Florida senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio said in a speech on Friday that by signing the nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration has ensured that Iran will be a powerful threat in the near future.
“President Obama has not only permitted Iran to retain its entire existing nuclear infrastructure, he has also endorsed the construction of a full-scale, industrial-size nuclear program within 15 years,” Rubio said.
A common criticism of the Iran deal has been that the U.S. did not broker an agreement that was “good enough.” Detractors like Rubio say the deal has effectively ensured that the nefarious Iranian regime will have nuclear weapons ready to go by 2030. Rubio said that if he were to get into office he would rip up the current deal.
“Iran may not return to the table immediately,” Rubio said, “but it will return when its national interests require it to do so.”
But experts say the deal is important for other reasons.
As former Secretary of Defense and former nuclear lab director Harold Brown argues, without the nuclear deal, Iran would have nuclear weapons much sooner. “Iran’s nuclear program, its advance suspended during the negotiations, is but two years from a nuclear weapon,” Brown writes in the Washington Post. “That’s an urgent problem demanding immediate attention.”
“Opponents of the deal warn that in 10 to 15 years’ time, the deal allows Iran to be only a couple of years away from a nuclear weapon. Why does accepting that danger now seem to bother opponents less than coping with a danger that might be 10 years away? Is there another way to delay the time until Iran is capable of making a nuclear weapon?”
International Relations Professor at Harvard Stephen M. Walt wrote in Foreign Policy earlier this week about the “myth” of a better deal than the current agreement.
“The most obvious example of magical thinking in contemporary policy discourse, of course, is the myth of a ‘better deal’ with Iran,” Walt wrote. “Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, opponents of the JCPOA keep insisting additional sanctions, more threats to use force, another round of Stuxnet, or if necessary, dropping a few bombs, would have convinced Iran to run up the white flag and give the United States everything it ever demanded for the past 15 years.”
Deal supporters generally feel that the agreement was a success, and that it will open the doorway to better relations between Iran and the western world as well as preventing a future war.