What exactly is the permanent benefit of the agreement with Iran for P5?

Question

Given the current agreement framework, what exactly is the long term (e.g., benefit in the situation in 2030) for everyone involved in negotiating with Iran as compared to situation today? I'm specifically looking to committed/guaranteed benefit spelled out in the agreement, NOT wishful goals that may or may not come to pass depending on your degree of optimism.

Iran obviously gets 10-15 years of no sanctions, which resuscitates its economy; lets it work on weapons delivery platforms (e.g. missiles) and accumulate some (though less than before) fissionable material - assuming they don't cheat and enrich in secret anyway. What do the Western countries get permanently in exchange other than the can got kicked down the road by several years?

(it's obvious what the benefit is to the current governments, but not to the countries long term geopolitical interests which is what the question is about).

To clarify what I'm asking - aside from not being the legal owners of 10-15 years worth of stockpiling weapons grade fissionable materials, did Iran explicitly concede anything in the agreement which would make its position in any way, shape or form, worse off in 2030 (or whenever agreement expires), compared to their position in 2015? Or conversely, that provenly and materially makes the P5 materially and explicitly better off in 2030 compared to their situation in 2015?

Answer 1

Bluntly, they don't get anything concrete, but mainly because that's not the goal of the deal. The point isn't to get as many concessions as they can; it's to stabilize the region.

The Brookings Institute has this to say about it (US perspective, emphasis added):

At heart, this is a fight over what to do about Iran’s challenge to U.S. leadership in the Middle East and the threat that Iranian geopolitical ambitions pose to U.S. allies, particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Proponents of the deal believe that the best way for the United States to deal with the Iranian regional challenge is to seek to integrate Iran into the regional order, even while remaining wary of its ambitions. A nuclear deal is an important first step in that regard, but its details matter little because the ultimate goal is to change Iranian intentions rather destroy Iranian capability.

Obviously, this is far from foolproof, and there's no guarantee that it will stabilize the region in the long term. This is where the main disagreement lies, not in the details of who gets what.

Answer 2

Reaching an agreement is what sanctions are ostensibly for and they only make sense if you have concrete demands. The level of sanctions imposed to Iran are quite extraordinary, states just don't shun each others like that because they don't like each other. So those sanctions can't be justified if no agreement is in principle possible and the question becomes: What could an alternative agreement look like?

I am not a specialist but everything I read suggests that the agreement severely curtails Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon while the monitoring remains in place and only includes symbolic concessions. Obviously, a large country with significant financial, industrial and scientific resources will always in principle be able to restart a nuclear weapon program at some point in the future. But you can't just wish the Iranian regime away and avoid that so this agreement is really as good as it gets as far as this particular issue is concerned.

Many people in the US seem to think everything was on the table, even some form of military action, and maintaining sanctions indefinitely until you get a regime to your liking is fair game but I am not sure that even European countries see it that way and China and Russia certainly would not tolerate it. UN sanctions and international buy-in is what has been so effective in hurting the Iranian economy. Without them, you could be left with something like the US is doing to Cuba, sanctions that don't bite that much and would have even less influence on a far-away country with oil resources.

And, if the agreement real holds, 10-15 years of stability or containment, is a good long-term benefit. Unless you are deluding yourself into thinking “we” can reshape countries and societies from afar (we have seen how that went of late), seeking some “permanent resolution”, whatever that means, isn't a realistic policy goal. How would 2030 be better if Western countries did not accept what is undoubtedly the best deal that was conceivably possible?

Answer 3

A deal has been done about a non-issue that stirred up national sentiments in Iran. The West does not lose anything here because the entire threat of an Iranian nuclear weapons program was due to irrational paranoia. The Iranian conservatives, on the other hand, will lose a lot of their political power due to this deal. Their argument (that most Iranians accept, however pro-Western and anti establishment they are) is that the West had improperly tried to coerce Iran into giving up their peaceful nuclear program.

If it is accepted as a fact in a country that foreign powers want to improperly impose their will on that country on a certain point, then the liberals arguing for better ties with those foreign countries will have a hard time putting forward their argument. It totally weakens the political base of the liberals, as the conservatives are seen to be correct.

In Iran, however, there was also another force at work. The sanctions made Iranians think again about the way they were arguing their case. That led to a more moderate president being elected. The fact that he did succeed to negotiate a deal with the West is a huge boost for the moderate and liberals in Iran (note that while Russia and China were also part of the negotiations, to them the Iranian nuclear issue was never a problem, this was only ever a dispute between Iran and the West plus its Arab allies).

What will likely happen in 15 years from now? What we're likely to see is an Iran where the people enjoy a lot more political freedoms. The economy will have improved lot. Western companies will have invested a lot in the Iranian oil and gas industry. Iran's nuclear program will only make news headlines if Western companies get involved in the Iranian nuclear industry. That may well happen as the World needs to make huge investments in the nuclear sector to deal with the threat posed by climate change. We may well see the West changing the deal with Iran about the Arak reactor, because in the future we do need to produce large amounts of plutonium.

The whole problem with nuclear energy is that if you only use U-235 then using nuclear energy to providing the World with all of its current requirement for energy, would cause all the known uranium reserves to be used up in a century. However, if you use nuclear reactions to convert U-238 into PU-239 and use Th-232 to produce U-233 which is also fissile (using so-called fast breeder reactors), then the known reserves will last 30,000 years.

In summary, the West suffers from WMD-o-phobia, Iranophobia and Radiophobia, which has caused a lot of damage to the environment, the World economy, and the political situation in the Mid East. The negotiations with Iran and the deal that has been agreed to will have contributed a lot toward the West coming to terms with these issues, the World will be a lot better off as a result.