Summer – the 2.5 months during the year when [the majority of] students and teachers do everything and anything to avoid any school-related activities, including keeping up with current events.
Unfortunately, summer has already bid us adieu and the all-too familiar days of restlessly sitting in classrooms have returned. Even more specifically, the days of sitting clueless in your history class while your teacher drags on and on about something are back. This year, that ‘something’ is called The Iran Deal.
I remember sitting by the pool on a warm Tuesday morning in Palm Springs- July 14th, to be exact, when my phone received a breaking news alert, notifying me of the Iran Deal. Since then, I’ve taken it upon myself to study and familiarize myself with all 159 pages of the deal. It probably seems irrelevant and complicated, but may I remind you that breaking news is breaking news for a reason; this is a matter of foreign policy that greatly impacts our nation’s future. Plus, your history teacher is probably going to keep bringing it up, so let me just give you a basic rundown.
photo courtesy: AP/ Susan Walsh President Obama speaks about the Iran deal.
After nearly two years of negotiating, on July 14, 2015, the United States and our international powers (Germany, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the European union, and Iran) announced the Iran Deal, a nuclear deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
It’s an historic deal — a promise fulfilled. It blocks every possible pathway Iran could use to build a nuclear bomb while ensuring — through a comprehensive, intrusive, and unprecedented verification and transparency regime — that Iran’s nuclear program remains exclusively peaceful moving forward. – Introduction of the Iran Deal
photo courtesy: New York Times, Carlos Burria Delegates from the U.S., Iran and six other nations after agreeing to the Iran Deal.
Long story short, the deal limits Tehran’s nuclear ability in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions. Before getting into the specifics, one must know that an atomic bomb can be made from either plutonium or uranium- two types of radioactive materials that Iran has lots of. As part of the agreement, Iran will either transform its uranium plants into science research centers or reduce production. They were also in the midst of building a nuclear reactor to produce weapons-grade plutonium, but Iran has agreed to make the original core of the reactor inoperable and to ship its fuel out of the country. The deal also requires Iran to reduce its current stockpile of low enriched uranium by 98% which in turn, prohibits them from any nuclear development for the next 15 years. With the materials Iran is left with, the ‘breakout time’, or the time it would take to produce a nuclear weapon has been extended from 2-3 months to at least one year. In order to enforce the Iran Deal, the International Atomic Energy Agency is mandated to monitor Iran’s nuclear facilities.
At this point, you’re probably wondering a lot of things and I don’t blame you. We know that the deal is intended to keep the U.S. safe and secure by preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
But how does the deal affect other countries?
From an economic standpoint, the Iran Deal is definitely going to affect the oil markets. Part of the agreement includes the relief of sanctions on Iran. Prior to sanctions, Iran was the world’s third-largest oil producer, specifically a major exporter to Europe and Asia, sending out almost 2.6 million barrels per day in 2011, but after the sanctions were put in place in 2012, those figures have fallen to about 600,000. The Iran Deal means that Iran can now drastically increase their oil production and export to any country.
The Iran Deal, agreed upon by the U.S., the U.K., Germany, China, France, Russia and Iran, is undoubtedly a historic deal intended to secure global security. The United States has acknowledged that Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, but in fact, it is one of our Middle East allies, Israel, that fears Iran the most, ranking Iran’s nuclear program as its top concern among global threats.
photo courtesy: U.S. News // As shown above, Israel’s greatest threat is Iran, while the U.S.’s greatest threat is believed to be ISIS.
While President Obama refers to the deal as a “historic opportunity”, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu calls it “a historic mistake that will fuel Iran’s terrorism worldwide.”
Since its release, and even before that, it is evident that Iran Deal has sparked controversy worldwide with politicians of all parties, and I’ve hardly scratched the surface in respect to that, but that’s a whole other story. Maybe one you should ask your history teacher for.
