Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran, continues his effort to win a new nuclear accord. Already, the White House and State Department have agreed to lift billions of dollars in sanctions. Other sanctions, they simply do not enforce, netting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps billions of dollars in profit.
Biden’s team believes the price is worth it. While an aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now-national security adviser Jake Sullivan bit on an Omani proposal that he negotiate with Iranian officials in Muscat. Sullivan was ambitious: Negotiating with rogues, however inadvisable, is a career catalyst in the State Department. Just ask Dennis Ross about the PLO or Zalmay Khalilzad about the Taliban. Sullivan was a Rhodes scholar astute at process but lacking regional expertise. Clinton’s leaked emails show Sullivan was more a trusted sounding board than strategist. He believed the conventional wisdom that the struggle between reformers and hardliners in the Islamic Republic was meaningful and could alter Tehran’s direction.
Those around Sullivan say he truly believed that by engaging so-called reformists, he could privilege them in their own struggle against more hard-line factions and open the door to reconciliation. This was naive for two reasons. First, elected positions in Iran do not set national security policy. That is the purview of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Second, the difference between reformers and hardliners is one of style over substance. Vetting from the Guardian Council disqualifies any candidate too liberal, democratic, or Western-oriented.
The Obama administration spun the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Iran nuclear accord as the most stringent nonproliferation deal ever. It was not. The Biden administration, too, says that maximum pressure and President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the deal enabled Iran to accelerate its program. This, too, is false, as a Foundation for Defense of Democracy timeline shows. One of the biggest problems with the deal was how it enabled the Revolutionary Guards to divert the fruits of sanctions’ relief and new investment to its war chest. While the Obama and Biden administrations said that they would counter Iran’s sanctions-busting, Malley’s efforts to lift the IRGC’s foreign terrorist organization designation effectively facilitate Iranian money-laundering.
Iran’s own behavior increasingly should raise alarm bells.
While liberals and pro-regime lobby groups such as the National Iranian American Council condemned the Trump administration’s restrictions on visas for Iranians, they ignore that it is the Iranian government today that restricts movement. Iranians say that the regime will no longer permit current and former officials as well as prominent businessmen to travel abroad absent vetting and permission from the IRGC’s intelligence department.
There are two possible reasons for this. First, the regime believes that its former officials are no longer willing to uphold the fiction of the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary precepts and they fear that, once outside Iran’s borders, they will acknowledge that the ayatollah wears no clothes. There is also a more mundane explanation: Intelligence officers appear to pay special attention to those Iranians with potential inside knowledge about the processes through which Tehran evades sanctions. The regime fears these officials might either voluntarily reveal such information or become targets of foreign intelligence organizations.
Either way, the White House should consider why, if they believe the Iranians will abide by any deal, Iranian authorities now work so assiduously to limit the ability to move freely of those with detailed knowledge of how Iran cheats.
Regimes that have legitimacy need not imprison their own citizenry. Nor do countries that intend to abide by the letter and spirit of diplomatic agreements fear what former officials might say.
Whether because of ambition, ideology, or to paper over past mistakes, Biden, Malley, and Sullivan continue to push for a renewed agreement. They may prefer to blame their predecessors rather than adversaries for the failure of rapprochement. Perhaps it is time, however, that they consider why it is that the Iranian government now works so hard to prevent its own citizenry from traveling beyond Iran’s borders.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
