In Iran Nuclear Talks, Familiar Cast of Characters Faces Fresh Problems
Negotiations over the original nuclear deal were a highly technical affair. This time they are a test of political will.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-iran-nuclear-talks-familiar-cast-of-characters-faces-fresh-problems-11617626187
When American and Iranian officials resume talks in Vienna on reviving the 2015 international nuclear deal, the people driving the diplomacy are a familiar cast of characters, including some of the key figures who negotiated the original accord working to put it back together again.
But if the participants in Tuesday’s discussions are familiar, the
context for the talks has changed sharply, as have some of the two sides’ objectives. And while the steps needed for Washington and Tehran to return to their commitments are relatively clear, the diplomatic choreography to get there is complicated.
Negotiating the original deal was a hugely technical effort aimed at inventing from scratch a set of
nuclear restraints on Iran. These talks will be more a test of political will.
President Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 and the nearly three years of sanctions that followed, crushing Iran’s economy, have deepened Tehran’s wariness of American promises. The
U.S. killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani last year heightened that mistrust.
After the Americans pulled out, Iran stopped adhering to limits the deal placed on its nuclear activities, taking steps that have brought it
closer to being able to produce an atomic weapon. Some Iranian officials question whether a future U.S. administration won’t abandon the pact again.
The coming Iranian presidential elections in June also have emboldened Tehran hard-liners who are striving to deny President Hassan Rouhani and his more moderate allies
a diplomatic victory ahead of the vote.
The Biden administration, for its part, regards
restoring the 2015 deal negotiated during the Obama administration as just a starting point.
President Biden has said he intends to use the deal to pursue follow-on arrangements that would impose more enduring limits on Iran’s nuclear efforts while addressing Tehran’s missile program and regional activities, especially its support for local militias.
“The U.S. and Iran are so suspicious of each other that it is going to be hard,” said Robert Einhorn, a former senior State Department official for proliferation issues who is at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “Returning to the deal will be slower and more complicated than originally expected, even though both countries support restoring the agreement. Achieving follow-on arrangements will be even more difficult.”
Compounding the challenge, tensions have escalated between Washington and two of the other parties to the original seven-nation deal: Russia and China. Both countries have strengthened ties with Iran since 2015—the Russians by cooperating with Iran in Syria to bolster President Bashar al-Assad and the Chinese by becoming
Tehran’s main trading partner and concluding a wide-ranging accord in March.
While talks on the 2015 accord occurred against the background of major tensions with Russia over its intervention in Ukraine, former officials say that Moscow and Beijing nonetheless played a constructive role and that similar cooperation for any follow-on arrangements could be less likely.
“When it comes to a follow-on agreement, the change in relations with China and Russia will make this incredibly difficult for Biden,” said Gary Samore, director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and a weapons of mass destruction expert on former President Barack Obama’s National Security Council.
Iran’s team in Vienna will be headed by Abbas Araghchi, an influential deputy foreign minister who helped orchestrate Tehran’s approach to the 2015 deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
The U.S. delegation is staffed by experienced hands who have been dealing with Iran’s nuclear program for years. Rob Malley, the U.S. special envoy for Iran, will be present, and the U.S. team is also expected to include his deputy, Richard Nephew, a sanctions and proliferation expert.
Signaling their support for the Vienna talks, the European nations that participate in the deal plan to send the political directors from their foreign ministries to the opening of the session before government experts get down to the highly technical talks, a Western diplomat said. Russia, in contrast, isn’t sending a deputy foreign official from Moscow but will rely on Mikhail Ulyanov, its Permanent Representative to International Organizations in Vienna. China is also expected to be represented by a lower level official..
For now, Iran is refusing to meet directly with U.S. officials unlike the years of sometimes day-and-night negotiations that led to the 2015 accord. Instead, European diplomats will talk separately with the Iranians and the Americans, and shuttle between the two sides.
At the heart of negotiations will be Iran’s breaches of the deal and
the future of sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, which not only reimposed the sanctions lifted under the 2015 deal but also sanctioned many of the same sectors of Iran’s economy under antiterror powers, or tied them to Iran’s development of ballistic missiles.
Biden administration officials are prepared to remove nuclear sanctions if Iran complies with the 2015 deal.
But they say they plan to keep some sanctions on terrorism and human rights grounds and perhaps impose new ones, which they insist were never precluded by the accord. Entities targeted under counterterrorism authority include Iran’s central bank and the Revolutionary Guard, its prime military unit.
Iranian officials say all U.S. sanctions imposed since 2018 must be lifted before Tehran returns to compliance with the accord. In addition to the economic benefits that Iran would get from the removal of sanctions, it would gain more than $30 billion if the U.S. agreed to release all of Tehran’s export revenue that has been frozen abroad.
Reversing Iran’s breaches of the 2015 deal is also a knotty problem. In addition to increasing uranium enrichment, Iran has installed advanced centrifuges, gaining technical
knowledge that can’t be erased.
The U.S. is likely to argue that the centrifuges be destroyed and not merely dismantled, some former officials say, a step Tehran may be unwilling to take.
European officials would like to see the negotiations over re-entering the deal done before Iran’s presidential election, but some former U.S. officials say they could well take much longer.
In recent weeks, the Biden administration offered to release an initial $1 billion in frozen oil revenue from South Korea, which would be used to buy humanitarian items, and to issue some waivers for Iran to legally export some of its oil. In return, the U.S. asked for specific steps on the Iranian side, including stopping the production of 20% uranium. But Iran, which once asked for an initial gesture from Washington, now says it is no longer interested in a step-by-step approach and wants to define
what a comprehensive return to compliance for both sides would look like, U.S. and Iranian officials say.
Even if the deal is restored, the lingering distrust will cast a shadow over future talks and could make Iran resistant to the Biden administration’s long-term goal of a broader security arrangement. And by negotiating hard in Vienna over restoring a deal previously agreed to in 2015, Iran will also be sending a signal that any discussion of follow-on arrangements would be much harder, those former U.S. officials say.
European diplomats have said that any U.S. effort in Vienna to nail down Tehran’s commitment to participate in future negotiations could push Iran away from the table.
The Biden administration hasn’t said Iran must commit to engage in talks on follow-on arrangements as a condition for restoring the 2015 deal. Yet if Washington doesn’t extract an Iranian promise to engage in such discussions before the 2015 deal is revived, it could surrender some of its biggest leverage—sanctions—to lure Tehran into those future talks, some former U.S. officials say.
Tehran hasn’t formally ruled out a follow-up accord on its nuclear activities if it would get more benefits in return. But negotiating limits on Iran’s missile program, which Tehran says is needed as a counterweight to the superior air forces of the Arab Gulf states and Israel, is a “non-starter,” according to Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian nuclear negotiator, now with Princeton University.
“Since the U.S. broke its promise, it needs to first restore the trust by correctly implementing the agreed deal, and then raise other disputed issues,” he said.
“Considering the broken promises of the U.S. and Europe, when it comes to military issues, even reformist voices are against giving concessions,” Abolfazl Amouei, spokesman for the national security and foreign policy commission in Iran’s parliament, said in an interview.
—Aresu Eqbali and Laurence Norman contributed to this article.
