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How to Solve Obama's Iran Dilemma
(Politico) Dennis Ross - The negotiations with Iran are now about: Can the U.S. get the Iranians to roll back their nuclear program and infrastructure in return for a rollback of the sanctions? The Iranians have now built nearly 20,000 centrifuges and accumulated approximately 5-6 bombs' worth of enriched uranium. They will not get the extensive sanctions rollback they seek without a massive reduction in their nuclear infrastructure. Iran must not be left with a nuclear infrastructure that is sufficiently robust and advanced that it can break out to nuclear weapons at a time of its choosing. There is nothing in what the Iranian leadership is now saying that suggests they believe they will have to seriously reduce their program. Their concept would leave them as a nuclear threshold state. Many observers, me included, believe that has been their goal all along. The only chance of getting Iran to give up this objective is for Iran to believe that the cost of pursuing it is simply too high. It was not inducements that got us this far, but the pressure of the sanctions. If Khamenei thinks the sanctions will collapse of their own weight or that there is no prospect for the use of force or that the U.S. is desperate for a deal, there is no prospect of the Iranians accepting that they must roll back their program to the point of not being a threshold state. The administration needs to recognize the importance of being willing to add to the pressure. When the Iranians are doing work on new and more advanced centrifuges, they are sending a signal to us about what they will do if diplomacy fails. The administration can match that by agreeing with key members of Congress on which new sanctions it would be prepared to adopt if there is no follow-on agreement to the Joint Plan of Action. Congress would not adopt the new sanctions during the life of the Joint Plan of Action, but the Hill would know that the administration is preparing the ground to increase the pressure in a meaningful way - and so would the Iranians. The writer served as special assistant to President Barack Obama from 2009-11.