Trade negotiators like to say that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. And that is a useful way to understand the less-than-meets-the-eye agreement last week between Iran and the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog that seemed to promise a return of international oversight over Tehran’s controversial nuclear program.
Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), appeared to hail the framework agreement as a breakthrough of “profound significance,” saying that the still-unpublished accord “will open the way for the respective inspections and access” to Iranian nuclear facilities, from which IAEA inspectors have been barred since Israeli and U.S. military strikes in June. Iran’s leadership, too, boosted the tentative accord over the weekend, suggesting that hard-liners inside the regime have not yet gained ascendancy.
The problem, as Grossi acknowledged and Iran does not cease to point out, is that there is not yet any actual agreement between Iran and the IAEA that would allow for the return of inspectors to the facilities that Israel and the United States suspect are the epicenter of Iran’s push to develop a nuclear weapon.
Iran maintains that it will not resume full cooperation with the IAEA as long as the threat of additional sanctions loom—but loom they do, with a U.S.-backed push by Britain, Germany, and France (the E3) to restore a half-dozen suspended U.N. Security Council resolutions on an apparently unstoppable march to implementation by the end of September. (“Use it and lose it all,” Iran’s foreign minister said of Europe’s continued efforts to implement the so-called snapback sanctions.)
Iran is also desperate to forestall any additional military strikes on its facilities, such as those in June by the United States and Israel which severely damaged much of Iran’s incipient nuclear-weapons capability. This week at the IAEA general conference in Vienna, Iran is seeking support for a resolution that would ban military strikes on nuclear installations.
“I think we are on the snapback train now. In my view, it would be smart for the Iranians to do a deal with Grossi, then get snapback at any rate, and then be able to say, ‘The E3 weren’t on board, and neither was the U.S., but we left no stone unturned,’” said Ellie Geranmayeh, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a Foreign Policy contributor.
The June attacks by the United States and Israel ended Iran’s already-limited cooperation with the IAEA, if not Iran’s perceived nuclear-weapon aspirations or growing capabilities. (Iran maintains that it does not seek a nuclear weapon, though its actions suggest otherwise.)
But the attacks also made it harder to reach an interim agreement with the big three European countries that are driving the push for sanctions snapback.
One of the bloc’s demands from Iran to secure a short-term reprieve from snapback is a full accounting of the whereabouts of an estimated 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, a potential precursor to nuclear weapons. But that stockpile is the last ace card that Iran has to play, and there’s little point tossing it on the table just to secure six months of respite.
“It would have been much easier to reach a deal before the June attacks,” Geranmayeh said. “Iran, having seen its nuclear facilities damaged, is going to hold back any last remaining card for a negotiating process with the United States, rather than one over the implementation or not of snapback sanctions.”
In the near term, the high-level week at the U.N. General Assembly (Sept. 22-30) might be the last chance for a diplomatic thaw between the United States and Iran that could head off the otherwise inevitable return of sanctions and even restart serious negotiations. That, though, depends on the Trump administration’s willingness to continue to engage with Iran after seeing what was, in the White House’s eyes, a low-cost and successful use of military power to curb Iran’s nuclear outbreak capacity.
“The best way to get back on the diplomatic track, since it is all personal, is the General Assembly, the last time this year both sides will overlap,” Geranmayeh said. “Unless the Iranians pull a rabbit out of the hat, they have an escalation dynamic ahead of them.”
But even if there is a short-term pause on the snapback, as the E3 previously offered and which Russia and China have mulled presenting formally to the U.N. Security Council, it’s not clear if Washington and Tehran could bridge the implacable divide on the nuclear issue.
Multiple rounds of negotiations this spring foundered on the question of Iran’s right to the enrichment of uranium; Iran insists it can and should be able to, and the United States insists it cannot and should not. Given the damage done to several Iranian facilities, especially its cascades of advanced centrifuges, in the June strikes, Iran will likely be taking a break from serious enrichment for a while in any event. That might create space for a face-saving compromise that would satisfy hard-liners in both Washington and Tehran, Geranmayeh suggested.
And then, even if somehow diplomatic talks resumed, and the two sides were able to reach an accommodation that would give the United States what it wants (severe, verifiable, and enforceable limits on Iran’s ability to ever make a nuclear weapon) and what Iran wants (some semblance of relief for a battered economy), that may not come to pass.
Sanctions are sticky. Banks, insurers, energy companies, and traders remain long leery of doing business with regimes that were blacklisted. Iran’s best hope might be a deal with the United States to ease formal sanctions pressure, which could open the door to greater investment from China, Turkey, and Persian Gulf states, not Western firms that have been burned too many times by falling afoul of hard-to-navigate and ever-shifting U.S. sanctions rules.
But if there is no return to diplomacy, and if at the end of the month those previously suspended U.N. sanctions on Iran do go back into place, the showdown between Iran, the IAEA, Europe, United States, and Israel will likely head to a scarier spot. That could mean both renewed determination by certain elements of Iranian leadership to make a dash for the bomb while the country still has some highly fissile material, and could equally push outside states to turn again to military intervention to prevent precisely that.
The next two weeks will tell.
The post The Iran Deal That Isn’t Quite Yet appeared first on Foreign Policy.
