From its earliest days, restoring the Iran nuclear deal has been a priority of the Biden Administration. A signal foreign policy accomplishment of former US President Barack Obama, the deal involved Iran agreeing to concrete verifiable steps to constrain those aspects of its nuclear energy program feared by the West to be directed towards nuclear weapons capacity; in return, the UN Security Council sanctions regime was lifted, and accordingly so were some US and EU economic sanctions.
The JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) was one of the many parts of Obama's legacy that Donald Trump was determined to destroy. Trump reinstated sanctions contrary to the JCPOA, despite the view of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the other partners including the EU Russia and China that Iran was in substantial compliance. Indeed Trump went furhter, adopting a so-called maximum pressure strategy against Iran, not only reinstating sanctions lifted through the JCPOA but adding others.
Iran's response to these developments was, not surprisingly, to break out of the limits in the JCPOA, though it did so only gradually and cautiously at first (the EU especially counseling restraint even though it was strongly opposedi to Trump's move). Eventually, Iran proved dramatically successful in advancing toward the capacity to produce weapons-grade nuclear fuel. That Trump's moves produced the exact opposite effect than intended, considerably advancing Iran's path toward a bomb, reinforced the Biden Administration's determination to dedicate considerable resources to a set of negotiations with the JCPOA partners in Vienna, towards a deal that would be a bridge toward the restoration of the stability of the original JCPOA. But the technical issues of rolling back Iran's nuclear advances and the complexity 0f untangling the US sanctions regime from the Trump era policy of maximum pressure resulted in a slow often cumbersome though never entirely stymied process in Vienna.
This challenge was at times rendered even more delicate by virtue of certain positions among Iran's leaders suggesting the US must pay for the distrust it created by the Trump Administration not honoring commitments entered into by Obama, atoning for promise-breaking. Another disruptive factor was Israel's (until recently never publically admitted-or denied) efforts at attacking Iran's nuclear program, including by assassination of a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist, and remote-controlled damage to Iranian nuclear facilities.
Then came the Iranian Presidential election and the (albeit hardly surprising) victory of a conservative hardliner, Raisi, in fact the groomed successor of Rouhani. Iran experts are probably right to discern some hardening is entailed in this political transition (the polished diplomat Zarif who was a critical interlocutor of the Obama Administration as Iran's foreign minister, is now out, for instance). But the recent spotlight on the internal Iranian politics of the nuclear deal has revealed what was already apparent to many experts: the Iranian leadership is not chomping at the bit to get back to the JCPOA, much less to move toward some kind of broader rapprochement with the US or the West. To be sure, there has been no explicit repudiation of the Vienna talks, including the decisions made on technical matters in those meeting rooms. But there is a coolness in the air, more noticed now than before the election.
Earlier this week, Biden's special envoy for Iran, Rob Malley, gave his assessment of the current state of play in a new interview. A seasoned diplomat and regional expert, Malley offered the following prognosis:
We made substantial progress in the six rounds of [Vienna] talks, but we hadn’t closed all the gaps. And if Iran comes back with a more hard-line position, it’s going to be very difficult to close because we hadn’t closed before, even under the preceding government. So our hope remains that Iran will come back with a realistic position.
As Malley hints, Iran's way of killing the deal would be coming back to Washington and asking for unrealistic new concessions. That could include, for example, demanding that the US lift sanctions that can only be fully removed through Congressional action (an unlikely possibiility given that there are enough Iran hawk Democrats in the Senate to kill any such move). Iran has also hinted that, given the behavior of the Trump Administration, it wants some guarantees that a new US President would not reneg on a revived JCPOA. As a legal matter it is not clear how that could be done, other than Congress somehow tying the hands of a future Administration through legislation. Asking for a treaty confirmed by a 2/3rds vote of the US Senate (what the Constitution requires) would be delusional-or, more pertinently, an obvious way to kill any deal.
So what is the Biden Administration to do? One got the impression that for many months the Administration was more worried about pushback from domestic political quarters and sabotage efforts by Israel's Netanyahu (now out of office, of course) than the possibility of cold feet in Tehran. But there is a larger context that explains Tehran's less than full enthusiasm, and it isn't even about the recent elections or gains by hardliners in the inner circles of power.
First, the removal of sanctions under the original JCPOA did not bring the kinds of economic benefits that Iranians might have been led to expect from a deal putting a strong brake on the country's nuclear programme. There are several reasons for this. One is that many non-nuclear sanctions remained, as well as secondary sanctions, which led major foreign firms to be cautious about plunging back into Iran. Even with the nuclear sanctions lifted, firms and their counsel rightly worried about residual liability under measures still in place. A second reason, but one of considerable importance for the calculations of Iran's rulers, is that Iran's economy is in shambles, quite apart from the impact of sanctions. In fact, the removal of the nuclear sanctions made more evident the failure of domestic economic governance and the desperate need for industrial renewal. Despite the regime's public posture of indignation, Trump's unilateral dismanting of the JCPOA actually turned out to be pretty good for the Iranian leadership. The demonic US could once again take the blame for strangling Iran's economy, taking off pressure for painful domestic economic reform. Then Iran discovered how quickly it could break out of the JCPOA and advance its nuclear ambitions, once its leaders decided to follow that course of action. And (as already noted) Iran also witnessed how little Israeli sabotage attempts could set it back. At the same time, Iran was becoming increasingly adept at cryptocurrency transactions to avoid some of the sanctions, and China stepped in with an ambitious cooperation deal, a convenient route to plugging the holes in the sinking ship of Iran's industrial economy. Once the context is articulated in this way, it becomes understandable that a straightforward restoration of the JCPOA would not command universal enthusiasm in Tehran these days.
