The Smart Way to Get Tough With Iran

As the two negotiators who initiated the secret talks that led to the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, we are intimately familiar with the deal’s strengths, its inevitable imperfections and the wider challenge posed by Iran.

In an ideal world, we would have erased Iran’s knowledge of the nuclear fuel cycle, eliminated its missile arsenal, stopped its dangerous use of proxies across the region, and transformed it into a less disruptive regional power.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. Diplomacy requires difficult compromises. And the nuclear deal achieved the best of the available alternatives. It cuts off Iran’s pathways to a bomb, sharply constrains its nuclear program for a long time, and provides for unprecedentedly strict monitoring and verification. Diplomacy avoided another war in the Middle East and averted the kind of crisis we now face with North Korea.