Many of the characters are the same for President-elect Joe Biden, but the scene is much tighter, as he reassembles a team of veteran negotiators to re-enter the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
President Donald Trump has worked to blow up the multinational agreement to contain Iran’s nuclear program during his four-year term, avoiding the diplomatic achievement of his predecessor Barack Obama in favor of what Trump called a campaign of maximum pressure against Iran.
Until Trump’s last days in office, accusations, threats and even more sanctions from Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as well as Iran’s decision to stimulate uranium enrichment and confiscate a South Korean oil tanker, help keep worries that regional conflict will break out. Iran held exercises on Friday, dropping ballistic missile volleyball and crushing drones at targets, further increasing pressure on the new US president over a nuclear deal.
Even before this month’s Chapter uprising, home overthrows threatened to weaken the US hand internationally, including in the Middle East nuclear confrontation. Political divisions are fierce, thousands are dying in a pandemic and unemployment remains high.
Biden and his team will face allies and opponents wondering how much attention and resolution the US can bring to the Iranian nuclear issue or any other foreign concern and whether any of Biden’s commitments will be canceled 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’s coming after Biden,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies. Johns Hopkins University. Nasr was an adviser in Afghanistan during the first Obama administration.
Biden’s election as deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman acknowledged the difficulties in an interview with a Boston news program last month before his nomination.
“We will work hard on this because we have lost credibility, we are seen as weaker,” according to Trump, said Sherman, who was Barack Obama’s chief US negotiator for Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal. He was generally talking about US foreign objectives, including the agreement with Iran.
Biden’s first priority for renewing negotiations is the recovery of both Iran and the United States under the nuclear deal, which gave Iran relief from sanctions in exchange for Iran accepting limits on its nuclear materials and equipment.
“If Iran returns to the agreement, we will do the same,” said a person familiar with the thinking of the Biden transition team, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not allowed to speak in evidence. “It would be a first step.”
But Biden is also facing pressure from Democrats and Republican opponents of the deal with Iran. They do not want the United States to drop the sanctions lever until Iran is made to address other elements unacceptable to Israel, its Sunni Arab neighbors and the United States. This includes Iran’s ballistic missiles and substantial and long-term intervention in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq. Biden promises to take care of all this as well.
Returning to the original transaction “is the floor and not the ceiling” for the Biden administration in Iran, said the person familiar with the administration’s thinking about it. “It doesn’t stop here.”
“In an ideal world, it would be great to have a comprehensive agreement,” he said at first. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “But that’s not how these negotiations work.”
Connolly said he believed there was widespread support in Congress for reintroducing the agreement.
Richard Goldberg, senior adviser to the Democracy Foundation, which worked as Iran’s adviser to the Trump administration in 2019 and this year, questioned this.
Congress lawmakers will stop lifting sanctions against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and other Iranian players it considers supporters of terrorism and will also drop financial pressure to block Iran from approaching nuclear weapons, Goldberg predicts .
“This is a real breakdown within the Democratic Party,” Goldberg said.
Trump’s sanctions, which ousted the United States in 2018, mean that Iran’s leaders are under greater economic and political pressure at home, as is Biden. The European allies of the United States will be eager to help Biden win the new talks with Iran, if possible, Nasr said. Even among many non-American allies, “they do not want the return of Trump or Trumpism.”
Biden was the main promoter of Obama’s 2015 deal with lawmakers once the transaction was brokered. He spoke for hours with skeptics at Congress and at a Jewish community center in Florida. Then, Biden showed Obama’s promise that America will eventually do everything in its power to prevent Iran from receiving nuclear weapons if diplomacy fails.
In addition to calling Sherman for his administration, Biden called back William Burns, who led early secret talks with Iran in Oman as CIA director. He has chosen Iranian negotiators Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan as secretary of state and national security adviser, respectively, among other Iranian players since 2015.
It is unclear whether Biden will hire Sherman as his chief diplomatic manager in Iran or someone else, or whether he will appoint a senior Iranian envoy. Sherman also contributed to US negotiations with North Korea.
The Obama administration’s implicit threat of military action against Iran if it continues to move toward a weapons-capable nuclear program may seem less convincing than it was five years ago, given the US internal crises.
A new conflict in the Middle East would only make it harder for Biden to find the time and money to deal with urgent issues, including his planned $ 2 trillion effort to reduce climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions.
“If war with Iran becomes inevitable, it would remove anything else it is trying to do with its presidency,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a US and Middle East policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Biden and his team are very attentive to this. Their priorities are internal. ”