Days before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial address to Congress, Israeli officials are citing a little-understood element of the Iran nuclear talks as their chief concern about a potential deal.

Concerns that a final deal restricting Iran’s nuclear program will “sunset” any agreement as early as 2025 have thrown a new jolt into Israeli officials who had grown resigned to the idea that Obama will allow Iran a greater uranium enrichment capability than they would like.


“Ten years is nothing. It’s tomorrow from our point of view,” said Yaakov Amidror, who served as national security adviser to Netanyahu from 2011 to 2013. “It’s a license for Iran to be a threshold nuclear state.”

A former Obama Pentagon and State Department official who met with Israeli officials this week said he heard “resigned acceptance” on some aspects of the nuclear talks.

But not on the question of a nuclear deal’s duration.

“This sunset clause is probably the most difficult piece” of the emerging agreement for Israel, said Ilan Goldenberg, director of the Middle East security program at the Center for a New American Security.

The expiration date of the nuclear deal could be a focus of Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress on March 3.

Critics say that after the expiration of any deal’s natural life, Iran would be free to use the reactors it was allowed to keep operational for peaceful purposes like producing electricity and instead use them to produce as much fuel for nuclear weapons as it likes. Once it had a large stockpile of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, Iran could fashion nuclear weapons in a matter of weeks, perhaps faster than the international community would be able to react.

It’s not just the Israelis who are upset. Citing reports of a 10- to 15-year sunset period at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Tuesday, the panel’s top Democrat, Robert Menendez, called that “a matter of time that is far less than anyone envisioned.”

Obama officials deny that any specific sunset clause has been agreed to in the talks. “Don’t believe what you read,” Secretary of State John Kerry, who spoke at Tuesday’s hearing, told Menendez.

One person who talks regularly with members of Congress about Iran says that until recently, many were unaware a nuclear deal would have any sunset clause at all.

But no one close to the talks has ever denied that a comprehensive agreement which extends a temporary deal now in effect will also be of finite duration. Speaking at the Aspen Institute on Monday, Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken — while insisting that a final deal hasn’t been reached — defended the idea of a time limit.

“At some point in the future, having demonstrated that it’s making good on its commitments, Iran will be treated as a non-nuclear weapons state,” Blinken said.

As one senior administration official put it in a September 2014 briefing, the goal is to encourage Iran to become a “normal” nuclear state: “What choices [the Iranians] make after they get to normal… will, of course, be their choice.”

Blinken noted that the idea of a sunset clause does not bear Obama’s signature, and that the concept was first advanced by Obama’s Republican predecessor.

“The Bush administration put on the table the proposition that Iran would be treated as a non-nuclear weapons state after it complied for some period of time with any agreement,” Blinken said. “And that is exactly what we are doing.”

Language to that effect was also included in the first interim agreement struck in November 2013 between Iran and the five other world powers — Russia, China, Great Britain, France and Germany — known as the P5+1.

But Blinken added that that any deal will include “a permanent ban on Iran pursuing nuclear weapons activity.”

Blinken was apparently referring to the fact that, even after the conclusion of any nuclear deal, Iran would still be bound by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran’s pre-revolutionary government ratified that treaty in 1970 and officially still honors it. Its nuclear program would thus be monitored by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors who could sound alarms if Tehran takes steps towards weaponization.

Some experts fear that Iran could deceive inspectors both during and after the duration of an agreement, however, and fashion a bomb undetected. Iran insists it uses enriched uranium for energy and medical purposes only. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has even issued a religious fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons — although many U.S. officials and experts question the edict’s sincerity and durability.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has issued a religious fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, but insists that Iran eventually needs a robust nuclear energy program. | AP Photo

But Khamenei insists that Iran eventually needs a robust nuclear energy program. And other Iranian officials have long said that any nuclear deal — giving Iran relief from harsh economic sanctions in return for limits on the size of its nuclear infrastructure — must be fairly temporary.

“Let’s establish a mechanism for a number of years. Not 10, not 15 — but I’m willing to live with less,” Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif told the Council on Foreign Relations in September.

America’s original proposal was for a deal lasting at least 20 years, according to Gary Samore, who handled the Iran nuclear portfolio in the Obama White House until 2013. “This is a compromise,” Samore said.

A crucial question is whether that compromise will buy enough time for a more moderate Iranian regime to emerge, one perhaps less likely to race to a nuclear weapons capability once it is free of any commitments it makes to the U.S. and its negotiating partners.

Obama has publicly assured Iran that the U.S. is “not seeking regime change.” But even if he is not promoting that change through force or covert action, he is undoubtedly rooting for it. Iran’s government is openly hostile to America and Israel abroad and brutally repressive at home.

And while U.S. officials say that Iran will never surrender its entire nuclear infrastructure or unlearn its technical expertise, it is possible that it’s anti-American, anti-Israel regime will moderate. Before Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, Tehran was America’s closest Middle East ally. It even had friendly ties with Israel.

Goldenberg argued that the sunset period on the table is enough time for Iran’s 75-year old fundamentalist Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, to pass from the scene. “I think the Supreme Leader does not last 10 or 15 years. So the question is, who comes after him?”

Rather than a policy of regime change, Goldenberg said, “you could call it regime evolution.”

Samore said that some reformers within Iran are promising that the very achievement of a nuclear deal will give them a boost. “Iranians close to the government are whispering to us that a ‘good’ nuclear deal will empower [Iran’s President Hassan] Rouhani to neutralize Khamenei and overcome hard-liner resistance to reform at home and more moderate foreign policy.”

Samore added that Iran’s hard-liners could also denounce a deal and undermine Rouhani. “In other words, I don’t think we can reliably predict the consequences of an agreement on Iran’s domestic politics, and we certainly can’t know what Iran will look like in 10 to 15 years,” Samore said.

A senior Obama administration official concurred: “The notion that they might someday have a better regime in no way affects our negotiations because we can’t rely on that,” said the official.

Some outside experts were even more skeptical. A 10-year time frame would be a “catastrophic mistake,” said Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of two books about Iran.

Iran is “a system permeated by ideology, so Khamenei dying tomorrow is not likely to change the system dramatically.”

Amidror, the former Netanyahu adviser, dismissed the idea that any predetermined time frame for a nuclear deal could buy enough time for a less dangerous regime to emerge in Tehran.

“I don’t understand the question,” he said. “When do bad people become good people? When a time is over — or when they change?”