Eli Lake, Columnist

Iranian Mayhem Is About to Get Worse

An expiring arms embargo underscores the limits of the U.S.’s “maximum pressure” campaign.

October 24, 2019 at 4:30 AM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

A missile on display in Tehran.
Photographer: STR/AFP

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Back in 2015, desperate to reach a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program, U.S. negotiators made a fateful concession: The UN’s conventional-arms embargo on Iran, they agreed, would be lifted in five years.

The costs of that concession, one of the worst mistakes of those negotiations, are about to come due. The embargo is set to expire on Oct. 18, 2020 — and if it does, the situation in the Middle East is likely to get even worse.