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BRUSSELS – President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has vowed to act swiftly to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal as long as Iran again complies with it. But that vow is easier said than done.
While Biden’s promise pleased the other signatories to the deal, who were angry that President Trump stepped down two years ago, getting back to the way things were can be impossible, complicated by both Iranian and American politics.
President Trump, even like a lame duck, is moving quickly to increase US sanctions against Iran and sell advanced weapons to his regional enemies – policies that would be difficult for a new president to reverse.
Last week, he asked his advisers for options to launch a military strike against Iran, but they appear to have deterred him. His aides argued that an attack could quickly lead to a bigger war.
Iran, where President Hassan Rouhani faces strong opposition from conservatives in elections scheduled for June 2021, is expected to demand a high price to return to the deal, including the immediate lifting of sanctions imposed by the Trump administration and thousands of millions of dollars in compensation. for them.
Those are demands that Mr. Biden is highly unlikely to meet, especially given the strong opposition from Congress.
Iran has some influence. When Trump took office, Iran had about 102 kilograms, or about 225 pounds, of enriched uranium, the production of which was limited by the 2015 agreement. After the United States withdrew, Iran declared that it was no longer bound by the agreement. and resumed enrichment of uranium to higher levels.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said last week that Iran now had more than 2,440 kilograms, more than eight times the limit set by the 2015 nuclear deal. The “breakout” time for Iran to possibly manufacture a nuclear weapon, an ambition which he denies, is now considerably shorter than a year.
During the campaign, Biden called Trump’s decision to walk away from the agreement “reckless” and said it ended up isolating the United States, not Iran.
“I will offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy,” Biden wrote in a September op-ed for CNN. “If Iran strictly complies with the nuclear deal again, the United States would rejoin the deal as a starting point for follow-up negotiations.”
A week ago, after Biden’s victory, Rouhani welcomed the initiative, calling it “an opportunity” for the United States to “make up for its previous mistakes and return to the path of fulfilling international commitments.”
The choice of the word “offset” was not accidental, said Robert Einhorn, a nuclear arms control negotiator now at the Brookings Institution. Iran says it wants Washington to pay for the billions of dollars in economic losses it suffered when Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran deal in 2018 and reinstated the sanctions it had lifted.
Since then, Trump has racked up more sanctions. This maximum pressure campaign, as the administration has called it, devastated Iran’s economy, but it failed to get Iran back to the negotiating table or reduce its involvement in Iraq, Syria or Lebanon.
The administration is also trying to further limit Iran’s support for delegated militias in those countries. It is selling more sophisticated weapons to Arab monarchies in the Persian Gulf, countries that view Iran as an enemy and have their own regional ambitions, and it is accelerating the transfer of F-35 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates.
Some think Trump will take more kinetic measures, including more sabotage and cyber attacks on Iran’s nuclear or missile programs or even military action, which Israel, Egypt and Gulf allies would likely support.
The presidential transition
“I don’t think the administration is done with the Iran issue,” said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a longtime supporter of a tough policy on Iran. “I think people will run hard for the next three months against Iran, knowing that after January there could be a very different Iran policy.”
Iranian negotiators know that the United States would never provide financial compensation, Einhorn said. “But they can bet on a difficult negotiating position, especially given the dynamics of their upcoming elections.” He suggested that Iran would demand not only the removal of sanctions related to nuclear weapons, but also those imposed for human rights violations, development of ballistic missiles and support for terrorist groups, which a Biden administration would find politically and technically difficult to do.
In the absence of a swift reentry to the nuclear deal, Einhorn said, the parties should work toward an interim deal, in which Iran would reverse a significant portion of its current nuclear build-up in exchange for partial sanctions relief, especially by giving Iran the access to some of their oil revenues now locked in overseas bank accounts. Iran could welcome such an interim deal if it gave the economy a quick boost, especially ahead of the mid-June elections.
But given the complications of the U.S. transition of power, with the requirements for security clearances and Senate confirmation already slowed by Trump’s refusal to admit defeat and cooperate with Biden, top officials may not be in their minds. place very soon. The practical window between the January 20 and June inauguration is likely to be just two to three months, advocating a swiftly constructed “secondary canal” between Washington and Tehran after Biden takes office.
Despite Trump’s lobbying campaign, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has kept the door open for the return of the United States, refusing to completely abandon the nuclear deal, said Ellie Geranmayeh, the Council’s Iran expert. European Foreign Relations.
Iranians who oppose the initial deal argue that the United States has shown that it cannot be trusted, and Iran rejected any negotiations with Trump. But Ayatollah Khamenei gave Rouhani “the green light, the political space to convey these messages to the Biden administration” on Iran’s desire for Washington to return to the agreement, Geranmayeh said.
At the same time, he noted, Rouhani’s hardliners will not want him to “get this victory before the June elections, and will seek to hamper this effort as Republicans will try to block Biden’s,” he said. . Biden could quickly lift a series of sanctions linked to Iran’s nuclear activities, including passing more waivers that allow Iran to sell oil. It could ease travel restrictions for Iranian citizens, increase humanitarian trade by easing banking impediments, and lift sanctions on some key officials, such as Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, the top nuclear negotiator.
But sanctions instituted under the category of counterterrorism and human rights, such as those against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, would be more difficult to overturn, especially since many Democrats also support them. But Ms Geranmayeh said Iran will insist that the United States lift the sanction against the Central Bank of Iran, accused of financing designated terrorist groups, so that it can reuse the world banking system.
If the Iran deal can be reconstituted, Iran has said it is open to talks on other issues, especially regional concerns around Iraq and Syria. But Iran has so far refused to put its missile program on the table, which is already under separate sanctions from the United States and the United Nations.
Some, like Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute in Washington, think Biden should aim higher, for example by proposing to normalize diplomatic relations with Iran. “Reassembling the puzzle of diplomacy between the United States and Iran will be tremendously difficult,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. “But the last few years have shown that not trying will not make the difficulties go away.”
The key, as with all major policies in Iran, is Ayatollah Khamenei, now 81. He regards the United States as a country condemned to “political, civil and moral decline.” He agreed to the nuclear deal because it promised significant economic benefits from the lifting of sanctions, and now he apparently sees his skepticism about the United States as confirmed by Trump’s withdrawal from the pact.
But with the change in US leadership, he again sees the possibility of easing the economic straitjacket imposed by renewed US sanctions.
“Despite Khamenei’s arrogance, a Biden presidency presents both an opportunity and a challenge for Tehran,” wrote Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment. “The opportunity is an opportunity to improve the dying economy of the country; the challenge is that Tehran will no longer be able to effectively use President Donald Trump as a pretext or distraction for its internal repression, economic failure and regional aggression. “
Lara Jakes and Pranshu Verma contributed reports from Washington.
