militias, mercenaries, cash, and weapons into bases throughout neighboring Syria, a military intervention that, in coordination with Syrian and later Russian forces, drove 6 million Syrians out of their own country, at a cost to Iran of over $50 billion. Policymakers in Washington, however, were far more interested in the headline-making news that Iran had agreed to enter nuclear negotiations with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—the P5 1.

The prevailing assumption within the US policy community was that Iran had little choice but to come to the negotiating table, so acute was its need for trade with the West to relieve its battered economy. One can only speculate how the P5 1 negotiators’ attitudes might have differed had they known that the supreme leader controlled upwards of $100 billion in resources at the time, or understood how much of the country’s oil and gas revenues were being channeled to support the IRGC, Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and other regime security priorities including the nuclear program. If evidence exists that the needs of the Iranian people have ever been treated as a priority by their clerical........

© The National Interest