The brief “proximity talks” aimed at salvaging the nuclear negotiations ended earlier this week after just two days without any progress in breaking the impasse between the United States and Iran.
Mediated by the European Union and hosted by Qatar in Doha, the talks were an attempt to move towards the full restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, whose future now seems bleak.
The fact that they took place at all was a testament to the efforts of the EU High Representative, Josep Borrell, who traveled to Tehran last weekend to pave the way for the Doha meeting. The mediating EU envoy, Enrique Mora, expressed his disappointment with the result and his determination to press on: “We will keep working with even greater urgency to bring back on track a key deal for non-proliferation and regional stability.” Regrettably, neither the United States nor Iran seems to share that sense of urgency to save the deal.
According to initial reports, American and Iranian delegations refused to budge from their respective positions, which have hardened over the last six months and left the negotiations deadlocked. Like all previous rounds of negotiations, these were indirect talks because the United States is still not a party to the JCPOA following Trump’s 2018 decision to renege on the agreement. The failure of this latest round to make any progress will make it more difficult to resolve the outstanding differences in any future meetings, assuming that there any more meetings to be had. Expectations for this round had already been very low, and they will be even lower the next time that the negotiators meet.
The United States and Iran continue to be at odds over the scope of the demands that should be included in the negotiations. While the Iranian government wants the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps removed from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations before it resumes compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States refuses to entertain making concessions on what it deems to be an extraneous issue. Iran also wants assurances that it will receive the economic benefits it is entitled to under the agreement, but the Biden administration cannot really guarantee anything beyond the next two and a half years.
The Iranian government is understandably wary of being burned yet again by Washington backtracking on its commitments, but there is unfortunately nothing that will bind the United States to honor its side of the bargain except for its own self-interest in avoiding another crisis. Given the near-certainty that any revived deal would get the axe under a future Republican administration, the Iranian government is faced with the unenviable choice of getting perhaps two years of sanctions relief.
The State Department stuck to the usual talking points on Wednesday in a statement: “As we and our European allies have made clear, we are prepared to immediately conclude and implement the deal we negotiated in Vienna for mutual return to full implementation….But for that, Iran needs to decide to drop their additional demands that go beyond” the nuclear deal. The Biden administration has been a stickler for ignoring everything except for the text of the agreement, and this has led them to dismiss Iranian demands for the lifting of what are ostensibly “non-nuclear” sanctions on the grounds that they are ”beyond” the deal.
Even though it is well-known that these “non-nuclear” sanctions were imposed for the express purpose of sabotaging any future U.S. reentry into the JCPOA, the Biden administration maintains that they have nothing to do with the deal and shouldn’t be part of the discussion. This is a myopic view for the Biden administration to hold, but it allows them to present their own inflexibility as if it were something more reasonable. Biden has had the means to revive the nuclear deal all along, but his administration has made it clear that it would rather watch the deal collapse than be seen making an “additional” concession by undoing more harmful Trump decisions.
The domestic political reasons why Biden is unwilling to remove the IRGC from the list of terrorist organizations are very similar to the domestic reasons why the Raisi government feels compelled to insist on the removal: both of them have to cater to their respective hardliners and they need to avoid the appearance of giving in too easily on a symbolic issue.
The IRGC designation itself is mostly useless, but it has become the bane of many innocent Iranians that seek to travel and work in the United States. As The Associated Press reported recently, because of the designation “it has become all but impossible for anyone who served in the branch, even as a conscript and in a non-combat role, to obtain a visa to travel to the United States.” Despite Biden’s move in the first days of his presidency to overturn Trump’s obnoxious travel ban, he has permitted a de facto travel ban created by this designation to stay in place with the same deleterious effects that the other one had.
As Reza Mazaheri and Sanjay Sethi explained in their article for Responsible Statecraft in May, “the collateral damage of the U.S. government’s immigration policy towards Iran far outweighs any specious benefit to national security.” Just as ordinary Iranians bear the brunt of the “maximum pressure” campaign against their country, they are also being made to pay the price when they try to come to this country for legitimate reasons.
It is a truism that the obstacles to the revival of the nuclear deal have never been technical, but they have always been political for both the United States and Iran. Raisi feels compelled to obtain more concessions than Rouhani did, and Biden is unwilling to take any political risk ahead of the midterms, and neither one wants to take the chance of “going first” and exposing himself to attacks from domestic critics. The basic problem of sequencing U.S. and Iranian moves to return to compliance has plagued the negotiating process from the start, and the Biden administration has never accepted that the onus to take the first steps was on the United States because of our government’s responsibility for breaching the agreement first.
While Washington dawdles in reviving the nuclear deal, there are still American citizens wrongfully detained and held hostage by the Iranian government, and they need our government to get them out. The successful conclusion of the nuclear negotiations can and should include provisions for the immediate release of those who have been unjustly imprisoned and mistreated for years. One of those hostages, Siamak Namazi, has been held for more than six years, and he appealed directly to the president in an op-ed in The New York Times this week: “Mr. Biden, I implore you to put the lives of innocent American detainees above Washington politics and make the tough decisions necessary to free all of us immediately. While political backlash is inevitable, the prolonged suffering and potential deaths of hostages are not.”
President Biden can still change course and secure the revival of the agreement, but to do this he will have to show much more flexibility and a greater willingness to accept political risk than he has shown thus far.
