Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that while it was not realistic for the US and Iran to stop competing for regional influence, “it is reasonable to expect them to keep those isolated from the path of JCPOA in their mutual interest. “
Mutual interests are clear. The nuclear deal is the easiest way to fulfill the US sworn intention to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And while Iran is vocal about how it is resisting sanctions in the best possible way, it is perfectly clear that its economy and Covid-19’s response would be much better with its relief.
Biden surrounded himself with Iranian experts – his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and CIA chief nominee Bill Burns, are immersed in creating the original 2015 deal. The only small risk in this pedigree team is that they underestimate the damage that Trump’s past four years have done to faith in careful American diplomacy.
However, Biden seems relatively relaxed about the exaggerated schedule that Iran’s parliament and the hardliners have set for the deal to be renewed in late February. This brought Iran’s enrichment to 20% (with the additional threat of a jump to 60% from supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei).
“Clearly, Iran wants to increase its advantage. And I think they are exaggerating.”
Geranmayeh sees Iran’s escalation movements as “very deliberate and calculated. There are many more things that Iran can do to return to levels of nuclear activity in 2013, but it did not.”
Future movements
If we are seeing carefully choreographed movements, albeit with songs at different times, what comes next? The EU suggested informal meetings with the US to try to make diplomacy move a little quieter and faster. Ali Vaez, director of the Crisis Group’s Iran Project, said the proposal put Iranians “in a difficult situation”.
Watching without any of the relief sanctions they desire “can be interpreted as evidence of their despair in Washington,” he said, “and if they don’t, they can be seen internationally as the unyielding culprit.”
Vaez was “cautiously optimistic” that the meeting would take place, and Geranmayeh echoed a broad consensus that the hardliners seeking to derail diplomacy before Iran’s presidential elections in June were “marginalized”.
“So far, it appears that the Biden government is showing less flexibility to step down from its initial negotiating position that Iran must act first to reverse its nuclear activities, while Iran has left the door open for a synchronized process,” he said. .
Vaez said the problem may come later, when Biden’s team realizes its desire to expand JCPOA – already old, only about four years old until some of its sunset clauses come into effect – into something more lasting and wider reach. “Mess with” the business, said Vaez, “let alone fundamentally change [its] terms … on the theory that it has more influence than the other would be a dangerous move. “
Thursday’s attacks on the Iraq-Syria border do not pose an existential threat to diplomacy with Iran. The nuclear deal was designed to simply deal with the risk of Iran receiving the bomb – not its widespread dispute over regional influence and other conventional weapons programs.
Still, they show the region’s habit of unpredictability and how it can jeopardize paths to diplomacy that seem safe and obvious, but can be hindered by worn-out and needless temperaments, staggered retaliations.