The Obama Administration’s Response to Netanyahu is Premised on One Very Shaky Assumption

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The US basically gained its negotiating leverage through a process that may be impossible to reproduce when there's already a deal in place, business ties have been restored, and the world is inclined to think of the Iranian nuclear program as a settled issue.

“In a decade, if Iran is not Japan, a democratic, nuclear-transparent country with an industrial program, the US president in 2025 will have a severe national challenge on his or her hands,” Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider.

“That president will also have only one option to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, a military one,” Dubowitz said. “It took Clinton, Bush, and Obama almost 20 years to build an effective sanctions regime against an illicit nuclear program and to persuade companies to terminate their business ties with Iran. Once the deal expires in a decade, Iran will have a legal program and it will be impossible to reconstitute an effective sanctions regime in time to block an Iranian industrial-size program from producing multiple nuclear bombs.”

By that point, the fragile political consensus that led to the sanctions regime will be nearly impossible to piece back together if Iran ramps up its program.
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