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Killing scientists won’t stop Iran’s nuclear work. Diplomacy can.

Over the past two decades, the United States and its allies have tried two very different strategies for containing Iran’s nuclear program. One has been to apply crushing sanctions to the regime, launch covert operations to disable key facilities or kill scientists, and threaten overt military action. The other has been to negotiate deals with Tehran that freeze key activities, such as uranium enrichment, and provide for international inspections. It is now apparent which works better. The 2015 nuclear accord, though flawed, had succeeded in rolling back and freezing Iran’s uranium enrichment. In contrast, sanctions and sabotage, even when successful, have failed to stop Iran from advancing toward nuclear weapons production — much less toppled its Islamist regime. That record won’t be altered by the assassination last week, reportedly by Israel, of the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh who headed its work on a bomb before the project was suspended in 2003.

Yet, since May 2018, when Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the multilateral nuclear accord, Iran has increased its stockpile of enriched uranium to 12 times the total. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who campaigned against the 2015 agreement, remains wedded to the strategy of pressure, and after Mr. Trump was defeated in last month’s election by Joe Biden, declared that “there must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, whose government negotiated the nuclear deal, reportedly is seeking to restrain any retaliation for the assassination pending Mr. Biden’s inauguration. That would benefit both sides. The president-elect will hardly be a pushover for Tehran — he has linked a return to the accord to follow-on agreements on issues such as Iran’s development of long-range missiles and exports of weapons around the region. But he offers the prospect of a return to a diplomacy-focused Middle East strategy that, unlike the hard line of Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu, has a record of positive results.

(Available: https://www.washingtonpost.com. Access on: 12/03/2020.)