Many of the characters are the same for President-elect Joe Biden, but the scene is much clearer when he brings together a team of veteran negotiators to return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
President Donald Trump worked to blow up the multinational agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program during his four years in office, destroying predecessor Barack Obama’s diplomatic achievement in favor of what Trump called the maximum pressure campaign against Iran.
Until the last days of Trump in office, accusations, threats and even more sanctions from Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Iran’s decision to stimulate uranium enrichment and seize a South Korean tanker are helping to keep concerns that a regional conflict will erupt. Iran exercised on Friday, launching bursts of ballistic missiles and drones hitting targets, further increasing pressure on the new American president over a nuclear deal.
Even before the Capitol rebellion this month, the revolt at home threatened to weaken the US hand internationally, including in the nuclear standoff in the Middle East. Political divisions are fierce, thousands are dying in the pandemic and unemployment remains high.
Biden and his team will face allies and opponents wondering how much attention and resolution the United States can bring to Iran’s nuclear issue or any other foreign concerns, and whether any commitment by Biden will be reversed by his successor.
“His ability to move the needle is … I think it’s hampered by doubt about America’s ability and skepticism and concern about what will come after Biden,” said Vali Nasr, professor at the Johns University School of Advanced International Studies Hopkins. Nasr was an advisor for Afghanistan during the first Obama administration.
Biden’s choice for deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, acknowledged the difficulties in an interview for a Boston newscast last month before his appointment.
“We will work hard on this because we have lost credibility, we are seen as weaker” after Trump, said Sherman, who was Barack Obama’s chief negotiator in the U.S. for the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. She spoke of US foreign objectives in general, including the agreement with Iran.
Biden’s first priority for renewing negotiations is to get Iran and the United States back to comply with the nuclear deal, which offered Iran relief from sanctions in exchange for Iran accepting limits on its nuclear material and equipment.
“If Iran resumes the agreement, we will too,” said a person familiar with the thinking of Biden’s transition team, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak officially. “It would be a first step.”
But Biden also faces pressure from Democratic and Republican opponents of the Iran deal. They do not want the United States to throw away the power of sanctions until Iran is taken to deal with other questionable items for Israel, its Sunni Arab neighbors and the United States. This includes ballistic missiles from Iran and longstanding substantial interventions in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq. Biden promises to handle all of that too.
Returning to the original agreement “is the floor and not the roof” for the Biden government on Iran, said a person familiar with the next government’s thinking on the matter. “It doesn’t stop there.”
“In an ideal world, it would be great to have a comprehensive deal” at the beginning, said Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “But that is not how these negotiations work.”
Connolly said he believed there was broad support in Congress to get the deal back.
Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies institute who worked as an Iranian advisor to the Trump administration in 2019 and this year, questioned that.
Congressional lawmakers will hesitate to lift sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and other Iranian players that the United States considers supporters of terrorism, and will also hesitate to give up financial pressure to prevent Iran from approaching nuclear weapons, predicts Goldberg.
“This is a real wedge within the Democratic Party,” said Goldberg.
Trump’s sanctions, which pulled the U.S. out of the deal in 2018, mean that Iran’s leaders are under strong economic and political pressure at home, as is Biden. European allies in the United States will be eager to help Biden achieve victory in new negotiations with Iran, if possible, said Nasr. Even among many non-American allies, “they don’t want the return of Trump or Trumpism”.
Biden served as Obama’s main promoter of the 2015 deal with lawmakers as soon as the deal was negotiated. He talked for hours with skeptics in Congress and at a Jewish community center in Florida. Then, Biden reinforced Obama’s promise that America would do everything in its power to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons if diplomacy failed.
In addition to hiring Sherman for his government, Biden called back William Burns, who conducted secret negotiations with Iran in Oman, as his CIA director. He selected Iranian negotiators Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan as his secretary of state and national security adviser, respectively, among other Iranian players of 2015.
It is not yet clear whether Biden will employ Sherman as his top diplomatic manager with Iran, or someone else, or whether he will designate a top Iranian envoy. Sherman was also instrumental in the US negotiations with North Korea.
The Obama administration’s implicit threat of military action against Iran, if it continued to move towards a nuclear program capable of producing weapons, could seem less convincing than five years ago, due to internal crises in the United States.
A new conflict in the Middle East would only make it more difficult for Biden to find the time and money to deal with urgent problems, including his planned $ 2 trillion effort to reduce climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions.
“If war with Iran were to become inevitable, it would change everything he is trying to do with his presidency,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran and US Middle East policy expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Biden and his team are very aware of this. Their priorities are domestic. “