Iran watchers are wary that President-elect Joe Biden may dive head-first into rejoining the Iran nuclear deal and squander the leverage created by his predecessor’s tough policies that kept Iran’s regional aggression in check in recent years.
“What we saw from 2013, when the initial agreement was signed … and 2018, when the Trump administration broke out, was a massive expansion of Iranian activities, aggression, and expansion throughout the region,” said Ambassador James Jeffrey, President Trump’s former special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.
“The Obama administration did nothing to stop that expansion on the ground,” Jeffrey asserted in a recent Wilson Center discussion on Biden’s tough challenges in Iran. “Then, in 2018, the Trump administration came up with this new maximum pressure policy.”
Iran estimates Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions cost the country $250 billion.
Jeffrey argued that the deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action limited Iran’s nuclear capability but failed to stabilize the region. Iran’s havoc was waged across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, creating instability and targeting American interests and soldiers.
With the lifting of a United Nations arms embargo in August, Iran will now have greater freedom to acquire weapons and maintain the imbalance it believes favors its survival. The former Obama-era ambassador to Iraq said Trump’s maximum pressure policies contained an aggressive Iran.
Crushing sanctions have crippled Iran’s economy, reduced its military spending, and scaled back its regional proxy war, but they allowed its nuclear ambitions to grow, Jeffrey argued.
“We stabilized the region,” he added. “We haven’t rolled Iran back. We’ve done this at the cost of a riskier nuclear situation with Iran. That has to be acknowledged.”
Absent a presidential debate on foreign policy, Biden used a CNN op-ed in September to outline his Iran plan and accuse Trump’s policy of failure.
“Instead of restoring deterrence, Trump has emboldened Iran,” he said, listing Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. forces that killed two American service members and a contractor and caused head injuries to more than 100 troops.
“Before Trump, years went by without a militia rocket attack on U.S. facilities in Iraq,” then-candidate Biden wrote. “Now, they happen regularly.”
Shorter ‘breakout time’ for a weapon
Former State Department lead coordinator for the Iran nuclear deal Jarret Blanc, however, said on the virtual discussion that some of Iran’s recent departures from the nuclear deal are easily reversible.
These include higher levels of uranium enrichment and excess centrifuges. Other moves, such as increasing research and development spending, will attain permanent progress toward a weapon.
Blanc said the result is a shrinking of the so-called “breakout time” for Iran to have enough weapons-grade material from a year to just three months.
“They do need more time to actually weaponize the uranium or plutonium if they had it,” he said.
“The JCPOA increased the amount of time that it would take them to collect that fissile material to a year or more. It’s now down to, let’s say, three or four months, and it’s falling quickly,” he added, explaining that weapons-grade material requires 80% to 90% enrichment.
Trump also created regional pressure against Iran by fostering the Abraham Accords, which would combine the efforts of Israel and anti-Iran Sunni states such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
With a June presidential election in Iran that hard-liners are expected to win, Wilson Center fellow Robin Wright said Biden will have a short window to negotiate.
“There’s an urgency to move, to get something going, and I think that’s going to be the hardest part,” she said. “That’s the real crisis; we all know what Joe Biden wants to do.”
Rejoining the JCPOA would require the United States to lift sanctions on Iran. Whether or not that is palatable to Congress and the American people in the post-Trump era is an open question.
“We’re so polarized that the idea of any American president of any party lifting sanctions on groups like the Revolutionary Guards or the Supreme Leader’s office, or the Central Bank will become a political football and look like you’re caving to a revolutionary regime,” said Wright.
Biden’s incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently said that the president-elect intends to rejoin the JCPOA when Iran returns to compliance, then conduct follow-on negotiations to limit Iran’s regional behavior and ballistic missile program.
Jeffrey, however, was less optimistic that Biden can do anything more than contain Iran’s nuclear program.
“There will be no change in Iran’s attempts to ravage through the region,” he said.
“The Iranians are going to demand a lot,” said Jeffrey, who believes the “cult-like” hold that the JCPOA has on some future Biden administration people will hurt American efforts to curtail Iran’s regional aims.
The alternative to Biden striking a deal, warned Wright, could put the U.S. on a path to war with Iran.
“There’s a broad consensus among those of us who know the region well that a war with Iran could end up being far messier, far costlier than either the war in Iraq or Afghanistan,” said Wright. “Four years may seem like a long time, but time flies, literally, when it comes to trying to make peace with long-standing rivals.”
