Asia & the Pacific

Chuck Freilich provides an analysis of the recent Kim-Trump summit in Singapore that includes implications for Israel.

Mahsa Rouhi compares and contrasts the situations with Iran and North Korea and warns of the consequences.

As the policy community prepares to assess an agreement between the U.S. and its P5+1 partners and Iran, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker asked me to review the history of analogous agreements for lessons that illuminate the current challenge. In response to his assignment, I reviewed the seven decades of the nuclear era, during which the U.S. negotiated arms-control treaties, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968; strategic arms limitation talks and agreements from SALT to New Start; the North Korean accord of 1994; the agreements that helped eliminate nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus in the early 1990s; and the pact that eliminated the Libyan nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Among many lessons and clues from this instructive history, five stand out

"...U.S. and Iranian strategic interests align on some key issues, including the fight against ISIS and the postcombat mission era in Afghanistan....Today, Tehran is the only actor involved that has enough at stake in Iraq to be willing and able to send in ground troops, should the need arise. In Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia was one of three countries to recognize the Taliban as an official government. But Iran has and continues to want the Taliban out of the picture, as does Washington."

"The United States is overestimating its leverage with sanctions in negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran—a gamble bound to fail. A second deadline has slipped without a comprehensive agreement between the P5+1 and Iran, and hawkish rhetoric in the U.S. underscores a growing pessimism for successful negotiations by the next deadline in June 2015. Calls to strengthen sanctions highlight waning Congressional support for the talks, and buttress a narrow and unrealistic narrative that economic deprivation will force concessions. Any new sanctions, especially those proposed under the draconian Nuclear Iran Prevention Act, threaten to derail negotiations while providing cannon fodder for Iran’s hardliners..."