By desperately seeking Iran’s return to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear accord, the Biden administration is squandering the vast economic leverage bequeathed to it by the Trump administration.
President Joe Biden is encouraging Iran to play hardball in negotiations pertaining to its return to compliance with the nuclear deal. It has just been announced that the United States will participate in a meeting in Vienna on Tuesday with Iran. Also included will be the other signatory members of the nuclear accord — Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia. But while the U.S. is expected to play a passive role in these discussions, the Iranians evidently believe that they now hold the strategic initiative. Iran’s Fars News state media outlet reported one Iranian official’s comment on Friday that no negotiations were necessary. This is because, the official said, “The United States can return to the agreement and end lawbreaking just in the way that it pulled out of it and imposed illegal sanctions against Iran.”
This is not the rhetoric of a regime desperate for sanctions relief. This is the rallying cry of a regime that senses appeasement has returned to American foreign policy.
Biden is making a huge mistake. The appropriate way to deal with Iran is for Biden to hold true to what he pledged to do in early February — to keep all U.S. sanctions in place until Ayatollah Ali Khamenei suspends his enrichment of uranium beyond purity caps imposed under the 2015 accord.
That strategy would ensure that Iran’s leaders are the ones begging for a deal, rather than the other way around. It would also recognize the basic reality that Iran’s economic collapse, precipitated in large part by the Trump administration’s sanctions, has greatly damaged the patronage relationships upon which Tehran’s hard-liner elite root their power. These sanctions have also restrained the regime’s ability to export the revolution. Unfortunately, the Biden administration now appears willing to sacrifice this leverage.
On Friday, an administration official told the New York Times that “the United States would not seek to retain some sanctions for leverage … arguing that the previous ‘maximum pressure’ campaign waged against Iran by the Trump administration had failed.”
This is absurd. The Biden administration has the very same access to U.S. intelligence reporting on Iran as the Trump administration did. In turn, Biden and his senior officials should be confident that were they willing to maintain sanctions pressure, Iran would be forced into a desperate negotiating stance. Absent that desperate negotiating, the regime’s very survival would come under question. Recent years have seen escalating street protests and a fundamental collapse of the Revolutionary Guard Corps finance structures. How much more of that strain can Khamenei’s regime handle? It’s a question he most certainly does not want to answer. Intelligence on this reality is surely why Biden was willing to play hardball back in February.
It’s not clear why Biden abandoned his previously prudent strategy. But the shift in Biden’s position is obvious. Washington is even now begging the Chinese to persuade the Iranians to give some ground. The Chinese have, of course, loved this show of desperation from Washington and delivered nothing in return. On the contrary, Beijing has just given Iran the economic gift of a 25-year strategic partnership.
Iran is now sitting pretty. Expect Biden to suspend major U.S. sanctions in return for Iran’s reduction of some enrichment activities. Iran will get its payday and the fundamental flaws of the 2015 accord, such as Iran’s ballistic missile research, will remain in place.
