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For Netanyahu and Obama, Difference Over Iran Widened Into Chasm

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By DAVID E. SANGERMARCH 3, 2015

WASHINGTON — Over six years of bitter disagreements about how to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel kept running into one central problem: The two leaders never described their ultimate goal in quite the same way.

Mr. Obama has repeated a seemingly simple vow: On his watch, the United States would do whatever it took to “prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Mr. Netanyahu has used a different set of stock phrases. Iran had to be stopped from getting the “capability” to manufacture a weapon, he said, and Israel could never tolerate an Iran that was a “threshold nuclear state.”

That semantic difference has now widened into a strategic chasm that threatens to imperil the American-Israeli relationship for years to come, and to upend the most audacious diplomatic gamble by an American leader since President Richard M. Nixon’s opening to China.

For years, Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu avoided direct discussion of the philosophic and practical differences between an Iran on the verge of having the ultimate weapon and an Iran that actually possesses one. But it lies at the heart of the argument that Mr. Netanyahu is pressing before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday morning.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Obama at the White House in October. CreditKevin Lamarque/Reuters

“It’s a distinction with a huge difference,” said Robert Einhorn, who helped formulate the administration’s Iran strategy at the State Department and enforced the sanctions that helped force Tehran into the difficult negotiations that followed. “It defines two different approaches to dealing with Iran that today may be fundamentally irreconcilable.”

In short, Israel would eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability, and the United States would permit a limited one.

The emotions surrounding Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to do an end run around the White House and appear before Congress at the invitation of the Republican leadership has obscured what the two countries’ approaches would look like. Mr. Netanyahu has simplicity and recent history on his side. Mr. Obama has practicality on his, along with a compelling case that his Israeli counterpart has yet to come up with a better approach that would not most likely lead to military conflict.

The essence of Mr. Netanyahu’s case is that the only way to make sure Iran never gets a bomb is for it to dismantle all of its nuclear facilities — from the uranium enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordo to the heavy-water plutonium reactor at Arak, along with the mines that produce uranium ore and the laboratories where Iranian scientists are believed to have worked on bomb designs. It is a maximalist position based on a belief that Iran’s long history of nuclear deception means that any facilities left in place would eventually be put to use.

“We’ve seen this kind of agreement before — between the U.S. and North Korea,” Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli minister for intelligence, said on a visit to Washington late last year. He was referring to a deal of the George W. Bush administration requiring North Korea to “disable” its main nuclear facilities, and to the dramatic implosion in 2008 of the cooling tower at one of its main nuclear reactors. Seven years later, the North Koreans have rebuilt and are back in business — and by some estimates, they are poised to build bombs faster than ever.

The problem with the dismantle-it-all approach is that the Iranians have made clear that it is a deal they would never sign. For all the suspicions swirling around Iran’s program, the country is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — a treaty that Israel, India and Pakistan never signed. (North Korea pulled out.) Iran argues that signatories have a “right to enrich,” something the Obama administration obliquely acknowledged at the start of the current negotiations, nearly two years ago.

So Mr. Obama’s strategy has been one of buying time. That sounds like a concession, but it has worked well with Iran for two decades. No nation has spent more years seemingly trying to build a weapon but failing to get there. American intelligence agencies say that is because Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has never made the “political decision” to build a bomb.

But that is only part of the answer. The United States and its allies have done their part to slow Iran’s efforts, blocking the shipment of needed technology, imposing sanctions on the country’s oil exports, slipping faulty parts into its supply chain and attacking the country’s nuclear facilities with one of the most sophisticated cyberweapons ever developed.

Mr. Obama’s approach is based in part on a bet that time remains on America’s side. Eventually, the administration’s thinking goes, the clerical government in Iran will fall or be eased from power, and a more progressive leadership will determine that Iran does not need a weapon. But the implicit gamble of the accord now under discussion is that the long-awaited change will occur within 15 years, when the deal would expire and Iran would be free to build 180,000 advanced centrifuges the supreme leader spoke about last summer.

If Iran had that many machines to enrich uranium — a big if — it would have the capacity to make a bomb’s worth of uranium every week or so.

Even a far smaller number of centrifuges worries the Israelis and many of their gulf neighbors. Three years ago, the Obama administration was talking about letting Iran keep a few hundred machines spinning in a “pilot” plant, essentially a face-saving capacity. Then the figure rose to 1,500 centrifuges. Now, 4,000 to 6,500 are under consideration.

“The Iranians give up no capability in their possession,” Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, a former Israeli national security adviser, wrote over the weekend, “they only postpone their intention to fulfill those capabilities.”

The critique stings Secretary of State John Kerry, who is negotiating the accord in Switzerland, but he will not discuss it, citing the confidentiality of the talks. But that secrecy is costing him support every day, in Congress and from his allies in the Persian Gulf.

“I just saw him, and he wouldn’t offer up any details,” said one senior official from a gulf nation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his conversations at the State Department were private. “What am I supposed to conclude from that?”

In fact, there is a case to be made that the number of spinning centrifuges is only one factor in how long it would take Iran to get to a bomb. If Iran ships enough of its fuel out of the country, in a deal with Russia that has largely been struck, officials say, there would be precious little nuclear fuel to enrich.

If the remaining centrifuges are connected to one another in ways that can produce only reactor-grade uranium, it would essentially limit Iran’s options — as long as inspectors were present every few days or weeks, so that they could raise the alarm if the machines were reconfigured to make bomb fuel.

But those arguments require some knowledge of the physics of enriching uranium, and they will be hashed out in an environment where politics, not engineering, will dominate the debate. Mr. Kerry says he is ready for that. “We’re not about to jump into something we don’t believe can get the job done,” he said while traveling in Europe on Monday.

But then he turned to what may be his most effective argument: Mr. Netanyahu has yet to come up with a plan that does not ultimately lead to a decision to take military action to wipe out Iran’s facilities.

“You can’t bomb knowledge into oblivion unless you kill everybody,” Mr. Kerry said. “You can’t bomb it away. People have a knowledge here.”

The key, he said, was “intrusive inspections” and “all the insights necessary to be able to know to a certainty that the program is, in fact, peaceful.”

And there lies the problem for the White House. It is easy to make verification measures sound tough, but it is hard to enforce them. Dennis B. Ross, who worked for Mr. Obama from 2009 to 2011 and focused on the issue of Iran, wrote recently that the deal must have “anywhere, anytime access to all declared and undeclared facilities.”

As part of Mr. Obama’s selling of the agreement, Mr. Ross argued, he should specifically describe how the United States would respond to any race for the bomb, including the use of military force.

For his part, Mr. Obama says the use of force is implicit in a promise he made two years ago that “we’ve got Israel’s back.”

Mr. Netanyahu once pretended to welcome those words. His speech on Tuesday is testament to the fact that, rightly or wrongly, he no longer believes them.