Energy

Much of the immediate commentary on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed between the P5+1 and Iran on July 14 focused on the deal’s details as well as its many shortcomings. Most of these reactions, both favoring and opposing the agreement, focused on elements of the nuclear package itself.

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

Five former members of President Obama’s inner circle of Iran advisers have written an open letter expressing concern that a pending accord to stem Iran’s nuclear program “may fall short of meeting the administration’s own standard of a ‘good’ agreement” and laying out a series of minimum requirements that Iran must agree to in coming days for them to support a final deal.

"One of the dramas playing out this month in New York at the 2015 Review Conference for parties to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) concerns the future of discussions on establishing the weapons of mass destruction free zone in the Middle East..."

At the very least, Congress should reconsider its position of "once approved, always approved."

"...Iraq has never gone to war in the face of a clear deterrent threat."

Making the case for action against Iraq, President Bush has quoted what President John F. Kennedy said in October of 1962: "We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security to constitute maximum peril."

In thinking about Iraq, one of the president's closest advisers told The New York Times,"The example he refers to is the Cuban missile crisis." Says Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: "It is not a perfect, on all fours, analogy, but it is certainly as similar as anything in recent years that one can find."

As a longtime student of the missile crisis, I agree with Mr. Bush that the similarities between it and the current face-off with Iraq are more salient than the differences. What's uncertain in the current crisis, however, is whether Bush will grasp and apply what Kennedy judged the most significant lesson of the missile crisis.