Restart of Iran nuclear deal fading
Observers: Trump hobbled ability to talk with Tehran
WASHINGTON — Many factors are to blame for the dying prospects of reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But perhaps nothing has hobbled the Biden administration’s efforts more than the legacy of President Donald Trump.
It was Trump who withdrew in 2018 from the nuclear pact brokered with Iran by the Obama administration.
U.S. officials and analysts say his actions vastly complicated America’s ability to negotiate with Iran, which has made demands outside the nuclear deal that President Joe Biden has refused to meet without receiving concessions.
The original pact limited Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the easing of economic sanctions that have crushed the country’s economy. After Trump quit the deal and reimposed sanctions, Iran also began violating its terms.
With no compromise on a new agreement in sight and Iran making steady progress toward nuclear capability, the Biden administration could soon be forced to decide between accepting that Iran has the capacity to make a bomb or taking military action to prevent it from doing so. Iran maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, such as producing medical isotopes to diagnose and treat disease.
Trump handed Biden a needless nuclear crisis, Robert Malley, the State Department’s chief negotiator, told senators at a hearing late last month, adding that the chances of salvaging the deal had become “tenuous.”
Negotiations in Vienna to restore the deal have been on hold since mid-March. Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Iranian leaders “have to decide, and decide very quickly, if they wish to proceed with what has been negotiated and which could be completed quickly if Iran chose to do so.”
This month, after the United States and European allies criticized Iran for failing to cooperate with international inspectors, Iranian officials doubled down by deactivating and removing some surveillance cameras in its nuclear facilities.
On Tuesday, Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, said Iran had proposed a new plan to the United States, but he did not provide details.
A senior administration official in Washington who is close to the negotiations said he was unaware of any new proposal from Tehran, but “of course we remain open” to ideas that might lead to an agreement.
Trump’s legacy haunts the talks in at least three notable ways, according to several people familiar with the negotiating process, which Biden began early last year.
First, there was what the Iranians call an enormous breach of trust: Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the deal, despite Iran’s adherence to its terms, confirmed Tehran’s fears about how quickly the United States can change tack after an election.
At the negotiating table in Vienna, the Iranians have demanded assurances that any successor to Biden be constrained from undoing the deal again.
The Iranians have a related concern: Foreign companies may be reluctant to invest in Iran if they believe that America’s sanctions hammer might fall again after the next presidential election.
Trump created a second major hurdle for restoring the deal by heaping around 1,500 new sanctions designations on Iran. Iran has insisted that those sanctions be reversed — none more so than Trump’s 2019 designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group. Previous administrations have condemned the Revolutionary Guard, which oversees Iranian military proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen and has aided insurgents in Iraq who killed Americans. But they were wary of identifying an arm of a foreign government as a terrorist group.
Iranian negotiators have said that to clinch a renewed nuclear agreement, Biden must drop the Revolutionary Guard’s terrorist label. But Biden has refused without Iran first giving other concessions — and Blinken described the group as a terror organization as recently as April.
People familiar with the talks point to a third, logistical way in which Trump’s legacy looms: Iranian officials have refused to speak directly to U.S. officials since Trump’s exit from the deal. (Trump further enraged Iran by ordering the assassination of a senior Iranian military commander, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020.)
During the talks in Vienna, Malley communicated with Iranian negotiators by sending messages through European intermediaries. That bogged down the process and occasionally made for time-consuming misunderstandings.
Trump administration officials and their associates expected such complications, to varying degrees, as they crafted a policy meant in part to make any future negotiations difficult without dramatic changes in Iran’s behavior.
Dennis Ross, a Middle East negotiator who has worked for several presidents, said both sides still have incentives to compromise. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, needs sanctions relief. As for Biden, Ross said, “he doesn’t have any other way at this point to limit the Iranian nuclear program — and it is marching ahead right now” with less monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency.