Many of the characters are the same for President-elect Joe Biden, but the scene is much grimmer as he assembles a team of veteran negotiators to get back to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
President Donald Trump worked during his four years in office to blow up the multinational deal to stem Iran’s nuclear program, dismantling predecessor Barack Obama’s diplomatic achievement in favor of what Trump called a maximum pressure campaign against Iran.
Up to Trump’s last days in office, allegations, threats and more sanctions by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Iran’s decision to encourage uranium enrichment and seize a South Korean tanker, help to raise concerns. believe that a regional conflict will break out. Iran on Friday staged exercises, hurled bursts of ballistic missiles and slammed drones against targets, further increasing pressure on the incoming US president over a nuclear deal.
Even before the Capitol uprising this month, domestic turmoil threatened to weaken the US hand internationally, including in the nuclear standoff in the Middle East. Political divisions are widespread, thousands die in the pandemic and unemployment remains high.
Biden and his team will face allies and opponents who wonder how much attention and resolution the US can give to Iran’s nuclear issue or any other foreign concern, and whether any commitment from Biden will be reversed by his successor.
“His ability to move the needle is … I think he is held back by the doubts about America’s capacity and the skepticism and concerns about what comes after Biden,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Nasr was an adviser on Afghanistan during the first Obama administration.
Biden’s choice of Deputy Secretary of State, Wendy Sherman, acknowledged the difficulties in an interview with a Boston news show last month before her appointment.
“We are going to work hard on this because we have lost credibility, we are considered weaker,” said Sherman, who was Barack Obama’s chief US negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. She spoke of the foreign goals of the Iranian government. US in general, including the deal with Iran.
Biden’s first priority for renewed talks is to get both Iran and the United States back in line with the nuclear deal, which offered Iran sanctions exemption in exchange for Iran accepting restrictions on its nuclear material and equipment.
“If Iran honors the deal again, so will we,” said a person familiar with the ideas of the Biden transition team, on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak on the record. “It would be a first step.”
But Biden is also under pressure from both Democrats and Republican opponents of the Iran deal. They don’t want the US to throw away the influence of sanctions until Iran is forced to deal with other issues that are offensive to Israel, Sunni Arab neighbors and the United States. That includes Iran’s ballistic missiles and the substantial and protracted intervention in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq. Biden also promises to fix all that.
Going back to the original deal, “it is the floor, not the ceiling” for the Biden administration on Iran, the person familiar with the new administration’s views on it said. “It doesn’t stop there.”
“In an ideal world, it would be great to have a comprehensive agreement,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “But that’s not how these negotiations work.”
Connolly said he thought there was widespread support in Congress to get back into the deal.
Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who worked as an Iran adviser to the Trump administration in 2019 and this year, questioned that.
Congressional lawmakers will refuse to lift sanctions against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and other Iranian players who view the US as proponents of terrorism, as well as refuse to give up financial pressure designed to prevent Iran from moving closer to nuclear weapons. come, Goldberg predicts.
“This is a real wedge within the Democratic Party,” Goldberg said.
Sanctions from Trump, who pulled the US out of the deal in 2018, mean Iranian leaders at home are under tougher economic and political pressure, as is Biden. The United States’ European allies will be eager to help Biden achieve a victory over the new Iran talks, if possible, Nasr said. Even among many non-US allies, “they don’t want the return of Trump or Trumpism.”
Biden was Obama’s main promoter of the 2015 deal with lawmakers when the deal came about. He spoke for hours with skeptics in Congress and a Jewish community center in Florida. Subsequently, Biden hammered in Obama’s promise that America would eventually do everything it could to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons if diplomacy failed.
In addition to tapping Sherman for his administration, Biden has recalled William Burns, who led secret early talks with Iran in Oman, as his CIA director. He has selected Iranian negotiators Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan as his intended Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, respectively, among other Iranian players from 2015.
It is not yet clear whether Biden will hire Sherman as his chief diplomatic manager with Iran, or someone else, or whether he will appoint a key Iran envoy. Sherman was also instrumental in the US’s negotiations with North Korea.
The implicit threat from the Obama administration of military action against Iran if it continued to evolve into a nuclear weapons program might seem less convincing than five years ago, given the domestic crises in the US.
A new conflict in the Middle East would only make it more difficult for Biden to find the time and money to deal with pressing issues, including his planned $ 2 trillion effort to reduce climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions.
“If war with Iran were to become inevitable, it would turn everything he tries to do with his presidency on its head,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran and US Middle East policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International. Peace. “Biden and his team are very aware of this. Their priorities are domestic. “