WASHINGTON -- Prussian King Frederick the Great offered this rebuke to those who refused to allow any concessions: "If you try to hold everything, you hold nothing."
President Obama might make a similar retort to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's attack on the alleged "bad deal" the U.S. is contemplating with Iran. Netanyahu rejects any concessions that allow Iran to enrich uranium; he thinks the U.S. goal of a one-year "breakout" period before Iran could build a bomb isn't enough.
To which several leading administration officials respond: OK, then, what's a better practical idea for controlling Iran's nuclear program? They see in Netanyahu's maximalist goals an air of unreality -- of fantasy, even. They grant that their solution isn't perfect. But they argue that it's far better for Israel and the West than any other plausible scenario.
The Iran nuclear talks, arguably the most important diplomatic negotiations of the last several decades, will come to a head next month. Netanyahu will take his case against the agreement to Congress on Tuesday in an unusual speech organized by the GOP House speaker.
His own political leadership will be tested in Israeli elections on March 17. The Iran negotiations will reach a March 24 deadline for the framework of a final comprehensive accord.
Israel's Minister of Intelligence Yuval Steinitz made the case against the Iran agreement in an interview with me last week. "From the very beginning, we made it clear we had reservations about the goal of the negotiations," he explained. He said Obama's effort to limit the Iranian nuclear program for a decade or so, in the expectation that a future generation of leaders wouldn't seek a bomb, was "too speculative."
The administration's response is that the agreement is better than any realistic alternative. Officials argue it would put the Iranian program in a box, with constraints on all the pathways to making a bomb. Perhaps more important, it would provide strict monitoring and allow intrusive inspection of Iranian facilities -- not just its centrifuges but its uranium mines, mills and manufacturing facilities.
If Iran seeks a covert path to building a bomb, the deal offers the best hope of detecting it.
If the current talks collapsed, all these safeguards would disappear. The Iranians could resume enrichment and other currently prohibited activities.
In such a situation, the U.S. and Israel would face a stark choice over whether to attack Iranian facilities -- with no guarantee that such an attack would set Tehran back more than a few years.
The length of the agreement is a crucial variable. U.S. officials have always spoken of a "double-digit" duration period, somewhere between 10 and 15 years. Negotiators are also exploring the possibility of different phases of the timeline, with inspection provisions having a longer lifespan than, say, limits on the number of centrifuges.
The deal-stopper for the administration is if Iran balks at U.S. insistence that sanctions will only be removed step by step, as Iran demonstrates that it's serious about abiding by the agreement. In the U.S. view, Iran has to earn its way back to global acceptance.
The Iran deal is imperfect. As Count Metternich observed in 1807 about negotiations with the rising powers of his day, "Peace does not exist with a revolutionary system." But U.S. officials make a compelling case that this agreement is a start toward a safer Middle East.
Washington Post Writers Group