So much has been written and said about the uranium enrichment aspect of the 14-month nuclear negotiation with Iran that it is hard to look at it with fresh eyes, and starting from first principles. Nonetheless what follows is an attempt to do so. It suggests that the US and Iran are closer on enrichment than once seemed possible, but are still at risk of failing to find common ground in the course of the extension agreed a week ago.
From an international legal perspective the text that matters is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran deposited its last instrument of ratification on 5 March 1970, the same day as the deposit of the US instruments. Under the NPT the US is a “Nuclear Weapon State,” Iran a “Non-Nuclear Weapon State” (NNWS).
The NPT does not prohibit the acquisition of enrichment technology by NNWS. Nor does it impose any limit on the size or number of NNWS enrichment facilities. It merely requires NNWS to use that technology exclusively for peaceful purposes, and to place all the nuclear material fed into and produced by such facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.
In the current negotiation, Iran has assured the US that it takes its NPT obligations very seriously. It has also reaffirmed its intention to use enrichment technology exclusively for peaceful purposes, and to continue to implement the NPT safeguards agreement that it concluded in 1975.
Some people assume that such assurances are worthless. They point to the breaches of the NPT safeguards agreement that occurred between approximately1991 and 2003. However, none of those breaches amounted to evidence of an intention to use enrichment for non-peaceful purposes. And US intelligence has yet to come across any such evidence; suspicion of Iranian nuclear weapon intent has rested on inference, not evidence. States, like people, can make mistakes and then resolve not to repeat them.
There are also several resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council (UNSC) between 2006 and 2010 that make legal demands of Iran. But none of them imposes limits on the size and number of Iranian enrichment facilities. Still less do any of them outlaw Iranian possession of enrichment technology for peaceful purposes. One of them requires Iran to cooperate with the IAEA to resolve concern that Iran has engaged in research into nuclear weapon-related technologies. Iran has been doing that since November 2013, albeit with increasing hesitancy.
In the Iranian case another perspective is as important as the legal perspective; it is the confidence-building perspective. This was crucial to an attempt to resolve the problem peacefully in the wake of the IAEA Director General reporting the safeguards breaches to which reference is made above, because these breaches had undermined confidence in Iran’s peaceful intentions.
In the autumn of 2003, Iran volunteered, in the interest of confidence-building, to go beyond the requirements of its NPT safeguards agreement and make available to the IAEA the information and access required by the Additional Protocol (AP). Tehran also undertook to suspend activity at its only enrichment facility while it negotiated longer-term confidence-building measures with the UK, France and Germany (E3). The Iranians implemented these short-term measures scrupulously and ceased doing so only after they had grasped that nothing less than renunciation of the enrichment option would satisfy the E3.
In the current negotiation, various reports suggest that Iran has so far volunteered to renew application of the AP, de facto initially and later de jure; to accept limits on the size and number of its enrichment facilities during a confidence-building period; to refrain from producing uranium enriched to more than 5% U235; to convert some of its under 5% U235 uranium (LEU) into forms in which it would not be readily available as feed material; and to send the rest of its LEU stock to Russia for use in the fuel that the Rosatom corporation is supplying to the power reactor at Bushehr. Iran’s negotiators also have reportedly suggested that they are ready to extend the Bushehr fuel supply contract well beyond 2021.
In parallel, Iran has negotiated that Rosatom will help build two further power reactors and will supply them with fuel throughout their operating lives.
In confidence-building terms, this amounts to an impressive package. With only 10,000 IR-1 centrifuges in operation in only one facility, and its LEU stock unavailable to serve as feed material, Iran would need at least six months to produce enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for one nuclear device. With only 8000 IR-1s and no LEU feed, Iran would need at least eight months.
And if the Bushehr supply contract were extended to 2031, Iran would only need to consider increasing the available quantity of separative work units (a measure of centrifuge output) in the late 2020s.
In other words, Iran is offering a package that exceeds its NPT obligations by a wide margin. IAEA inspectors would be able to acquire confidence that there are no undeclared nuclear activities or material in Iran. The international community would know that it had six to eight months at least to react to any sign of Iranian misuse of its enrichment capacity for non-peaceful purposes.
So why in Vienna did it seem that this package is not enough for the US? That is for representatives of the US administration to explain. Past statements suggest that they will say that they need certainty that Iran will be incapable of producing (“cannot”) even one nuclear weapon.
That may sound reasonable but is in fact an unrealistic goal. It would require Iran not only to destroy all its centrifuges but also to wipe the minds of its engineers clean of all their knowledge and experience of enrichment technology. It also puts the negotiation at risk of the same fate as the 2003-5 E3 negotiation, because Iran is unready to build confidence by closing down its enrichment program. And it runs counter to the spirit of the NPT, since the NPT bases nuclear non-proliferation on self-restraint, political will, and deterrence through verification, not on nuclear technology surrender.
If instead the administration admits that it cannot literally “close all pathways” to a weapon but claims that it needs at least 12 months to react to any break-out attempt, then they should be asked why six to eight months would not be enough.
It is self-evident that 12 months of additional sanctions would not cause Iran to abandon a break-out attempt. Eight years of sanctions have failed to persuade Iran to re-suspend enrichment. Post-1918 history is littered with failed sanctions policies.
On the other hand, 12 months are more than are needed to get UN Security Council approval for the use of force to prevent break-out and to act on it—or for a coalition of the willing to form in the unlikely event of Russia or China threatening to veto a UNSC resolution. In 1990, only six months were needed for the US to gain approval for and prepare a massive operation to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. As recently as last April, Secretary John Kerry was formulating the goal as “six to 12 months.”
This analysis will be misconstrued by some as an apologia for Iran. Others will realize, I hope, that it is an attempt to clarify the progress that has been made on enrichment over the last 12 months; to explain why the current Iranian offer is reasonable from a legal and from a confidence-building perspective; and to counter the pernicious influence on US negotiating goals of people who want the bar set so high that Iran will refuse the jump.
]]>by Ariane Tabatabai
With the November 24 deadline for a comprehensive deal between world powers and Iran on the country’s nuclear program now behind us, the negotiating teams have returned to their capitals to debate next steps. They will reconvene in Oman in early December to continue their efforts to strike a deal in seven months.
The extension represents both good and bad news. It shows once again that the parties truly want a final deal and that they are ready to take up the task. At the same time, the prolonged timeframe for a deal won’t be welcomed by various factions back home, who now have more time and room to derail the process altogether.
Indeed, as the negotiating teams were working around the clock to try to bridge the remaining gaps, various groups in Tehran and Washington, as well as in Tel Aviv and Riyadh, were working to get their own concerns onto the negotiating table.
In the United States, some influential members of Congress believe that Iran is in a comfortable position, not really seeking a solution but rather an indefinite extension of the talks to get sanctions relief. But as noted by Secretary of State John Kerry from Vienna on the day the extension was announced, Iran has been complying with the interim deal concluded in November 2013. In fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a report the same day showing that key elements of the Iranian nuclear program remain suspended. Tehran, then, is not just kicking the can down the road.
Powerful Iranian figures also have concerns about the extension. They believe that the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), signed last year in Geneva, has effectively suspended important parts of the country’s nuclear program without giving Iran much back in return. However, they are also ignoring an important element of the process: The JPOA has granted Tehran access to some of its frozen assets, as it slowly prepares to reopen its market to international business, and leave its political isolation.
Over the next few months, critics on all sides will become louder, especially as Tehran and Washington continue to engage in cordial settings, raising concerns among some of their respective key constituencies.
The remaining key issues—the number of centrifuges Iran will be able to keep and operate, the timeframe of the deal, and sanctions relief—will likely be the main points of contention for these constituencies.
Other challenges could also arise in the process, including the interpretation of the JPOA over the next several months and the grey areas it includes. For instance, a couple of weeks prior to the deadline, Iran began to feed its IR-5 centrifuges (currently non-operational) with Uranium Hexafluoride, which caused a serious debate among nuclear experts. According to David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security, this act was a violation of the interim deal. Others, however, including Jeffrey Lewis at the Monterey Institute, rejected the charge, stating that the JPOA does in fact allow Iran to pursue research and development, including this activity. Expectedly, Iran denied that it had failed to uphold its end of the bargain and the US State Department ultimately backed up the Iranian position.
However, while key components of the Iranian program, including the installation of new centrifuges or further work on the Arak heavy water reactor, are suspended under the JPOA, Tehran continues its research and development. This means that a new generation of centrifuges could add fuel to the fire. Ideally, Iran would refrain from such activities while the talks are ongoing. But while such a step would be received positively on the international stage, thereby aiding the confidence-building process, domestically, it would backfire. It would provide conservatives and other hard-liners in Tehran with more ammunition to shoot at the negotiating team and the government generally.
Indeed, balancing international and domestic priorities and expectations is going to constitute a major challenge for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as the talks continue. If his government is to make any concessions, it needs to show its domestic constituencies that it is not giving up and still making progress on the nuclear program.
The good news is that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the highest authority in Iran, continues to back the negotiating process. He reiterated his support for the negotiators led by Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on Nov. 25, the day after the deadline was missed, saying that Zarif and his team remained standing even as the West tried to force them to kneel. This crucial statement, which reiterated his deep mistrust of the West, came amid increasing pressure from hard-liners in Tehran and will serve in quieting them down for a while.
But as they key countries of Iran and the United States continue to engage, the prospect of prolonged détente, and especially rapprochement between the two long-time adversaries will result in the unity of four unlikely stakeholders—hard-liners in Tehran and Washington, as well as Riyadh and Tel Aviv—in opposing improved US-Iran relations, for their own reasons.
Meanwhile, the stakes are higher than ever. President Obama, who will be dealing with a Republican-dominated Congress as of January, needs a major foreign policy achievement before his term is up in 2016. In the meantime, his ability to effectively “defeat and ultimately destroy” Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria—another defining element of is presidential legacy—will inevitably be influenced by the outcome of the talks. On the Iranian side, by the new deadline of July 1, 2015, the Iranian president will have spent the better half of his first term almost entirely focused on the nuclear issue, essentially rendered unable to seriously advance other items on his agenda.
In other words, both presidents have been banking on a historic deal, but while the extension of the talks allows Tehran and the West to continue engaging, thereby building the trust necessary for a final accord, it also means more time and room for detractors to sabotage the process.
Ariane Tabatabai is an Associate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and a columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
It’s too early to tell all there is to be told about the negotiations in Vienna between the so-called P5+1 and Iran on the latter’s nuclear program. The “telling” by each and every participant of what happened will surely take place in the next several days, and then better-informed assessments can be made. As of now, we know that the talks did not reach agreement by the November 24 deadline—a year after the interim Joint Plan of Action was agreed—and that the negotiators are aiming for a political agreement no later than next March and a comprehensive deal by June 30.
This is better than having the talks collapse. Better still would have been a provisional interim fill-in-the-blanks memorandum of headings of agreement that is so often put out in international diplomacy when negotiations hit a roadblock but neither side would have its interests served by declaring failure.
An example of failing either to set a new deadline or to issue a “fill in the blanks” agreement was vividly provided by President Bill Clinton’s declaration at the end of the abortive Camp David talks in December 2000. He simply declared the talks on an Israeli-Palestinian settlement as having broken down, rather than saying: progress has been made, here are areas of agreement, here is the timetable for the talks to continue, blah, blah. I was at dinner in Tel Aviv with a group of other American Middle East specialists and Israel’s elder statesman, Shimon Peres, when the news came through. We were all nonplussed that Clinton had not followed the tried and true method of pushing off hard issues until talks would be resumed, at some level, at a “date certain,” which had been the custom on this diplomacy since at least 1981. One result was such disappointment among Palestinians that the second intifada erupted, producing great suffering on all sides and a setback for whatever prospects for peace existed. Poor diplomacy had a tragic outcome.
This example calls for a comparison of today’s circumstances with past diplomatic negotiations of high importance and struggles over difficult issues. Each, it should be understood, is unique, but there are some common factors.
Optimism
The first is the good news that I have already presented: the talks in Vienna did not “break down” and no one walked away from the table in a huff. The other good news is that the official representatives of the two most important negotiators, the United States and Iran, clearly want to reach an agreement that will meet both of their legitimate security, economic, and other interests. Left to themselves, they would probably have had a deal signed, sealed, and delivered this past weekend if not before. But they have not been “left to themselves,” nor will they be, as I will discuss below.
Further good news is that all the issues involving Iran’s nuclear program have now been so masticated by all the parties that they are virtually pulp. If anything is still hidden, it is hard to imagine, other than in the minds of conspiracy theorists who, alas, exist in abundance on any issue involving the Middle East. A deal to be cut on specifics? Yes. New factors to consider? Highly unlikely.
Even more good news is that the United States and the other P5+1 countries (US, UK, Russia, China, France plus Germany), have got to know much better than before their official Iranian counterparts and overall Iranian interests, perspectives, and thinking (US officials, long chary of being seen in the same room with “an Iranian,” lag behind the others in this regard). We can hope that this learning process has also taken place on the Iranian side. This does not mean that the actual means whereby Iran takes decisions—nominally, at least, in the hands of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei—is any less opaque. But even so, there is surely greater understanding of one another—one of the key objectives of just about any diplomatic process.
A partial precedent can be found in US-Soviet arms control and other negotiations during the Cold War. The details of these negotiations were important, or so both sides believed, especially what had to be a primarily symbolic fixation with the numbers of missile launchers and “throw-weight.” This highly charged political preoccupation took place even though the utter destruction of both sides would be guaranteed in a nuclear war. Yet even with great disparities in these numbers, neither side would have been prepared to risk moving even closer to the brink of conflict. Both US and Soviet leaders came to realize that the most important benefit of the talks was the talking, and that they had to improve their political relationship or risk major if not catastrophic loss on both sides. The simple act of talking proved to be a major factor in the eventual end of the Cold War.
The parallel with the Iran talks is that the process itself—including the fact that it is now legitimate to talk with the “Devil” on the other side—has permitted, even if tacitly, greater understanding that the West and Iran have, in contrast to their differences, at least some complementary if not common interests. For the US and Iran, these include freedom of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz; counter-piracy; opposition to Islamic State (ISIS or IS); stability in Afghanistan; opposition to the drug trade, al-Qaeda, Taliban and terrorism; and at least a modus vivendi in regard to Iraq. This does not mean that the US and Iran will see eye-to-eye on all of these issues, but they do constitute a significant agenda, against which the fine details of getting a perfect nuclear agreement (from each side’s perspective) must be measured.
Pessimism
There is also bad news, however, including in the precedents, or partial precedents, of other negotiations. As already noted, negotiations over the fate of the West Bank and Gaza have been going on since May 1979 (I was the White House member of the first US negotiating team), and, while some progress has been made, the issues today look remarkably like they did 37 years ago.
Negotiations following the 1953 armistice in the Korean War have also been going on, with fits and starts, for 61 years. The negotiations over the Vietnam War (the US phase of it) dragged on for years and involved even what in retrospect seem to have been idiocies like arguments over the “shape of the table.” They came to a conclusion only when the US decided it was time to get out—i.e., the North Vietnamese successfully waited us out. Negotiations over Kashmir have also been going on, intermittently, since the 1947 partition of India. The OSCE-led talks on Nagorno-Karabakh (Armenia versus Azerbaijan) have gone on for about two decades, under the nominal chairmanship of France, Russia, and the United States. All this diplomatic activity relates to a small group of what are now called “frozen conflicts,” where negotiations go on ad infinitum but without a lot of further harm done.
But with the exception of the Vietnam talks, all the other dragged-out talking has taken place against the background of relatively stable situations. Talks on Korea go nowhere, but fighting only takes place in small bursts and is not significant. Even regarding the Palestinians, fighting takes place from time to time, including major fighting, but failure to get a permanent end of hostilities does not lead to a fundamental breakdown of “stability” in the Middle East, due to the tacit agreement of all outside powers.
Dangers of Delay
The talks on the Iranian nuclear program, due to restart in December, are different. While they are dragging along, things happen. Sanctions continue and could even be increased on Iran, especially with so many “out for blood” members of the incoming 114th US Congress. Whether this added pressure will get the US a better deal is debatable, but further suffering for the Iranian people, already far out of proportion to anything bad that Iran has done, will just get worse. Iran may also choose to press forward with uranium enrichment, making a later deal somewhat—who knows how much—more difficult to conclude and verify. Israel will have calculations of its own to make about what Iran is up to and whether it should seriously consider the use of force. And chances for US-Iranian cooperation against IS will diminish.
So time is not on the side of an agreement, and any prospects of Iranian-Western cooperation on other serious regional matters have been further put off—a high cost for all concerned.
Due to the contentious domestic politics on both sides, the risks are even greater. In Iran, there are already pressures from the clerical right and from some other nationalists to undercut both the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, and the lead negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, both of whom, in these people’s eyes, are now tainted. We can expect further pressures against a deal from this quarter.
The matter is at least as bad and probably worse on the Western side—more particularly, on the US side. The new Congress has already been mentioned. But one reason for consideration of that factor is that, on the P5+1 side of the table, there have not just been six countries but eight, two invisible but very much present, and they are second and third in importance at the table only behind the US itself: Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Both countries are determined to prevent any realistic agreement with Iran on its nuclear program, even if declared by President Barack Obama, in his judgment, to satisfy fully the security interests of both the United States and its allies and partners, including Israel and the Gulf Arabs. For them, in fact, the issue is not just about Iran’s nuclear program, but also about the very idea of Iran being readmitted into international society. For the Sunni Arabs, it is partly about the struggle with the region’s Shi’as, including in President Bashar Assad’s Syria but most particularly in Iran. And for all of these players, there is also a critical geopolitical competition, including vying for US friendship while opposing Iran’s reemergence as another regional player.
The United States does not share any of these interests regarding Sunni vs. Shi’a or geopolitical competitions among regional countries. Our interests are to foster stability in the region, promote security, including against any further proliferation of nuclear weapons (beginning with Iran), and to help counter the virus of Islamist fundamentalism. On the last-named, unfortunately, the US still does not get the cooperation it needs, especially from Saudi Arabia, whose citizens have played such an instrumental role in exporting the ideas, money, and arms that sustain IS.
Thus it is to be deeply regretted, certainly by all the governments formally represented in the P5+1, that efforts to conclude the talks have been put off. The enemies of agreement, on both sides, have gained time to continue their efforts to prevent an agreement—enemies both in Iran and especially in the United States, with the heavy pressures from the Arab oil lobby and the Israeli lobby in the US Congress.
What happens now in Iran can only be determined by the Iranians. What happens with the P5+1 will depend, more than anything else, on the willingness and political courage of President Obama to persevere and say “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” to the Gulf Arab states, Israel, and their allies in the United States, and do what he is paid to do: promote the interests and security of the United States of America.
]]>With the rumored extension of the negotiations in Vienna on Iran’s nuclear program hanging in the air, a group of legislators and right-wing thinkers gathered on Capitol Hill yesterday to talk about what they believe a comprehensive deal with Iran should entail.
Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) told the assembled crowd that he was there [...]]]>
With the rumored extension of the negotiations in Vienna on Iran’s nuclear program hanging in the air, a group of legislators and right-wing thinkers gathered on Capitol Hill yesterday to talk about what they believe a comprehensive deal with Iran should entail.
Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) told the assembled crowd that he was there to “ring the alarm” about the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran, and, indeed, that alarm rang over and over again throughout the event. The afternoon’s speakers were clear on one thing: nothing short of total Iranian capitulation would be an acceptable outcome to the talks, and even that would really only be acceptable if it came in the aftermath of regime change in Tehran. They were decidedly less clear as to how that outcome might be achieved.
The forum, “High Standards and High Stakes: Defining Terms of an Acceptable Iran Nuclear Deal,” was sponsored by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) (successor to the now-defunct Project for the New American Century), the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), which specializes in finding Democrats who agree with the neoconservative agenda when it comes to Iran. The speakers broadly agreed on the need to maintain and even increase sanctions to encourage the Iranians to negotiate, which seemingly ignores the fact that the Iranians are already negotiating and that the sanctions are in place precisely so that they can be traded away in exchange for Iranian concessions.
Among the materials distributed at the session was a paper by a group called the “Iran Task Force,” which has a few members in common with the “Iran Task Force” formed within the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs but nonetheless seems to be a different group. The paper was titled, “Parameters of an Acceptable Agreement,” though it might better have been called “Parameters of a Deal That Would Certainly Be Rejected by Iran.”
The task force’s “acceptable agreement” requires, among other items, the complete dismantling of Iran’s enrichment capabilities and extraordinary monitoring requirements that would remain in place permanently. Again, this would not be a deal so much as it would be unconditional surrender by the Iranians, and would impose restrictions on Iran that even retired Israeli generals don’t seem to believe are necessary. If this is how the “Iran Task Force” defines an “acceptable agreement,” it seems fair to ask if they want any agreement at all.
One of the legislators who spoke at the forum was Brad Sherman (D-CA), who has endorsed the Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, (aka MEK, MKO, PMOI and NCRI), which lobbied itself off the US terrorist organizations list in 2012, and whose desire for regime change is quite explicit.
Congressman Sherman offered some of the most colorful (or maybe terrifying) remarks. For example, he declared that Iran’s “breakout” period must be “years,” which would presumably involve subjecting all of Iran’s nuclear scientists to some kind of amnesia ray to make them unlearn what they already know about enriching uranium. He then argued that Iran’s ultimate goal was not a nuclear missile, but a device that could be smuggled into a major city and detonated without directly implicating Tehran. Most Iran hawks assume (based on questionable evidence) that Iran’s nuclear program is ipso facto a nuclear weapons program. But Sherman apparently believes that Iran doesn’t only crave a nuclear weapon, but will obviously use that weapon once it’s built to bring destruction upon the world. Sherman closed by proposing that the United States arm Israel with advanced “bunker buster” bombs and surplus B-52 bombers, which would surely ensure peace in that region.
After the legislators had their say, it was time for the expert panel, featuring FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, Ray Takeyh from the Council on Foreign Relations, and Stephen Rademaker from the BPC. Gerecht argued that Iran has a “religious” need to acquire nuclear weapons, which might come as a shock to the Iranian religious establishment, and criticized the Obama administration’s unwillingness to apply “real” economic pressure to force Iranian concessions. He never got around to describing what “real” economic pressure looks like, or how much different it could be from what Iran is currently experiencing. It was also unclear why, if Iran does have such a strong need to develop a nuclear weapon, and if it hasn’t yet felt any “real” economic pressure, it agreed to, and has by all accounts complied with, the terms of the interim Joint Plan of Action reached in Geneva last year.
But it was Rademaker who came closest to openly admitting the theme that underpins the hawks’ entire approach to these talks: that no nuclear deal will ever be acceptable without regime change. He criticized last year’s historic deal for its promise that a comprehensive deal would remain in place for a specified, limited duration, and that Iran would be treated as any other Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signatory at the conclusion of the deal. Rademaker later compared Iran to Brazil and Argentina, whose nuclear programs were both abandoned after their military regimes gave way to democratic governments. At that point the suggestion that regime change, which didn’t exactly work out the way the US envisioned in Iran (1953) and Iraq (2003), must precede any normalization of Iran’s nuclear program was obvious.
]]>by Adnan Tabatabai
The negotiations in Vienna between world powers and Iran over its nuclear program are in the home stretch even if the July 20 deadline to reach a final deal set by last year’s interim accord will not be met.
Few expected a deal to be reached so quickly, less than [...]]]>
by Adnan Tabatabai
The negotiations in Vienna between world powers and Iran over its nuclear program are in the home stretch even if the July 20 deadline to reach a final deal set by last year’s interim accord will not be met.
Few expected a deal to be reached so quickly, less than one year after last year’s historic agreement, the Joint Plan of Action. Experts argued early on that there would be an extension. Even Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araqchi said on July 12 that “there is a possibility of extending the talks for a few days or a few weeks if progress is made.”
While the possibility of a final deal being reached any time soon is far from guaranteed, one thing is certain: the Rouhani government’s most important task will be effectively framing the outcome of these talks at home.
Zarif Makes Iran’s Case
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and his team made two significant moves in presenting Iran’s position more clearly than ever before during this marathon round of talks, which began on July 2.
First, Zarif offered details, for the first time, about Iran’s proposal in an interview with the New York Times.
Second, Zarif’s team published a document clearly outlining Iran’s view of its practical needs for its nuclear program in English, which it distributed through social media.
Prior to this latest round of talks, Zarif also again emphasized his country’s willingness to reach a comprehensive agreement with world powers in a video message released by the Foreign Ministry.
This commitment is based on a number of domestic incentives.
In order to gain more strength in his critical second year in office, President Hassan Rouhani needs a policy success story. Solving the conflict over Iran’s nuclear program was among his top campaign promises, and so far he has yet to achieve any of them.
A nuclear deal would embolden him to push for ambitious policy decisions to pursue his other campaign promises.
Rouhani — to use his own words — has to “break” the devastating sanctions imposed on Iran before any meaningful economic reconstruction and development can be implemented.
With a nuclear deal in his pocket, Rouhani could begin to counter Iranian hard-liners’ and conservatives’ deep-rooted scepticism towards the West. Indeed, a nuclear deal would fly in the face of those who argue that the West cannot be trusted. Rouhani could prove that moderation and reconciliation, when strategically applied, can be extremely beneficial.
A no-deal scenario, one could therefore conclude, would considerably weaken Rouhani while strengthening his opponents at home. But this train of thought is highly simplistic.
Framing the Outcome
Regardless of what these negotiations lead to, more than half the battle will involve controlling how the outcome is framed and perceived at home.
Rouhani and Zarif will have to respond to two forms of criticism: factual and ideological.
The factual criticism will be concerned with the actual details of the negotiations — particularly those determining the scope and future prospects of Iran’s nuclear program.
The ideological criticism will be related to Zarif’s negotiating strategy. For Iran’s far-right principlist faction, Zarif’s reconciliatory approach toward world powers is not in line with Iran’s revolutionary ideals.
Many of them former supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, these parliamentarians and archconservative clerics prefer a more confrontational foreign policy approach through which Iran maintains its position of resistance, is the main regional powerhouse and pursues its nuclear program without seeking approval from the international community.
The latter dimension was stressed in a follow-up meeting of the “We’re concerned” conference in Tehran, which I discussed in May. The very same figures who launched the first event gathered again in a “Red lines” session July 15 to set clear limits on what is and is not negotiable.
In many ways, these hard-liners resemble hawks in the US Congress. Both groups are trying hard to impose themselves into the negotiating process and express their discontent at being side-lined through emphatic opposition to reconciliation and prospects for normalized relations.
In fact, deal or no deal, Rouhani and Zarif will have to convince critics at home that they safeguarded Iran’s national interests — especially in terms of scientific progress and security — and maintained Iran’s position as an important regional actor.
Successfully framing the post-negotiations environment will mean that neither Rouhani nor Zarif will be able to maintain their considerable political capital even in a no-deal scenario.
A “Win-Win” for the Supreme Leader
Rouhani and Zarif have not only proven themselves as adept negotiators (Rouhani was Iran’s chief negotiator from 2003-05), they have also been skilfully manoeuvring Iran’s domestic political scene in the following ways:
“Khamenei’s personal win-win,” as a Tehran-based political analyst recently told me, would also eliminate a lot of pressure from the Supreme Leader’s shoulders, which — as the past 25 years have shown — has always led to less domestic turmoil.
Indeed, when under pressure, Supreme Leader Khamenei approves tighter security measures. Not only was this the case during the 2009 post-election crisis when crackdowns on protests and the arrests of prominent critics escalated, but also during the final year of the Ahmadinejad presidency when some of his aides were verbally and, in the case of Ali Akbar Javanfekr, even physically attacked.
Thus, Iran’s negotiating partners should keep in mind that while Zarif’s negotiating team is committed to achieving a comprehensive agreement, and Rouhani would gain considerable political clout in the event of one, it would be wrong to operate on the assumption that they are desperate for it. Their careers do not depend on the outcome of the talks.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Sixty-one percent of the American public prefers a deal permitting Iran to continue limited uranium enrichment and imposing intrusive inspections on its nuclear facilities in exchange for some sanctions relief, according to a unique new survey released here Tuesday.
In contrast to previous polling on attitudes toward Iran’s nuclear program, the survey, conducted [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Sixty-one percent of the American public prefers a deal permitting Iran to continue limited uranium enrichment and imposing intrusive inspections on its nuclear facilities in exchange for some sanctions relief, according to a unique new survey released here Tuesday.
In contrast to previous polling on attitudes toward Iran’s nuclear program, the survey, conducted by the Program for Public Consultation and the Center for International & Security Studies at the University of Maryland between June 18 and July 7, also found no significant differences between self-identified Republicans and Democrats on the issue.
The poll, which was released as negotiations between Iran and six world powers intensified in Vienna in advance of the July 20 deadline for an agreement, was distinct in the level of detail provided to the respondents before they ultimately had to choose between “a) making a deal that allows Iran to enrich but only to a low level, provides more intrusive inspections and gradually lifts some sanctions; [and] b) not continuing the current negotiations, imposing more sanctions, and pressing Iran to agree to end all uranium enrichment.”
As noted by George Perkovich, who heads the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the survey methodology “modeled a rational thought process” much more rational than that which can normally be found in the US government. “Most members of Congress don’t spend much time on this except when they meet with someone who’s writing a check,” he said at the survey’s release.
Nonetheless, he and Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist at the Brookings Institution, agreed that the survey’s findings suggests that, if indeed a deal is reached with Iran, the Obama administration will be in a good position to sell it.
This “Citizen Cabinet” method simulated the policy-making process: respondents were given briefings on the subject and arguments — both for and against — the two options before they were asked to make a final recommendation.
The briefings and arguments were vetted in advance by independent experts and Congressional staffers from both sides of the aisle, according to Steven Kull, the Program’s director, to ensure as much accuracy and balance as possible within the US political context. You can judge this for yourself by examining the study and its methodology (beginning on p. 5). More than one staffer, Kull said Tuesday at a press briefing, commented that the respondents “are going to know more than their Member (of Congress) knows” after reviewing the material.
“At this point, the public doesn’t have a clear idea,” said Kull. “[This survey] tells us what would happen if we had a bigger debate,…and people had more information.”
All of the briefing materials were provided to respondents via the Internet, and access was arranged for those who lacked it. According to Kull, only 16 out of the 748 randomly selected respondents did not complete the exercise, which also required participants to assess each of the arguments separately for their persuasiveness before making a final policy choice. I won’t bore you with further details about the methodology, but here are the main findings:
Still, it’s worth noting that the numbers who prefer a deal over increased sanctions are not so very different from those taken last November when the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) was being negotiated between the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, China, and Russia plus Germany) and Iran in Geneva. Sixty-four percent of respondents in an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted a week before the Geneva accord said they supported “an agreement in which the United States and other countries would lift some of their economic sanctions against Iran, in exchange for Iran restricting its nuclear program in a way that makes it harder to produce nuclear weapons.” Thirty percent were opposed.
A second poll taken by CNN on the eve of the agreement found 56 percent of respondents in favor of “an interim deal that would ease some …economic sanctions and in exchange require Iran to accept major restrictions on its nuclear program but not end it completely and submit to greater international inspection of its nuclear facilities.” Thirty-nine percent opposed. In that poll, however, there was a much more significant gap between Republican and Democratic respondents than that found in the survey released Tuesday. While 66% of Democrats supported such a deal in the CNN poll; only 45% of Republicans did.
In addition to the questions about a possible nuclear deal, the new survey asked respondents a number of other pertinent questions after they completed the briefings and made their final recommendations on the nuclear negotiations:
On possible confidence-building bilateral measures, the survey found that:
In responding to the individual arguments made in the survey for and against a deal with Iran, Republicans generally tended to be somewhat more hawkish than Democrats, although independents tended to be substantially more so. More significant partisan differences appeared in their opinions about Iran’s government: 40% of Republicans said they held a “very unfavorable view” of Tehran, compared to 24% of Democrats and 27% of Republicans. Perhaps the most striking difference emerged on the questions regarding the compatibility of the Islamic world and the West: while 62% of Republicans said they considered conflict between the two inevitable, only 33% of Democrats agreed with that view.
Photo: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, US Secretary of State John Kerry shake hands after world powers reached an interim agreement with Iran over its nuclear program on Nov. 24, 2013 in Geneva. Credit: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
]]>by Derek Davison
American sanctions on Iran: what have they accomplished? There seems to be little dispute that the sanctions have hurt the Iranian economy, the oil revenues of which have been drastically cut, not to mention Iran’s double-digit inflation, and its lack of access to SWIFT, the network that facilitates [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
American sanctions on Iran: what have they accomplished? There seems to be little dispute that the sanctions have hurt the Iranian economy, the oil revenues of which have been drastically cut, not to mention Iran’s double-digit inflation, and its lack of access to SWIFT, the network that facilitates most of the world’s international banking transactions. The conventional wisdom, especially here in DC, is that the economic hardship imposed by these sanctions has led to the current negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, by creating the conditions under which moderate Hassan Rouhani could be elected president of Iran, or by forcing Rouhani to come to the negotiating table to get them eased, or both. Trita Parsi, President of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), opposed this notion in May, noting that Rouhani’s election was driven by a desire for reform and not by economic hardship, and that the resumption of talks was spurred by diplomatic overtures from Washington to Tehran. His argument is bolstered by Iran’s pursuit of a negotiated settlement with the United States years before the strongest nuclear sanctions were imposed.
Yet much of the DC foreign policy establishment, especially hawks and neoconservatives, has endorsed sanctioning Iran, in growing degrees, even while doubting the sanctions ability to get Iran to abandon its alleged nuclear aspirations. As the negotiations in Vienna get ever closer to the July 20 deadline imposed by last November’s Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), hardliners in Congress and the neocon establishment are insisting that there be no sanctions relief unless Iran not only dismantles its entire uranium enrichment apparatus, but also does away with its ballistic missile program, ends its “support for international terrorism,” and agrees to uniquely intrusive monitoring requirements for at least 20 years. If those demands, none of which can be acceptable to the Iranians, somehow didn’t scuttle the deal, the neocons would probably require an apology for the Battle of Thermopylae.
While some Iran hawks might prefer military action either instead of or in addition to the sanctions, others appear more concerned with punishing Iran — and, whether they want to or not, Iranians – than reducing the chances of military conflict. Indeed, just this week the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake wrote a sarcastic “Thanks Obama!” piece bemoaning and overemphasizing whatever slight improvement the JPOA’s easing of sanctions has spurred in Iran’s limping economy, based on a report by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Roubini Global economics. If US sanctions on Iran were indeed aimed at solving the conflict over its nuclear program through diplomacy rather than military force, then the tiny improvement in Iran’s economy following the interim nuclear deal should not be worrisome. Rather, it’s an indicator that incentives are more useful in achieving objectives than punishments; remember, the Iranians are still at the negotiating table where, slowly or not, progress is being made.
Everybody argues about what the sanctions have or have not done to Iran’s economy, but few seem interested in what they may be doing to America’s economy. That’s where a new report by NIAC, “Losing Billions: The Cost of Iran Sanctions to the U.S. Economy,” comes in. Using an economic model called the “gravity model of trade,” NIAC estimates that between 1995 and 2012 the US economy lost, at a minimum, between $134.7 and $175.3 billion in revenue that it could have earned via bilateral trade with Iran (the figures for several European countries are actually larger, relative to the size of their respective economies).
Using the US Department of Commerce’s calculations for the number of jobs created per additional billion dollars in exports, NIAC estimates that sanctions on Iran have cost the US somewhere between 51,043 and 66,436 job opportunities per year over the same period, on average. Any improvement in Iran’s economy over its real world 1995-2012 performance (which could be expected in the absence of sanctions) would push these estimates higher.
Though NIAC’s overarching point (sanctions on Iran have blown back on the US economy) is sound, there are reasons to be skeptical of their exact figures. The gravity model of trade predicts bilateral trade based on the size of the two economies and the distance between the two nations, just as the actual theory of gravity estimates the attraction between two bodies based on their masses and the distance between them. It also incorporates additional variables like past colonial relationships, contiguous borders between the two nations, and linguistic affinities. The report then compares Iran’s trade volume with other countries to estimate how much trade it would have done with America in the absence of sanctions. But Kimberly Elliott, co-author of one of the academic studies underpinning the gravity model, told Al-Monitor that this method doesn’t include the extent to which any lost trade between the US and Iran has been offset by increased trade between the US and other nations. The Brookings Institution’s Barry Bosworth also noted that the US has been a weak exporter in general for much of the period that NIAC was studying, and so the actual impact of sanctions on the US economy may be less than the theoretical impact. The estimates also don’t take into account the particular complications in the US-Iran relationship; Washington didn’t suddenly cut diplomatic and economic ties with Tehran in 1995, so assuming, as the study does, more-or-less normal trade relations between the two countries over the period 1995-2012 seems problematic. Even absent formal sanctions, it’s unlikely that American and Iranian trade ties would have been that close.
Complicating factors aside, there is no denying that American sanctions on Iran have had a drag effect on America’s economy. NIAC’s report not only reminds us of that easily-forgotten fact, it also puts the dollar figure of that drag into some kind of a ballpark. Though NIAC makes no explicit claim as to whether or not the sanctions were “worth it” in the sense that trading economic growth for (presumed) leverage over Iran’s nuclear program may (arguably) still have been the right course of action, the negotiators in Vienna ought to take into account the damage done to the US and European economies as a result of these policies, even if China and Russia don’t want them to.
Photo: Port Newark and Port Elizabeth container complex in New Jersey, near Newark International Airport.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Ed Levine, an arms control specialist who worked for both Republican and Democratic senators for 20 years on the Intelligence Committee and another ten on the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a detailed and devastating analysis of S. 1881, the Kirk-Menendez bill (or, as I called it, the
by Jim Lobe
Ed Levine, an arms control specialist who worked for both Republican and Democratic senators for 20 years on the Intelligence Committee and another ten on the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a detailed and devastating analysis of S. 1881, the Kirk-Menendez bill (or, as I called it, the Wag The Dog Act of 2014), for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation on whose advisory board he currently serves. That analysis, which we republished on LobeLog in mid-January, played an important role in solidifying Democratic opposition in the Senate to the Kirk-Menendez bill, eventually forcing a humiliating retreat by AIPAC, which we chronicled in some detail during the winter months.
Levine has now written a second memo, this one on the Royce-Engel letter to President Barack Obama, which I wrote about last night and which had been signed by 344 House members as of Thursday. Like its predecessor, it details the problematic and unrealistic nature of many of the key demands contained in the letter and thus deserves the widest possible circulation.
Photo: Secretary of State John Kerry, middle, is escorted by Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), left, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), right, before giving testimony on Capitol Hill on April 17, 2013. Credit: Gary Cameron/Reuters
]]>by Jim Lobe
After a period of relative (and blissful) quiescence, the Iran hawks are springing back into action, preparing the groundwork for sabotaging any nuclear deal that may be reached by Iran and world powers by July 20 or shortly thereafter. While prospects for an agreement within that time frame remain uncertain [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
After a period of relative (and blissful) quiescence, the Iran hawks are springing back into action, preparing the groundwork for sabotaging any nuclear deal that may be reached by Iran and world powers by July 20 or shortly thereafter. While prospects for an agreement within that time frame remain uncertain — the most important sticking point by far appears to be the gap between US demands that Iran retain only a few thousand centrifuges and Iran’s insistence that it needs many more to meet its energy needs — the hawks (by which I mean the Israel lobby and its many allies in Congress) are taking no chances.
Officially, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ambassador here, Ronald Dermer, still insist that Iran should not be permitted any enrichment capacity whatsoever, even as Israel’s professional national security officials have reportedly agreed with US intelligence (and International Atomic Energy Agency reports) that Iran is fully complying with the Geneva Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) and that Tehran is engaged seriously in seeking a satisfactory resolution of the issue.
For now, however, hawks here appear to be taking their cue more from Netanyahu than the professionals, as this week saw clear evidence of their gearing up for a major fight both within and outside of Congress.
On Thursday, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce — who recently video-cast encouraging words to a conference in Paris organized by the (former) terrorist Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK) cult — and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Eliot Engel, released a letter they’d been circulating since late last month now signed by 342 other House members demanding that Obama consult Congress more closely on the ongoing negotiations and suggesting that Iran will have to satisfy Congressional demands on human rights, terrorism, ballistic missile development, and other issues unrelated to the ongoing nuclear negotiations before it will approve major sanctions relief. Here’s the most problematic passage:
Your Administration has committed to comprehensively lifting “nuclear-related” sanctions as part of a final P5+1 [US, UK, France, China, and Russia plus Germany] agreement with Tehran. Yet the concept of an exclusively defined “nuclear-related” sanction on Iran does not exist in U.S. law. Almost all sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program are also related to Tehran’s advancing ballistic missile program, intensifying support for international terrorism, and other unconventional weapons programs. Similarly, many of these sanctions are aimed at preventing Iranian banks involved in proliferation, terrorism, money laundering and other activities from utilizing the U.S. and global financial systems to advance these destructive policies.
Iran’s permanent and verifiable termination of all of these activities – not just some – is a prerequisite for permanently lifting most congressionally-mandated sanctions. This often unnoted reality necessitates extensive engagement with Congress before offers of relief are made to Iran, and requires Congressional action if sanctions are to be permanently lifted. With the July 20 negotiating deadline on the near horizon, we hope that your Administration will now engage in substantive consultations with Congress on the scope of acceptable sanctions relief.
Of course, President Barack Obama himself can provide a certain degree of sanctions relief under executive order as he no doubt intends to if a deal is struck. And there is no doubt that Congress has a role to play in lifting sanctions. But the letter’s assertion that there is no exclusively defined “nuclear-related” sanction against Iran under US law and that any relief can only be extended by addressing a host of non-nuclear-related issues appears calculated to sow doubts about Obama’s ability to deliver among Iran’s leadership, thus strengthening hard-liners in Tehran who argue that Washington simply cannot be trusted. That’s why more than two dozen groups, including Win Without War, MoveOn.org, Americans for Peace Now and the National Council of Churches, called on Royce and Engel (unsuccessfully unfortunately) to clarify the letter’s intent:
Demanding that non-nuclear issues be added to the nuclear negotiations at this time will only ensure that we get no deal and face the prospect of an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program or a disastrous war opposed by the American people.
… It would be a travesty if the very sanctions that Congress enacted under the premise of stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons proved to be the obstacle that blocked a nuclear deal.
(It may be worth noting that Royce has raised more money from “pro-Israel” PACs associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee than any other House candidate in the current election cycle, while Engel is number 4 in the rankings — only behind the just-defeated former House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor — according to the latest figures provided by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).
While Royce and Engel were releasing their letter, on one side of the Capitol, Sen. Mark Kirk, by far the biggest Congressional recipient of AIPAC-related funding in his 2010 re-election campaign, teamed up with Marco Rubio, the keynoter at last year’s Republican Jewish Coalition convention, to introduce The Iran Human Rights Accountability Act on the other. Among other provisions, it would impose visa bans and asset freezes against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. It’s just the kind of thing that generates a lot of goodwill in Tehran. Indeed, one of the Act’s chapters could only be interpreted as “regime change:” it declares the “policy of the United States” to be laying ”the foundation for the emergence of a freely elected, open and democratic political system in Iran that is not a threat to its neighbors or to the United States and to work with all citizens of Iran who seek to establish such a political system.” Another gift to the hard-liners in Tehran who are as eager to undermine their negotiators in Vienna as the hawks here are to blow up the negotiations.
On Friday came news of yet another letter that is circulating on the Senate side, this one from Lindsey Graham, who has long promoted military action against Iran, and Robert Menendez, who last winter co-sponsored with Kirk the Iran Nuclear Weapon Free Act of 2014, which itself was clearly designed to sabotage the JPOA. (Graham, incidentally, is the second-leading recipient of “pro-Israel” PAC funds in the current Senate election cycle after Cory Booker, while Menendez topped the list in the 2011-12 cycle, according to CRP.) Like the Royce-Engel letter, this new one attempts to prescribe to the administration an acceptable deal that would warrant sanctions relief by Congress, specifically with respect to verification and monitoring provisions, disclosure by Iran on possible military dimensions (PMDs) of its nuclear program, and enforcement mechanisms, including making Iran “understand that that the United States reserves all options to respond to any attempt by Iran to advance its nuclear weapons program.”
And, like the Royce-Engel letter, a number of the demands included in the Graham-Menendez letter seem certain to raise doubts about Washington’s good faith and/or Obama’s ability to deliver the sanctions relief Tehran wants. For example, it says “… Iran must dismantle its illict nuclear infrastructure, including the Fordow enrichment facility and the Arak heavy water reactor…” despite the fact that Iran has made clear that, while it is prepared to make major concessions to accommodate international concerns about both facilities, it is not prepared by any means to completely “dismantle” them. Similarly, the letter demands that Iran submit to extraordinary verification and monitoring measures beyond those provided under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Additional Protocol for “at least 20 years,” a time span that is certain to be dismissed as a non-starter in Tehran. In addition, it requires that Iran provide “full details about its nuclear program,” including PMDs, despite the fact that IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano has said it will take much longer than July 20 before his agency would be able to acquire that information, even with Tehran’s full cooperation.
“While the letter is written in terms that are sufficiently vague as to be somewhat meaningless, it could be interpreted in ways that call for outcomes that are not in the cards and could be deal-killers,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association (ACA), told LobeLog Friday.
“The negotiation is now in the final days, so who do these members of Congress think they are influencing? The Iranians? The other P5+1 parties? While members of Congress have legitimate concerns and interests in the outcome, they should wait until there is an outcome,” added Kimball.
“At this point, they can only complicate the talks and make it more difficult to achieve an agreement,” he said.
Meanwhile, outside Congress, neoconservative and other hard-line groups and individuals are also mobilizing what feels like a concerted campaign. Thus, in the latest edition of Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard, the doom-minded and highly defensive duo of Dick and Liz Cheney conclude a lengthy article entitled, “The Truth About Iraq,” with:
[W]e should be clear that we recognize a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat to Israel and to other nations in the region, as well. We should refuse to accept any “deal” with the Iranians that allows them to continue to spin centrifuges and enrich uranium. In the cauldron of the Middle East today, accepting a false deal — as the Obama administration seems inclined to do — will only ensure Iran attains a nuclear weapons and spark a nuclear arms race across the region. The Iranians should know without a doubt that we will not allow that to happen, and that we will take military action if necessary to stop it.
Meanwhile, the hard-line neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and the ever-hawkish Foreign Policy Project of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) announced a policy forum for next Thursday, July 17, entitled, “High Standards and High Stakes: Defining Terms of an Acceptable Iran Nuclear Deal.” The forum will feature Kirk, Engel, Rep. Brad Sherman, and Sen. Dan Coats, who previously co-chaired BPC’s task force on Iran. Panelists, according to the announcement, will also include the FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, former Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation Stephen Rademaker, and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations. Given this line-up, it would be most surprising if any of the participants diverted from Netanyahu’s definition of an “acceptable Iran nuclear deal.”
Both Rademaker and Takeyh are currently serving on the Iran task force at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). (Most members of the BPC Iran task force previously co-chaired by Coats moved over to the JINSA task force when the original BPC staff director, Michael Makovsky, was appointed to head JINSA last year.) JINSA announced Friday that its task force, which includes Dennis Ross, as well as Rademaker, Takeyh, and FPI’s Eric Edelman among other well-known hawks, will also hold a briefing on the subject July 28, apparently in the belief that a deal may be concluded by then.
On yet another front, The Israel Project launched Thursday its latest web campaign, “No Bomb for Iran,” complete with a scary black-and-white photo of a mushroom cloud and the slogan, “If Iran Goes Nuclear, Terror Goes Nuclear.” It, too, echoes Netanyahu demands to essentially dismantle Iran’s centrifuges (although it doesn’t say all centrifuges), in addition to “roll[ing] back” its ballistic missile program despite the fact that the administration has clearly stipulated that missiles are not now a subject of negotiation.
So, as the US and its P5+1 partners appear to be closing in on a deal with Iran, the hawks are taking wing. Oh, and AIPAC’s board is supposed to meet here next week.
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
Over the last century, July 20 was more than once a consequential date, for good and ill. The ill was in 1944: the unsuccessful plot to kill Adolph Hitler. The good was in 1969: the first manned landing on the moon. Success on the former July 20 might [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
Over the last century, July 20 was more than once a consequential date, for good and ill. The ill was in 1944: the unsuccessful plot to kill Adolph Hitler. The good was in 1969: the first manned landing on the moon. Success on the former July 20 might have spared at least some of the terrible suffering that continued for another 10 months; the latter ushered in a new era of expectations.
Will this year’s July 20 bring good or ill? The answer depends on whether Iran and the so-called P5+1 countries (the US, UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany) can reach a final deal by that day on the Iranian nuclear program.
Secretary of State John Kerry has said Iran must choose by the 20th: “No extension is possible unless all sides agree, and the United States and our partners will not consent to an extension merely to drag out negotiation.” If no agreement is reached by that time, it’s not clear what the US would do: impose more sanctions on the already beleaguered Iranian economy? Start bombing? The former is unlikely to work if current sanctions don’t; the latter is absurd.
If a deal is not reached, it will not be for want of US effort. This weekend, Kerry travels to Vienna to meet with the other top negotiators, and will make recommendations to President Barack Obama on the way forward. Iran, take note: while just about every deadline is flexible, if the US president is to sustain his diplomatic offensive to close a deal, refusing to meet him half-way will make it far more difficult for Obama to persevere in the face of strong political opposition in Congress and by some US regional allies to cutting any deal.
The Day After a Deal
For purposes of argument let us assume that an agreement is reached, if not on July 20, then within a timeframe that the P5+1 and Iran find acceptable. The term “tectonic shift” is not too strong to describe the possible regional response.
Within Iran, the promise of eased and eventually eliminated sanctions will be welcomed by the vast majority of Iranians, who want as much access to the West and its promises as possible. America is immensely popular among Iranian youth, and Western firms are already queuing up to invest, trade, and develop Iran’s economic and human potential.
If an agreement proceeds as it must in order to be accepted by the US and the other Western P5+1 states, regional politics will begin to shift, perhaps decisively over time. But not everyone will be pleased. Saudi Arabia and most of the other Persian Gulf states have depended on US-Iranian mutual hostility to contain what they believe to be an onslaught from Shia Islam. Of course, the Iranian revolution proved undesirable almost everywhere else in the Middle East, and this has been clear for about two decades now, but that is no matter! With a newly positive relationship between Iran and the West, Sunni Arab fears of Iran once again becoming a major regional power would be heightened. This would complement Gulf Arab fears that they might no longer be able to count on being Washington’s “most favored nations.”
For its part, Israel would be ambivalent. Objectively, a verifiable end to the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon would eliminate what has been called an “existential threat” to Israel. At the same time, some right-wing Israelis fear that the reduction of US-Iranian tensions could lead to increased pressure on Israel to face up to issues regarding the Palestinians. The argument has been compelling: How could any Israeli government negotiate seriously about the West Bank under the threat of a nuclear apocalypse? For Israel, too, competition for power and influence in the region would be complicated by Iran’s return to the game.
By contrast, for the US in the region, success in the nuclear negotiations with Iran would open up possibilities – though not certainties — of renewed cooperation over the future of Afghanistan, which came to an end when President George W. Bush added Iran to an “axis of evil” list in January 2002. Some cooperation might also become possible in Iraq, where both countries are worried about anarchy, though this is a more complex question.
The US would be better suited, however, to persuading Gulf Arab states to stop letting their citizens support– with ideas, money, and arms — the worst of the worst Islamist terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
The US could also then start fashioning the elements of a long-term security structure for the region to benefit all of its countries, provided that everyone — including US allies — prioritized common interests over the pursuit of narrow, national and sectarian ambitions. This is a tall order and would take many years to create, but even beginning this necessary process will be impossible so long as the Iranian nuclear question hangs over everything.
All these possibilities can challenge the status quo — as destabilizing as it has long since proved — and threaten the advantages that some regional countries have enjoyed as a result of destructive Iranian behavior.
It is thus no wonder that so many are putting so much effort in trying to derail the nuclear talks, beginning with the domestic enemies of Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani. Opposition has also been coming from the other side: the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have stepped up their pressure on the US to contain Iran. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been intensifying his efforts in the US and other P5+1 states to prevent what he recently called a “surrender agreement” with Iran.
The run-up to July 20 also comes at a time of more-than-usual tension, violence, and uncertainty across the region, ranging from the rise of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to renewed violence between Israel and Hamas. While these developments are not connected to the nuclear talks in Vienna, over the decades we have seen a sorry record of hope in one part of the region being undercut by conflict and tragedy in another. This is all the more reason for persuading at least one area of confrontation and challenge to move toward stability.
The next two weeks will thus be a time requiring focus and steady nerves by both the Iranian and US teams.
Obama has already achieved what his recent predecessors were thwarted in doing, either by circumstances (especially Iranian politics) or by unwillingness to take on domestic political opposition. He has done so despite substantial pressure from resurgent neoconservatives and congressional opponents of an agreement with Iran who are unwilling to accept that Obama is pursuing what is best for the United States. Indeed, no matter how good of an agreement is reached in terms of Western interests, Obama can depend on ample criticism from both partisan opponents at home and by some Middle Eastern allies.
Let us hope the US president will hold firm to his course and, if Iran permits, is able to achieve this foreign policy goal. Too much is at stake for these talks to fail.
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