Many of the characters are the same for President-elect Joe Biden, but the scene is much clearer as he reunites a team of veteran negotiators to return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
President Donald Trump worked to exploit the multinational agreement to contain Iran’s nuclear program during his four-year term, avoiding the diplomatic achievement of 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 by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Iran’s decision to spur uranium enrichment and seize ‘a South Korean oil tanker, they help keep alive the concerns that explain the regional conflict. On Friday, Iran staged drills, launching ballistic missile blasts and smashing drones against targets, further increasing pressure on the new US president over a nuclear deal.
Even before the Capitol Uprising this month, unrest at home threatened to weaken the U.S. hand internationally, even in the Middle East nuclear confrontation. Political divisions are fierce, thousands of people are dying from the pandemic and unemployment remains high.
Biden and his team will face allies and adversaries wondering how much attention and resolution the U.S. can give on the Iran nuclear issue or any other foreign concern, and whether its successor will reverse any commitment from Biden.
“His ability to move the needle is … I think hampered by doubt about the ability of the United States and by skepticism and concern about what’s coming after Biden,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins. University School of Advanced International Studies. Nasr was an adviser to 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 her nomination.
“We will work hard on this, because we have lost credibility, they see us weaker” after Trump, said Sherman, who was Barack Obama’s top U.S. negotiator for Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal. of the foreign objectives of the United States in general, including the agreement with Iran.
Biden’s first priority for renewed talks is to get both Iran and the United States back in compliance with the nuclear deal, which offered Iran relief from sanctions in exchange for Iran accepting limits on its nuclear material and equipment.
“If Iran fulfills the agreement again, 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 the record. “It would be a first step.”
But Biden also faces pressure from Democrats and Republican opponents of the deal with Iran. They do not want the U.S. to launch sanctions leverage until Iran takes over other issues that could be criticized in Israel, Sunni Arab neighbors and the United States. This includes Iran’s ballistic missiles and substantial and long-standing intervention in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq. Biden promises to deal with all of this as well.
Returning to the original agreement “is the floor and not the ceiling” for the Biden administration in Iran, said the person familiar with the administration’s thinking going into it. “It doesn’t stop here.”
“In an ideal world it would be great to have a global agreement” at first, said Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “But that’s not how these negotiations work.”
Connolly said he believed there was broad support in Congress to get the deal back.
Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Institute for the Defense of Democracies institute who worked as Iran’s adviser to the Trump administration in 2019 and this year, questioned that.
Congress lawmakers will worry about lifting sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and other Iranian players the U.S. considers supporters of terrorism, and will also relinquish financial pressure to prevent Iran from approaching arms. nuclear, predicts Goldberg.
“This is a real wedge within the Democratic party,” Goldberg said.
Trump’s sanctions, which withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018, mean Iranian leaders are under stronger economic and political pressure at home, as Biden does. U.S. European allies will be eager to help Biden win new talks on Iran, 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 proponent of the 2015 deal with lawmakers once the deal was negotiated. He spoke for hours with skeptics in Congress and at a Jewish community center in Florida. Biden then fulfilled Obama’s promise that the United States would ultimately do everything it could to prevent Iran from receiving nuclear weapons, if diplomacy failed.
In addition to intervening in Sherman for his administration, Biden has again called on William Burns, who led the first secret talks with Iran in Oman, as director of the CIA. He has selected Iranian negotiators Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan as secretary of state and national security adviser respectively, among other 2015 Iranian players.
It is still unclear whether Biden will hire Sherman as his chief diplomatic officer with Iran or someone, or whether he will appoint a senior envoy from Iran. Sherman has also been instrumental in the U.S. negotiations with North Korea.
The Obama administration’s implicit threat of military action against Iran if it continued to move toward a nuclear-capable program might seem less convincing than it did five years ago, given the U.S. internal crises.
A new conflict in the Middle East will only make it difficult for Biden to find the time and money to tackle urgent problems, including his planned $ 2 trillion effort to reduce climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions.
“If war with Iran becomes inevitable, it would affect everything he tries to do with his presidency,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a U.S. and Middle East policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment. for International Peace. “Biden and his team are very present. Their priorities are domestic. “