Back in 2015, the RAND Corporation think tank laid out the pluses and minuses of reaching a deal to curtail Iran’s quest to arm itself with nuclear weapons. Here are the opposing arguments RAND set out then:
Failure to reach or approve a deal would likely produce one or more of the following:
- an expanded Iranian nuclear program;
- an erosion of broad international sanctions without any benefit to regional and global security;
- heightened potential for military conflict; and
- the loss of opportunities to work on major areas of common concern to Iran and the United States.
To be sure, there are risks associated with a deal as well, including the possibility that Iran will:
- fail to implement the agreement;
- resume a nuclear program once the nuclear agreement expires; or
- covertly continue elements of its program beyond the surveillance of the international community.
Eight years later, these pros and cons are still being debated even as the chances of cutting a nuclear agreement with Iran are fading.
A complex accord was first signed by the United States, Iran, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China and Russia in 2015 during the administration of US president Barack Obama.
Three years later, his successor, Donald Trump, discarded it. Without US acceptance – and a willingness to lift economic sanctions on Iran – the agreement was left to hibernate.
For the past two years, current US President Joe Biden has tried to resuscitate it. Although reluctant to say a final goodbye, the administration has indicated that the chances of success are fast receding.
“We don’t see a deal coming together anytime soon,” Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday. “The door for diplomacy will always remain open,” she added.
Pessimism is based not only on the difficulties of reviving an accord that was already controversial. Two recent events involving Iran will likely make it hard for the Biden administration to sign on to a new compromise, if one is reached.
The first is Iran’s sudden role in Russia’s war on Ukraine. The Islamic Republic is supplying armed drones to the Russian army, which in turn is using them to damage Ukrainian infrastructure and kill civilians.
Biden and US allies deem Russia’s invasion illegal and consider its assault on civilians a war crime. Is the West confident that such a regime is trustworthy to honor a major arms control deal?
Moreover, for the past month, the Iranian government has cracked down hard on anti-authoritarian demonstrations, with more than 100 protestors so far killed. Security forces have especially targeted women who have spearheaded the protests.
Biden, who regards himself as a champion of human rights generally and women’s freedoms in particular, will hardly want to be seen coddling a regime whose misogyny is expressed by gunfire and beatings.
Biden was Obama’s vice president and, after ousting Trump in the 2022 presidential elections, reopened negotiations with Iran. But a series of whiplash disputes have kept the agreement from being revived.
Among them:
- whether the deal should be renewed as if Trump’s intervention never happened;
- whether Iran has made the old deal kaput by secretly breaching original restrictions on bomb development;
- whether the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has the capacity to monitor Iran’s traditionally secretive program; and
- whether future American governments can cancel a new deal as Trump did with the old one.
The original negotiations were headed by Obama’s secretary of state John Kerry, who is now Biden’s special climate change representative. In his previous job, Kerry labored to convince the US public that Iran, charged with sponsoring terrorism, was a promising partner for such a high-stakes accord.
Kerry insisted that the basis for the deal was not trustworthiness but, rather, verification. It was a throwback to an argument made by president Ronald Reagan. When he negotiated an arms control deal with the Soviet Union Reagan coined the phrase, “Trust but verify.”
Kerry made the same point, if more wordily: “You don’t trust. It’s not based on trust. It’s based on verification,” he said.
He also dismissed concerns that the US was downplaying other conflicts with Iran – in particular Tehran’s support of armed groups in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – in the name of getting an iffy nuclear deal.
“We believed it would be easier to deal with other differences with Tehran if we weren’t simultaneously confronting a nuclear regime,” Kerry said.
As back in 2015, critics currently contend that an agreement would not actually forbid but rather permit Iran to eventually construct nuclear bombs. They argue that the deal would strengthen a regime hostile to US policy across the Middle East.
They point out that the US and Iran have continually dueled in Iraq; that Tehran supports the dictatorial government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad; and that Iran is emphatically hostile to Israel, America’s chief Middle East ally.
Israel opposes the nuclear deal on the grounds it is lax.
So what if no deal is reached? Hamidreza Azizi, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, predicts we’ll see “growing tensions between Iran and Israel, especially in terms of Israel’s enhanced covert activities against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”
Iran’s nearest neighbors are preparing for the talks to fail. Persian Gulf states have played both sides of the field. Some, including Saudi Arabia, have put out feelers for reductions of tension with Iran. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have opened tentative relations with Israel under the so-called Abraham Accords, midwifed by the Trump administration.
Iran has brandished both carrots and sticks in Persian Gulf relations. On the one hand, it pledges to continue peacefully engaging with Arab countries in its so-called “Neighbors First” policy.
But, just in case, said Javad Heiran-Nia, a researcher at Iran’s Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies, Tehran has warned that if Israel threatens Iran through an Arab country, Iran “will target that Arab country as well,”
Supplementing its threat, Iran has launched a fleet of drone-armed ships for possible use against Gulf countries.
Countries involved in cobbling together the original nuclear deal are currently tensely divided over issues different from those of seven years ago.
Beijing and Moscow oppose what they consider US global “hegemony.” Russia is at war in Ukraine, and China has stopped short of criticizing Moscow over its invasion while expressing ever-deeper complaints about US policy toward Taiwan.
Nonetheless, Russia and China want a deal – they appear unwelcoming to the birth of another nuclear power even if it happens to be hostile to the United States.
“China and Russia are concerned about the destabilizing effects of a nuclear Iran and nuclear proliferation,” noted Benjamin Tsai, a former US government intelligence analyst on Northeast Asia and currently a senior associate at TD International, a risk management and security advisory firm.
As for Biden, the possibility of the negotiations’ final failure has opened a search for alternative policies toward Iran. He “has conveyed to the rest of the administration that he wants to make sure that we have other available options to us to potentially achieve that solid outcome of the no nuclear weapons capability for Iran,” his spokesman John Kirby said on September 8.
The Harvard International Review, an affiliate of Harvard University, laid out some options Washington might consider. It should strengthen military ties with Persian Gulf states and discourage Israel from taking unilateral military action that might draw the US into war, while normalizing relations with Iran, the journal said.
The latter step is needed because “a nuclear-equipped state demands active engagement and dialogue,” Harvard International Review wrote.