US-Iran Deal Worse Than US-Korea Deal

By Stephen Costello

The new deal between Iran and the P5+1, the result of years of negotiations led by the US, is a good deal, and should be supported. The complexity of the Middle East right now, and the multiple ways that Iran's actions in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere support terror and destabilization, are mind-boggling. The need to confront Iranian proxy forces in those locations will not go away with this agreement. So the follow-on work with allies and neighbors of Iran in years to come will be necessary and will require commitment from the US and the other P5+1 countries. But still the deal is overdue, logical, and opens the possibility for very different behaviors from Iran in the future.

The deal negotiated with North Korea in 1994, the Agreed Framework, should probably not be compared to the deal just concluded with Iran. North Korea is far more isolated and far less ambitious about its regional role than Iran. It is if anything more interested in a changed relationship with the US than Iran is today. There are many other differences. But both are largely due to US efforts, both have extensive implications for power in the region, and both provoke similar reactions in critics, who seem to imagine that there can be total victories over evil regimes.

As I noted three months ago here, the agreed framework did not fail because the agreement was lacking. It failed because leaders could not understand how to make their interests correspond, or because they believed myths about the North's collapse or the US's power. They may have just preferred to have an unstable and insecure focus for US policy in the region. The “pivot” and all that.

In any case the new Iran deal has major implications for the Korean Peninsula, just not for the reasons often cited. For instance, in some ways the relief felt now about what is possible if the Iran deal sticks is very similar to the relief felt after the Agreed Framework of 1994 and the North-South Summit of 2000. But remember what happened then. The US, half a world away, changed administrations, and US interests changed toward the Korean Peninsula. The Japanese administration at the time, as well as the South Korean, Chinese, Russian and North Korean leaderships, all preferred to continue working to manage the deal. The freeze on North Korean nuclear activities at the time, together with later freezes on missiles, unilaterally undertaken by the North, were – both in hindsight and at the time – more valuable than what we have with the Iranians today. In addition, the political breakthroughs surrounding Korea were truly unprecedented, from the visit of US Secretary of State Albright to Pyongyang, to the first North-South Korean summit, to the visit of General Jo Myong Rok to Washington. But the US administration had other ideas. North Korea is now believed to possess multiple nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, and a memory of diplomacy in the 2000s.

Natan Sharansky, the Russian dissident, voiced a fear in the Washington Post that he shares with the Israeli government and many other critics of the Iran agreement, that it is not linked to a reduction in Iran's other illegal activities. And here there is a general similarity in thinking about such a nuclear weapons-centered deal with North Korea. In both cases, critics will say that the lifting of sanctions and willingness to do business will not change the “nature” of the regime. But the first, nuclear agreement could not do that. It had to be part of a larger and longer-term, multiple-presidencies vision.

In the case of Iran, this means that all of the P5+1 governments will now be dedicated to a wide range of extensive diplomatic and military arrangements that should seriously confront terror and destabilization in the region by Iran. So the Iran agreement is really one part of a global effort to roll back a destructive dynamic and to change it. In the case of North Korea, critics have long argued that engagement failed because the first small incentives offered by South Korea and the US did not change the “nature” of the regime. But it too was embedded in a larger, longer-term effort with regional and global impacts, that could lower the temperature and change power relationships.

Much of what has developed in the northeast Asian region and in the US since the Agreed Framework's demise has proved the wisdom of that deal, and the recklessness of failing to secure it by all parties.

And that is one of the key lessons of the Korea deal of 1994 for the Iran deal of 2015. Parties must accept that implementation will be a matter of years, even decades. They must understand that the regional and bilateral benefits of such a deal should be great enough that alternative presidents and leaders can adhere to the terms. As Secretary of State John Kerry said days ago, “I am convinced that whoever is our next president will see the wisdom of this agreement and they will leave it in place.” He did not have to add, “unlike the deal with North Korea, and we know how that turned out.”

Stephen Costello is producer of AsiaEast, a Web

and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused

on security, development and politics in Northeast

Asia. He previously directed the Korea program

at the Atlantic Council of the U.S. He

writes from Washington, D.C. He can be contacted

at cosetllos@asiaeast.org.