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Bret Stephens: The End of Nuclear Diplomacy

[Bret Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]

There's a hoary cliché about how Western diplomats are always playing checkers while their (invariably) smarter adversaries play chess. In the matter of yesterday's nuclear agreement between Iran, Turkey and Brazil the line doesn't quite work. The game Tehran is playing isn't any more complicated than checkers. The trouble is, they're whipping us at it.

As I write these lines, it isn't yet clear how the Obama administration will respond to the deal, which reportedly is similar to the one the U.S. and its allies proposed, and Iran spurned, last October. Since then, the administration has rotely insisted that the original offer stands, albeit on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. But what do you do with a deal that was spoiled milk to begin with, and is now eight months past its sell-by date?

The ostensible virtue of the original bargain is that it would have required Iran to park 1,200 kilograms of its civilian-grade, 3.5% enriched uranium—the bulk of its total stockpile—in a third country. The uranium was then to be enriched to a 20% grade, to produce medical isotopes from a small research reactor in Tehran. In the meantime, the West would have bought itself at least a year of time before Iran could make the 1,900 kilos of civilian-grade uranium needed to produce the 20 kilos of high-enriched uranium it takes to build a bomb.

For Iran, at least, this should have been too good an offer to refuse—which is precisely why they did refuse it. The deal would have allowed them to continue to enrich uranium, never mind three binding U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on them to stop. It would have given them access to a significant stockpile of 20% enriched uranium, from which they could make a bomb in a matter of weeks rather than months. And it would have allowed them to kick the sanctions can another year down the road.

But Iran's leaders have learned that the West—and the Obama administration in particular—never closes the door on a diplomatic "opening," no matter how slight, and it never exacts much of a price for bad behavior. They've learned that they can always play to the anti-American peanut gallery, which if anything has grown larger since Barack H. Obama succeeded George W. Bush. And like Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment," Iran also knows that "man will get used to anything—the scoundrel!"

In short, Iran's leaders have learned the uses of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "defining deviancy down."..
Read entire article at WSJ