February 26, 2021
A survey of American academics dealing with foreign policy found that two-thirds advocate an immediate and unconditional return by Washington to the nuclear deal.
The Middle East Scholar Barometer, based at the University of Maryland, found that 67 percent of the respondents said the foreign policy strategy that was most likely to produce “favorable results” for the US would be President Biden returning “immediately” to the current Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) before negotiating any other conditions with Iran.
Also, in the survey, released February 16, some 75 percent of the experts said the US returning to the deal would reduce the likelihood of Iran getting a nuclear weapon within the next decade.
“That was an overwhelming response,” Shibley Telhami, a Mideast scholar and the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, told Newsweek. Telhami developed the survey.
“If you reopen the deal, there are two issues that are problematic,” said Telhami. The first is that the US would need to negotiate the agreement with allies who are already vested in the deal, including some of Amer-ica’s closest European partners.
The second issue concerns the “fear” that ever reaching a deal again would become impossible, said Telhami. He added that postponing the negotiation process opens up the possibility of “military escalation,” of which the academic community is largely opposed. Only 1 percent of those surveyed supported military action against Iran.
The survey was conducted from February 8 to 15 as a joint project between the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, which Telhami directs, and the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University. A non-random sample of 521 experts participated, providing perspective on how their opinions on current approaches to Middle East policy compare.
All experts were members of either the Middle East Studies Association or the Middle East and North Africa section of the American Political Science Association, two of the leading academic groups on the study of the Middle East.
Only 4 percent of the respondents were in favor of continuing the “maximum pressure” strategy, which Telhami said harmfully affects the people of Iran more than the country’s nuclear program.