Many of the characters are the same for President-elect Joe Biden, but the scene is much stronger when he brings a team of veteran negotiators back together to re-enter into the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
During his four years in office, President Donald Trump worked to inflate the multinational agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program and destroy the diplomatic performance of his predecessor Barack Obama in favor of what Trump calls a maximum pressure campaign against Iran.
Until Trump’s last days in office, accusations, threats and even more sanctions by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Iran’s decision to urge uranium enrichment and seize a South Korean tanker help to keep alive the concerns about the conflict in the region. Iran launched exercises on Friday, hitting ballistic missiles and drones into targets, which increased pressure on the incoming US president due to a nuclear deal.
Even before the uprising of the Capitol this month, the upheaval at home threatened to weaken the American hand internationally, including in the heart of 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 and ask how much attention and resolution the US can bring on the nuclear issue in Iran or any other foreign interest, 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 doubts about America’s ability and the skepticism and concern about what’s coming after Biden,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said. Nasr was an adviser on Afghanistan during the first Obama administration.
Biden’s choice as deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, acknowledged the problems in an interview with a Boston news program last month before her nomination.
“We’re going to work hard on it because we’ve lost credibility, we’re seen as weaker,” said Sherman, who was Barack Obama’s leading US negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. She generally spoke of U.S. foreign objectives, including the Iran deal.
Biden’s first priority for renewed talks is to get Iran as well as the United States back in line with the nuclear deal, which gives Iran relief from sanctions in exchange for Iran accepting restrictions on its nuclear materials and equipment.
“If Iran complies with the agreement again, we will do the same,” said a person familiar with the thinking of the Biden transition team, saying on condition of anonymity because the person is not authorized to speak on the record. not. “That would be a first step.”
But Biden is also under pressure from both Democrats and Republican opponents of the Iran deal. They do not want the US to throw away the leverage of sanctions before Iran does so to address other items that are offensive to Israel, Sunni Arab neighbors and the United States. These include the ballistic missiles of Iran and the drastic and long-standing intervention in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq. Biden promises to deal with it too.
The person familiar with the incoming government’s thinking about it said: the floor and not the ceiling for the Biden government over Iran. “It doesn’t stop there.”
“In an ideal world, it would be great to have a comprehensive agreement,” Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat in Virginia, said. “But that’s not how these negotiations work.”
Connolly said he thinks there is broad support in Congress to get back into the agreement.
Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Institute who worked as an Iranian adviser to the Trump administration in 2019 and this year, questioned that.
Lawmakers in Congress will lift sanctions against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and other Iranian players who see the US as supporters of terrorism, and also refrain from financial pressure intended to stop Iran from moving closer to nuclear weapons, Goldberg predicts.
“It’s a real wedge within the Democratic Party,” Goldberg said.
Sanctions by Trump, which pulled the U.S. from the deal in 2018, mean Iran’s leaders at home are under heavier economic and political pressure, just like Biden. The US allies in the United States would like to help Biden win the new Iran talks, if possible, Nasr said. Even among many non-US allies, “they do not want the return of Trump or Trumpism.”
Biden served as Obama’s primary promoter of the 2015 agreement with lawmakers once the agreement was entered into. He talked for hours with skeptics in Congress and in a Jewish community center in Florida. After that, Biden hammered out Obama’s promise that America would eventually do everything in its power to deter Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons if diplomacy failed.
In addition to tapping Sherman for his government, Biden also recalled William Burns, who led secret early talks with Iran in Oman, as his CIA director. He chose Iran’s negotiators, Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, as his intended secretary of state and national security adviser, among others, Iranian players, respectively.
It is not yet clear whether Biden Sherman will appoint Iran as his chief diplomatic officer or anyone else, and whether he will appoint a chief envoy to Iran. Sherman was also instrumental in the US negotiations with North Korea.
The Obama administration’s implicit threat of military action against Iran if it continues to move toward a nuclear program may seem less convincing than five years ago, given the US domestic crises.
A new conflict in the Middle East would make it harder for Biden to find the time and money to deal with problems, including his planned $ 2 billion effort to reduce climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions.
“If war with Iran became inevitable, it would improve everything he tries to do with his presidency,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran and the US-Middle East policy of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Biden and his team are very aware of this. Their priorities are domestic. ”