The cost of no agreement is not zero

The CNBC report tells us that U.S. Energy Secretary Wright has suggested a nuclear agreement with Iran "may never happen," while Iran simultaneously warns of swifter and heavier retaliation against American military action, even as it acknowledges the mounting economic toll the conflict has imposed upon itself. Both positions — the American dismissal and the Iranian threat — share a common defect: they treat the absence of a treaty as a neutral condition. It is not.

I learned this the hard way in my own time. When I was sent to London in 1794 to negotiate what became the Jay Treaty, no one was satisfied with the result. The Jeffersonians burned me in effigy. Yet the alternative — open hostilities with Britain while the young Republic was still learning to stand — would have been catastrophic. A flawed agreement, honestly administered, is in most circumstances preferable to an honorable refusal that leaves the underlying danger unaddressed.

The principle at stake here is not affection for any particular regime, nor approval of any particular state's conduct. It is the simple recognition that nations which share a dangerous capability — in this case, the capacity to produce weapons of catastrophic destructive power, the exact engineering of which I cannot pretend to understand — have a mutual interest in submitting that capability to some form of agreed restraint. Where such restraint is codified in a convention and ratified by the parties, it carries the force of treaty obligation. Where it is merely threatened or wished for, it carries nothing.

I would ask the Secretary, and the administration he serves, this question: what is the enforcement mechanism for the policy of "may never happen"? A declaration that negotiations have ceased is not a policy; it is the precondition for a worse set of choices. If the objective is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon — and I take that to be the stated objective of both parties at various moments — then the question is not whether to negotiate but how to structure an agreement whose terms are precise enough to be verified and whose consequences for breach are specified in advance. Vague menace on both sides is not a substitute for that structure.

I am aware that the shape of modern arms-control arrangements — inspections, centrifuge counts, enrichment ceilings — involves technical specifics well beyond what I could evaluate. On those particulars I defer entirely to those with the relevant expertise. But the architecture of the problem is familiar: two parties in a posture of mutual suspicion, each calculating that the other will blink first, each therefore escalating rather than resolving. The diplomatic record of my own era is littered with the wreckage of that calculation. The parties who chose the hard work of precise, verifiable, mutually uncomfortable agreement fared better than those who chose the cleaner rhetoric of irreconcilable positions.

What should be done? The parties — including whatever third-party guarantors have standing — should return to the table with a draft text, not a list of preconditions. Every term should be defined. Every verification mechanism should carry a named consequence for breach. The words of any agreement must be chosen as though they will be cited in an arbitral proceeding, because in the end, they will be. Precision now is cheaper than ambiguity later. The public faith of nations, once pledged in clear language, tends to hold; pledged in murky language, it tends to dissolve at the first inconvenience. That lesson cost me considerable political reputation to learn. I commend it without charge.