Four months ago, it looked like the United States, its partners in the P5+1, and
Iran
had an agreement: Tehran would come back into compliance with its nuclear obligations under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal). In return, the West would remove sanctions on the Iranian energy and banking sectors.
Unfortunately, things have since fallen apart. 2023 could turn out to be the year when the entire diplomatic enterprise collapses.
One major problem is that the Iranians have adopted an extremely unhelpful, if not intransigent, negotiating strategy. In addition to the usual disputes about the pace of potential U.S. sanctions relief and which centrifuges will have to be ripped up, Tehran is sticking with a bottom-line demand Washington and its allies in Europe are unprepared to accede to: that the yearslong IAEA investigation into Iran’s past nuclear activity is permanently shut down as part of a renewed nuclear deal. Despite repeated trips by the IAEA to Tehran for discussions, there doesn’t appear to be progress on resolving the main sticking points.
Meanwhile, the Iranians continue to increase their leverage by producing higher-enrichment purity uranium, operating more advanced centrifuges, and increasing their total uranium stockpile. The IAEA’s monitoring regime is now strictly limited, courtesy of Tehran’s decision last year to remove some of the cameras in retaliation for the IAEA Board’s censure. “[T]he Agency has not been able to perform JCPOA verification and monitoring activities in relation to the production and inventory of centrifuges, rotors and bellows, heavy water and uranium ore concentrate for almost two years,” the IAEA reported in its latest quarterly assessment.
Tehran’s negotiating position is rubbing off on the Biden administration. President
Joe Biden
, who campaigned on resurrecting a deal his predecessor killed, admitted in December that the JCPOA is as “dead” as disco. Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy for Iran and the man with the migraine-inducing task of convincing the Iranians to get to “yes,” also appears to have reached the end of his rope. This week, State Department spokesman Ned Price went as far as to say that nuclear talks are not a priority for the administration and, in fact, “hasn’t been on the agenda for some months now.”
Events have also outpaced the talks themselves. While one would hope the JCPOA negotiations could be insulated from other disputes between the U.S. and Iran, non-nuclear issues are bleeding into the nuclear file.
The Iranian government’s monthslong crackdown on demonstrators, sparked by the heinous death of a woman by the police over a perceived violation of Iran’s conservative dress code, has resulted in the deaths of more than 500 people and the arrests of around 19,000. Iran’s transfer of hundreds of drones to Russia, which Moscow is using to bombard Ukraine, has convinced some experts that sanctions relief would not only worsen Tehran’s behavior but be unjustified on a moral level.
Ultimately, Biden will have to decide whether it’s worth it to press on. As Duke University historian Susan Colbourn wrote in her new book, Euromissiles, Ronald Reagan faced a similar conundrum when the Soviets accidentally shot down a Korean airliner in 1983, killing everyone on board. Some of his advisers, such as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, recommended he pull out of arms control talks with Moscow as a sign of protest. Reagan didn’t take Weinberger’s advice, arguing that arms control was too important to abandon.
Iran’s power in 2023, of course, doesn’t come remotely close to what an even dying Soviet Union possessed in the early 80s. But it will nonetheless be interesting to see if Biden eventually comes to a similar conclusion.
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Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
