A new path for the Iran nuke deal?
US has little time before hard-line leader takes over
WASHINGTON — Iran’s announcement Saturday that an ultraconservative former head of the judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi, has been elected president now touches off an unpredictable diplomatic drama: The ascension of a hard-line government in Iran may actually present the Biden administration with a brief opportunity to restore the 2015 nuclear deal with the country.
President Joe Biden’s top aides, who have been negotiating with Iranian officials behind closed doors in Vienna — passing messages from hotel rooms through European intermediaries because the Iranians will not meet them directly — believe the moment may have come. And, they say, the next six weeks before Raisi is inaugurated present a unique window to strike a final deal with Iran’s leadership on a painful decision it has been delaying.
Officials in Washington and Iran contend that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wants to restore a nuclear agreement with the West, which former President Donald Trump ripped up more than three years ago, in
order to lift the crushing sanctions that have kept Iranian oil largely off the market.
The detailed wording of the resurrected agreement was worked out weeks ago in Vienna, senior officials say. Since then, the resurrected agreement has sat, awaiting an election whose outcome had seemed engineered by the ayatollah. Raisi is one of his proteges, and many believe he is the leading candidate to become the nation’s next supreme leader when Ayatollah Khamenei, now 82, dies.
The theory in Washington and Iran is that Ayatollah Khamenei has been stage-managing not only the election but the nuclear negotiations — and does not want to give up his best hope of ridding Iran of the penalties that have kept its oil out of a resurgent market.
So the indications inside the negotiations are that the final decision to go ahead with the deal could come in the next few weeks, before Raisi is inaugurated and while Iran’s older — and by some measures more moderate — government is still in office.
That means Iran’s moderates would be set up to take the blame for capitulating to the West and bear the brunt of popular anger inside Iran if sanctions relief does not rescue the nation’s stricken economy.
But if the deal comes together, the new conservative government under Raisi can take the credit for an economic upswing, bolstering his case that it took a hard-line, nationalist government to stand up to Washington and bring the country back.
“For Iran, this is a real Nixon-goes-to-China moment,” said Vali Nasr, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, who is close to the negotiations. “If anyone other than the conservatives made this deal with Biden, they would be torn up,” he said of Iran’s new leadership. “The bet is that they can get away with it. No one else could.”
If Biden’s bet works, and a hard-line government is the pathway to fulfilling his campaign promise to restore a deal that was largely working until Trump scrapped it, it would be only the latest twist in an accord that has left no one happy.
People inside the negotiations say there have been two major obstacles that could still derail Biden’s effort to restore the deal.
The Iranians have demanded a written commitment that no future U.S. government could scrap the deal as Trump did. The accord is not a treaty, because Biden, like President Barack Obama, could never have gotten the consent of two-thirds of the U.S. Senate. So it is an “executive agreement” that any future president could reverse.
But the Biden administration wants Iran to agree, in writing, to return to the negotiating table as soon as the old deal is restored and begin hammering out the terms of a bigger agreement that is, in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “longer and stronger.”
Blinken’s phrase acknowledges that critics of the six-year-old agreement have a point when they attack the accord for essentially expiring in nine years. Under the current terms, in 2030 Iran will be free to make as much nuclear fuel as it wants — meaning that even if it does not build a bomb, it will have the stockpile of fuel around to produce one fairly quickly.
“The administration there hopes it can have it both ways,” scholar and historian Michael Mandelbaum wrote in March, suggesting the United States will use the old deal as a steppingstone to negotiating a newer, much stronger one.
“This is an unlikely scenario,” he said about the prospects that a stronger deal could be reached, because once the United States lifts the sanctions that have hit Iran hardest, it “would severely reduce the leverage needed to improve upon it.”
Biden’s bet is that he will have some leverage left — and that may be enough to extend the length of the limitations on Iran’s production of nuclear fuel beyond 2030 and put limits on its research and development of new nuclear centrifuges.
“For Iran, this is a real Nixon-goes-to-China moment.”
— Vali Nasr, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies