March 28, 2015
“You can dwell on Yemen,” a senior State Department official told Politico’s Michael Crowley the other day, “or you can recognize that we’re one agreement away from a game-changing, legacy-setting nuclear accord on Iran that tackles what everyone agrees is the biggest threat to the region.”
“Everyone agrees”—well, not everyone. A radically different interpretation of an Iran deal was front and center Friday at the Center for the National Interest. “Never in our lifetimes,” said David Rothkopf, former Clinton administration official and CEO and Editor, The FP Group, has every single country in the Middle East (with the exception of Oman) been involved in conflict. An analogy to the chaos in the Balkans, he said, would not be over the top. Even the nuclear deal, he suggested, “looks very likely not to be anything like the nuclear deal we sought to get.” The risk of an Iranian nuclear weapon is secondary, Rothkopf argued, to the regional nuclear proliferation that Iranian nuclear gains could provoke, as “that increases the risk that weapons fall in the wrong hands”; the one-year breakout time being held up as a reasonable target in the current talks means that each state feeling threatened “will be put in the position of having to defend itself.” “Thus,” he argued, “the proliferation risk remains.”
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