I’m very behind in terms of the usual PR work I do for my own writing, so let me catch you up on the Iran nuclear talks with a little summary of a few pieces I’ve had published lately.
Here’s the overall point: it has become increasingly apparent, what with the failure of the P5+1 and the Iranians to reach an agreement by their original July deadline and the utter lack of any tangible progress toward a deal since the decision to extend the deadline into February, that the chances of a comprehensive deal being reached are pretty slim. Why? Because the U.S. and the P5+1 (but probably mostly the U.S.) is committed to the idea that Iran must substantially reduce the already pretty small-scale uranium enrichment operation it currently has in place, in order to lengthen the almighty “breakout time” before Iran can theoretically amass enough highly enriched uranium to build a bomb (this is a pretty silly metric, because what you’re really worried about is the time it would take Iran to enrich enough uranium for several bombs, not just one, and anyway Iran isn’t going to be dumb enough to attempt a maneuver like this using the enrichment facilities that everybody knows about). Iran, on the other hand, is committed to the idea that the U.S. and the P5+1 (but most the the U.S.) should give it a rest already, and that their obsession with Iran’s uranium enrichment program is more about stifling Iranian scientific progress than it is about anything to do with a theoretical weapons program. This isn’t particularly fertile ground for compromise, and it’s been made less fertile by the rather public posturing that both sides have done to their domestic political constituencies on this issue.
A couple of weeks ago I attended the release of the findings of a new opinion poll taken in Iran by the University of Tehran and a group at the University of Maryland. The findings were illuminating, in that they really went against the conventional DC wisdom about Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s political calculus with respect to the talks. The assumption in both policy and think tank circles has long been that Rouhani will eventually have to agree to pretty much whatever deal the P5+1 is offering, because his political life is on the line when it comes to getting international sanctions lifted and getting the Iranian economy moving forward. The Iranian public, which will ultimately decide Rouhani’s fate in their 2017 elections, doesn’t really care about the nuclear program according to this line of thinking. They just want the sanctions lifted. But according to the polling, the Iranian public has some clear red lines in terms of what kind of nuclear deal it’s prepared to accept, and one thing they will absolutely not accept is a deal that involves substantial reductions in Iran’s current enrichment capacity. The Iranian public, like their leadership, believes they’ve already made the lion’s share of the concessions in this whole process, and in return they’ve gotten a relatively small amount of sanctions relief (and they actually do have a point there). Meanwhile, they’re already pretty pessimistic about the chances of a deal or real sanctions relief getting done, mostly because they don’t trust the U.S. to uphold its end of the bargain and are pretty sure the U.S. is only in these talks for the aforementioned goal of stifling Iran’s scientific development, but they’re not taking that out on Rouhani, who remains pretty popular. So it’s likely that Rouhani has more to lose by agreeing to a lopsided deal than he does by just walking away and leaving the sanctions in place.
Then I reported on White House adviser Phil Gordon’s speech to the National Iranian-American Council’s leadership conference in DC on September 27. Gordon was optimistic that the completion of a nuclear deal would lead to a dramatic improvement in US-Iranian relations, but he made it pretty clear that the White House expects Iran to come to it on the enrichment question, not the other way around. Obviously there’s some public negotiating going on there, but it’s still a sign that things aren’t heading toward a successful conclusion. When you couple Gordon’s remarks with Rouhani’s UN speech, which stressed that Iran expects to be treated “fairly” under any nuclear agreement (which means they expect to be allowed to have an enrichment program without draconian limits), and with the tone of Rouhani’s pre-return press conference, in which he said that progress hasn’t been “significant” and noted that “time is short,” you really do get a sense that the parties aren’t getting anywhere. Iran expert Farideh Farhi sees some signs in Iran’s political establishment that the major players (Rouhani, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even the hardliners who have mostly opposed Rouhani’s negotiation efforts) are aligning with one another to show support for the talks so that they can collectively blame the U.S. in the event that the talks fail. Related to this is Iran’s recent trade accord with Russia, which offers Iran an avenue for continued economic expansion even if most or all of the sanctions remain in place (it also sets in place a scenario where Russia could break with the rest of the P5+1 and stop upholding the sanctions altogether, but we’re probably not at that point yet).
There have been various possible compromises floated, like maybe the U.S. would be OK if Iran just disconnected a bunch of centrifuges without dismantling them, or would be OK with Iran having a higher number of active centrifuges than it has been demanding to this point, or maybe Iran could come down a bit from its current number of centrifuges, though not all the way down to what the U.S. wants. The Arms Control Association, which is a really great, well-intentioned organization, keeps pushing variations of a compromise that would significantly reduce Iran’s current active centrifuges but would allow them to keep researching more advanced centrifuge models. That kind of compromise could satisfy Iranian concerns about their national scientific and technical progress (as could U.S.-Iran scientific exchanges, which was something Gordon talked a lot about), but you still run into the domestic political problem for Rouhani if he agrees to what would be an unpopular deal because of the centrifuge cuts. So none of these compromises seems to be getting any real traction.
All of this stuff I’d been hearing and writing about inspired this piece for Foreign Policy in Focus, where I argued that the P5+1’s intransigence, as much as Iran’s, is causing this opportunity for a deal to slip away. The assumption that Rouhani will eventually take whatever deal he’s offered is fundamentally inaccurate and is really steering the U.S. and the rest of the coalition in the wrong direction, and their overemphasis on measurables like “breakout time” is, in my opinion, blinding them to the very definite but also unquantifiable political benefit that will come out of reaching a deal and beginning the long process of fully bringing Iran back into the international community for the first time since 1979:
What’s worse is that, by waiting for Iran to concede on a few thousand centrifuges in order to lengthen its “breakout time,” the P5+1 risks missing the opportunity for a historic chance to reintegrate Iran into the international community. MIT nuclear security expert Jim Walsh has pointed out that in past arms control agreements, it is inevitably the process of reaching the agreement itself—and the political and diplomatic changes the agreement enables—that ensures the long-term success of the arms control process. The painstakingly negotiated details about numbers of armaments or uranium enrichment capacity are never as important as that political change.
A comprehensive nuclear deal has the potential to reincorporate Iran into the international community for the first time in 35 years and could cement the strength of Rouhani and his fellow moderates within Iran’s fractious internal political system. Changing Iranian politics and the way Iran interacts with the rest of the world would have immense benefits for arms control as well as on a vast array of other regional and international fronts, benefits that can’t be boiled down to a simple—and flawed—calculation of Iran’s nuclear breakout potential.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 