So what is the Biden Administration to do? The most obvious move would be to attempt improving the US offer on sanctions lifting. It is unclear that the Administration's current offers as reflected in the sanctions talks in Vienna represent the maximum possible under the political and legal constraints discussed above. Some sweeteners might be possible. This could be combined with efforts to have the European Union re-emphasize the importance it attaches to the restoration of the JCPOA. The EU is an important trading partner of Iran and even if the EU kept its sanctions lifted despite Trump, finding of way of doing business that obviated the long arm of the previous US Administration's sanctions policy proved illusive. An effort to establish a payment mechanism (INSTEX) that would clear transactions outside of US-linked financial institutions never got off the ground, for example. It has been proposed that a restored JCPOA would be accompanied by specific guarantees to firms that transactions would not risk liability under remaining sanctions. Cryptocurrency deals and countertrade with Russia, and cooperation with China, are only a partial answer to Iran's continuing need for foreign trade and investment to prop up even its current low level of domestic economic sustainability. China and Russia have interests in allowing their own economic activities with Iran to occur with less need to circumvent sanctions regimes (the notorious legal troubles that Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou faces are connected to allegations of misleading a financial institution about dealings with Iran, for example). And China and Russia probably have a strategic interest in some level of contaiment of Iran's nuclear ambitions. In sum, the US should present itself less as the ardent suitor of the JCPOA and encourage others to make more emphatically clear the importance they attach to a deal.
Learning to Live with an Iranian Bomb
Most importantly, though, the Administration must prepare for the scenario that there will be no deal, and make clear its approach and doctrine in facing the possibility that Iran, in a relatively short period of time, will break through to the point that it has the capacity to build a nuclear bomb. Avoiding this needed step by saying the US will never let Iran get a nuclear weapon is to place rhetoric over reality. One scenario would be for the US to acquiesce to Israel unilaterally attacking Iran's nuclear facilities. However, Israel neither has the ordnance nor the delivery means (even if it got the ordnance) to cripple Iran's nuclear facilities, which are in the main heavily fortified. Its shadow activities, as discussed above, havenot significantly retarded Iran's advances, and indeed have been a provocation to accelerating them. Israel risks massive retaliation from any direct strike on Iran, a strike that, to reiterate, would not be crippling and most likely would only produce a setback, perhaps of a couple months, in Iran's operations.
This leaves a possibility that by any measure is, and should be, unthinkable for the Biden Administration, which is US participation in an attack on Iranian nuclear assets, using Multiple Ordnance Penatrator (MOP) weapons dropped from a B-2 bomber. Such a step would equate to an all out war with Iran. It is also not clear how effective it would be: both the bombs and the aircraft have required updates and their performance is far from sure. In any case, the Biden doctrine commits to US from disentangling itself from wars not plunging into new advenures.
Compared to the costs and risks to the United States of an open war with Iran, learning to live with an Iranian nuclear capacity is surely the better option. Nuclear proliferation is dangerous and ought not to be encouraged, to be sure. But as the late Admiral Scowcroft pointed out there are means to engage even those powers like India and Pakistan that remain outside of the non-proliferation regime on the security and safety of their nuclear arsenals. Iran going nuclear may not make much difference in terms of regional stability, if measures such as the ongoing Iran-Saudi rapprochement are strongly encouraged and incentivized by the US and other powers. At the same time, the United States has some real leverage over Israel, and can and should do more to discourage provocations to Iran in the form of attempts to sabotage its nuclear program. Such provocations, as can be seen by the albeit internationally illegal)mischief Iran does in reprisal (including apparently attacks on merchant ships) is a cause of instability that can be minimized by avoiding the provocations. Part of the problem in the past was Israel's refusal to admit or deny these operations, leaving the US with the awkward job of supporting any criticism through revealing its own intelligence. But in a recent New York Times interview the new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has now openly admitted and endorsed the "clandestine" operations as an overt policy. Once outed as an admitted policy, this approach can be more explicitlyquestioned by the US Administration.
Beware of (What You Are Supposed to) Wish For
Most of the alarmism about Iran's nuclear ambitions refers to the concept of "breakout"-but this notion tends to hide a nuance, which is nevertheless of enormous importance. There is still a big step between having the capacity to fuel nuclear weapons and building and deploying them. Iran consistently denies that it is seeking nuclear weapons. Such denials are met with derisory laughter by US and Israeli hawks (Of course, Israel's policy of not declaring its own nuclear arsenal has long been tolerated by the US and others). But perhaps Iran's leaders really haven't thought their way through to an actual strategy of nuclear deployment, as opposed to the possible leverage from having the capacity for nuclear weapons. There are many imponderables here. What would Iran's doctrine for use of such weapons be, and how would it affect the behavior of other powers? Already, Iran's security and intelligence services have proven susceptible to breaches and infiltration. These risks are even more alarming on the scenario of Iran becoming a nuclear power. Differences of view on Iran's nuclear strategy, and who has control of the weapons, may well divide elements within the Iranian regime. What would be the role of the Revolutionary Guards?
There are many reasons why Iran may not want to take the leap between having nuclear capacity and building a bomb. But once such capacity is acquired, there are surely some elements in the regime that will press for a bomb, especially if Israel continues its provocations unrestrained by the United States, or if the Saudi-Iran rapprochement falls through, for instance. Iran could be pushed into building nuclear weapons out of a fear of appearing weak if it exercises restraint despite the fully achieved capacity to have a nuclear arsenal.
So today Iran's leaders should ask themselves if they really want to face, if not the abyss, at least the many unknowns, both in terms of internal and foreign politics, of becoming a nuclear power. A restored JCPOA, especially with somewhat greater US ambition on sanctions relief and a commitment by Europe to help Iran rebuild its economy, would allow Tehran to postpone that thorny, possibly destablizing decision process-and to do so with honor and advantage.
President Raisi, Vienna waits for you.