Jeffrey Lewis writes: There is an old joke about two elderly women at a Catskills resort. One says: “Boy, the food in this place is really terrible.” And the other one says: “Yeah, I know. And such small portions.”

That’s the same complaint raised by opponents of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal. Donald Trump called it, “one of the most incompetently drawn deals I’ve ever seen.” And Rex Tillerson explained that, “in particular, the agreement has this very concerning shortcoming that the President has mentioned as well, and that is the sunset clause.”

Such a terrible deal. Yeah, and it ends so early!

Far from being incompetently drafted, the JCPOA imposed a number of important limits on Iran’s nuclear energy program to create a wider gap between Iran’s nuclear energy programs and a bomb. Second, the JCPOA greatly strengthened Iran’s safeguards arrangements to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, to verify that gap. And it does not have a single sunset.

Prior to the JCPOA, Iran had built a large and capable uranium infrastructure that would have allowed Iran to produce enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a nuclear weapon in a matter of weeks if Iran chose to do so. Iran had nearly 20,000 centrifuges, including nearly 3,000 located in its deep underground facility near Qom. [Continue reading…]