Hey there, how’s it going? Today marks the day the Iran talks were supposed to end in a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action but didn’t. The new and improved deadline is now July 7, at which point surely this long negotiating process will come to a definitive en–HAHAHAHA, sorry, it’s got to be at least 50/50 that things get extended again.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif left Vienna and flew back to Tehran late Sunday before returning today. This was taken as a positive sign, that maybe he’d been presented with a new offer from the P5+1 that he had to take back to his bosses in Iran for discussion and/or that he was going back to see if the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, was healthy enough (he’s recently had surgery) to come to Geneva to participate directly in the talks (which he apparently was). The presence of Salehi and US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz at the talks in March was credited with helping to make some key technical breakthroughs that resulted in the development of the Lausanne Framework.
The good news, to everybody except maybe David Sanger at the NYT, is that Iran has gotten its low enriched uranium stockpile down below the level mandated under the terms of the Joint Plan of Action. Failure to meet that target by today, when the latest extension of the JPOA was to have expired, could have complicated the talks unnecessarily. The bad news is that there still seem to be a number of outstanding issues standing in the way of a comprehensive agreement.
Some of this is what Laura Rozen calls “eleventh-hour jitters” as the deadline approaches. For the Iranians, this deal represents is a major step into the unknown, Tehran’s first serious attempt to engage with the rest of the world, and especially the US, since 1979, and Iranian negotiators clearly want a deal that allows them to say that they didn’t back down in the face of American pressure. But there’s been a lot of talk coming from Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in recent days that seems to contradict terms that, according to the US at least, Iranian negotiators agreed to in the Lausanne Framework, like the timing of sanctions relief and the degree to with IAEA inspectors will have access to Iranian military facilities. Trita Parsi of the National Iranian-American Council wrote a couple of days ago that the implementation and sanctions relief process had been worked out, but his reporting was based on anonymous sources and hasn’t been picked up by the wider media. However, it’s hard to imagine the two sides letting almost two years worth of talks (if we go back to the JPOA negotiations in November 2013) collapse over what amounts to a question of timing over stuff that will happen eventually.
But things might still collapse over the question of inspector access to Iranian military facilities and nuclear scientists. As I’ve said before, this is a tough nut to crack; no country would accept a situation where international inspectors have unfettered access to its military facilities and personnel, but at the same time if the IAEA can’t get in to places where it suspects that nuclear weapons-related research is being (or has been) conducted, and can’t talk to relevant personnel, then the idea of monitoring and verifying Iran’s compliance goes out the window. It’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to come to an agreement on this that satisfies both sides, and it’s virtually certain that whatever agreement might be reached will be heavily criticized both in Iran and the US over this issue in particular.
Joshua Keating argues that the only thing keeping the talks going right now is that both Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani are desperate to make a deal now, in Obama’s case before Congress starts getting antsy about imposing new sanctions again (and before presidential campaign politics start making it harder to sell a deal) and in Rouhani’s case in advance of parliamentary elections early next year and presidential elections in 2017 (after Obama is out of office and a new, probably less amenable to a deal, president has replaced him). That’s a good point, although another factor keeping the talks going is sheer momentum after so many months.
Keating also brings up another interesting dynamic, which is that we’re starting to see the other members of the P5+1 present themselves as potential obstacles to a deal. Although the discussion around the talks always focuses on the US-Iran dynamic, France has consistently taken a harder line than the US (even going back to the JPOA). They don’t have any domestic political reason to need a comprehensive deal right now, but they do want to cultivate better ties with all those Gulf Arab countries that are so unnerved by this whole negotiation, so they’re pushing to delay things and keep negotiating (or, in other words, to let sanctions and low oil prices wear Iran down a little more, hoping that they’ll finally give in on these last key points).
But the real potential monkey-wrench belongs to Russia. One of the big US requirements in any comprehensive deal is the stipulation that sanctions that have been lifted will “snap back” into place if Iran is found to be out of compliance with its obligations — i.e., they’ll be reimposed without putting it to a vote in the UN Security Council. The fear is that a Security Council vote will be vetoed by Russia or (less likely) China, so essentially they’re asking Russia to forfeit its veto up front. Russia doesn’t like the idea of giving up any chance to play spoiler in the Security Council, it obviously has no particular affection for the United States at the moment, and plus it arguably has more to fear from warming Iran-US relations after a deal than it does from the total breakdown of the talks, since it’s getting a pretty sweet deal right now as the only major country really doing business with Tehran. It’s going to take some clever diplomatic maneuvering to get Russia to go along with something that’s acceptable to the US on this point.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 