🌻🌻🌻1 big thing: Can Biden save the Iran deal?
29 Oct. 2020
Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo:
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Four more
years of President Trump would almost certainly kill the Iran nuclear
deal — but the election of Joe Biden wouldn’t necessarily save it.
The big
picture: Rescuing the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA) is near the top of Biden's foreign policy priority list. He says he'd
re-enter the deal once Iran returns to compliance, and he'd use it as the basis
on which to negotiate a broader and longer-lasting deal with Iran.
Breaking it down: Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018, restoring
U.S. sanctions and piling on new ones under a “maximum pressure” campaign that
has devastated the Iranian economy.
·
He
contends that bringing Iran to its knees will eventually bring it back to the
negotiating table. That has yet to happen.
·
Iran
remains a party to the JCPOA but has been systematically breaching it since
last May.
·
It's not a sprint for the bomb, but Iran has
reduced its “breakout time” from one year to perhaps three months.
The European signatories to the
deal — France, Germany and the
U.K. — have been desperately trying to save it.
·
One European diplomat told Axios in September
that he had one eye on the polls and another on the calendar, anticipating that
support would arrive from Washington if the deal could only survive a few more
months.
But the Trump
administration is attempting to finish off the deal, in
part by adding a thicket of sanctions that Biden might find politically painful
to remove.
·
Rob Malley, a former Middle East adviser to
Barack Obama and now president of the International Crisis Group, says those
efforts will only intensify if Biden wins on Nov. 3.
·
"I’m sure there will be people around the
president who’d say, 'You are the only thing that stands between a President
Biden and undoing everything you did on Iran, and you now have two and a half
months to do everything you can to make a return to the JCPOA
impossible.'"
Iran's domestic politics may
prove more challenging still. The "reformist" administration of President Hassan
Rouhani has been badly burned, and hardliners are expected to take over
following presidential elections next June.
·
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says Iran
will return to compliance if the U.S. does — but insists Tehran won't consider
any additional U.S. demands and expects "compensation" for Trump's
sanctions.
·
Zarif expressed skepticism last month
about the prospects for a follow-on agreement — even one designed only to push
back the JCPOA's sunset clauses. “We spent more time negotiating those
limitations than anything else," he told the Council on Foreign Relations.
Where things stand: “There are obstacles — demands that Iran might make, our own
politics, the more complicated relationship that the U.S. now has with Russia
and China — so this is not going to be smooth sailing," Malley says.
·
Nonetheless, he continues, “the gravitational
pull is towards a return to the JCPOA."
2. Interview: Moniz on putting the deal back together
Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
It took Iran
about six months to come into compliance with the JCPOA the
first time says Ernest Moniz, the former energy secretary who played a key role
in negotiating that deal.
·
Now that "the playbook has already been
run" and Iran has less to dismantle, it could be accomplished in about
four months, he says. That would require help from
Russia, which was critical to the 2015 process.
That means the earliest Iran
could return to compliance would be
right around the time its next administration takes office.
·
"A
serious negotiation of JCPOA-plus probably has to wait for the new
president," Moniz says, noting that new negotiations would require the
approval of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
·
“A
new president in both places is probably what is needed, at least potentially,
to get the nod from the supreme leader in Iran," he says.
The big picture: Moniz says a revitalized JCPOA would provide the world with
confidence that Iran is not building a nuclear weapons program — its original
purpose — but would be insufficient.
·
While
verification measures would remain in place indefinitely, limitations on Iran's
nuclear material and facilities will lapse over the next several years.
·
A
cap on Iran's supply of low-enriched uranium — "the single biggest nuclear
constraint," in Moniz's view — expires in 2030.
In future negotiations, Moniz adds, "regional concerns will have to be more front and
center."
3. What to watch: Two paths forward
Photo: Jim Bourg-Pool/Getty Images
Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the loudest and most influential
critics of the 2015 deal.
·
He has declined to speculate on what a potential
Biden victory would mean for U.S. policy on Iran, instead staying silent
and hoping for a Trump victory, Axios' Barak Ravid reports.
·
But the Israelis, Saudis and Emiratis would
oppose a return to the JCPOA, Malley says. They object to the fact that the
deal doesn't constrain Iran's missiles, its proxy forces or its broader
regional activities.
The Trump administration has
demanded Iran negotiate on all of
those fronts as part of any deal — and claims it will be forced to if Trump is
re-elected.
·
“We
are at the moment where the Iranians will recognize, because they can’t take
four more years of this, they will have to enter into a negotiation,"
Elliott Abrams, Trump's Iran envoy, recently told CNN.
What to watch: Biden envisions almost precisely the opposite path to a broader
deal with Iran, but acknowledges there's no guarantee Iran will even return to compliance with the JCPOA.
·
As
with many other issues, his campaign emphasizes the need to restore America's
credibility and its alliances.
·
"If Iran decides not to do it, well, I
think the world would be able to address that together," Tony Blinken,
Biden’s top foreign policy adviser, told the
"Pod Save the World" podcast this week.
·
"And
if Iran does engage in this, then at least we’d be back with the folks who
helped us achieve the deal in the first place."
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