The Iran deal is immediately going to face this huge problem
As President Barack Obama has often argued,
a nuclear agreement with Iran will not be based on "trust." Now that an
agreement has been finalized, the US and its partners intend to hold
Iran to what they believe to be a vigorous and even invasive
verification regime.
That's the key to an agreement: In the deal, the US and its partners
have dictated the size of Iran's stockpile of fissile material along
with its means of creating more. That won't mean much if they can't
ensure that Iran is following these conditions.
But Iran is a sovereign state, and a
member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. As such, the country — even in
spite of its years of misleading the international community on its
nuclear program — has been given a say over how the agreement unfolds.
Whether the deal is successful or not depends on how Iran wields that
control and how it decides on key issues that the agreement has made
semi-voluntary.
Some of those issues are
fundamental to enforcing the deal. Iran's been given certain leverage
over how the agreement unfolds, and it's a tension that will have to be
overcome if the deal is going to be successful.
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