The Nuclear Deal Can Still Be Saved

All sanctions imposed for the purpose of destroying the deal need to be lifted in order to save it.

Fred Kaplan is puzzled by Biden’s failure to rejoin the nuclear deal quickly:

More puzzling than Trump messing things up, though, is why President Joe Biden—who, during the campaign, said he would bring back the deal—didn’t move to do so right after entering office this past January. He could have, accurately, blamed Trump for the mess, offered to lift the sanctions gradually if the Iranians dismantled their nuclear hardware gradually. Instead, for reasons that no one has clearly explained [bold mine-DL], the two sides got into a dispute over who should take the first step first.

I have no inside information about this, but it has seemed pretty clear that the reason that the Biden administration refused to go first and make concessions was that they were deathly afraid being attacked by Iran hawks for being “weak.” It was also because many Democratic foreign policy professionals had bought into the genuinely stupid idea that Biden should use Trump’s illegitimate sanctions as “leverage.” This is how we ended up with Biden administration officials talking about the fantasy of a “longer and stronger” follow-on agreement instead of focusing intently on reviving the existing one. They were so preoccupied with keeping Menendez and regional clients quiet that they missed the opportunity to undo Trump’s mess early on. Dragging their feet on sanctions relief also seems to be typical of the Biden administration’s foreign policy as a whole. Fearful of being accused of “rewarding” Iran, they presided over almost a year of drift and inaction while they kept saying that “the ball is in Iran’s court.” In other words, it was a combination of political cowardice and lack of flexibility.

For their part, the Iranian government insisted on the U.S. going first because the U.S. was the party to the agreement that first violated. As far as they were concerned, the one that broke the deal should take the initiative to repair it. That was a fairly reasonable position for them to take, since they had been in compliance with the deal before the U.S. launched its latest economic war on them and they had shown remarkable patience in waiting for a change in administrations so that the agreement could be salvaged. Once Raisi took over as president, that created additional delays and problems, because the new Iranian government was determined to be less flexible than its predecessor, so they ended up mirroring U.S. inflexibility with their own. During this period, Israel continued its sabotage campaign, and Iran responded to this with further expansions of the nuclear program, and the Biden administration then used these responses to sabotage as pretexts for refusing to provide sanctions relief.

In the end, the problem boils down to one of pride and the pathetic fear of appearing “weak” in the eyes of domestic opponents. No one wanted to take a first step because that would supposedly reflect an eagerness to make concessions, and so instead we get a nine-month staring contest where everyone loses. There are few things weaker than refusing to salvage a good agreement because of a fear of seeming weak. Sometimes worthwhile diplomatic achievements require taking a little political risk, and the political leaders that can’t or won’t take those risks end up looking both weak and foolish.

It is true that the U.S. cannot “guarantee” that a future administration won’t renege on the deal in the future, but it is understandable why the Iranian government feels compelled to ask for this. After all, what is the point in their complying with the deal once again only to have the rug pulled out from under them four years from now? What real benefits can they expect to receive in terms of increased investment and trade when a Republican sword of Damocles hangs over their heads? No major corporation is going to gamble on investing in Iran as long as the possibility of a new economic war looms on the horizon. That makes the deal distinctly less appealing to Iran now than it did six years ago. If our side is unhappy that the Iranian government has more expertise and technical proficiency than they did before, the Iranians are presumably furious that their country has been cut off from most of the global economy by U.S. economic warfare. Unless the Biden administration wants to see more of the former, they need to move quickly to end the latter.

The JCPOA has been an exceptionally bad agreement for Iran, and the surprising thing is that they have been willing to keep it alive despite years of U.S. efforts to make them abandon it. If a guarantee is impossible, the U.S. needs to be able to offer them something else in the short term to make cooperating worth their while. That means providing significant incentives up front, and that means more sanctions relief first before Iran does anything. In this case, it is our government that most needs to demonstrate that it can be trusted to do what it says.

U.S. officials are loath to offer sanctions relief under any circumstances, and they are especially reluctant to offer relief before the sanctioned government takes the desired actions, but this is not a typical case. The U.S. imposed all post-2018 sanctions to punish Iran in spite of Iranian compliance, and the new sanctions that are formally non-nuclear sanctions were imposed for the purpose of destroying the nuclear deal. We know this because the architects of the “maximum pressure” campaign told us this is what they were doing. All sanctions imposed for the purpose of destroying the deal need to be lifted in order to save it. Iran has lost out on years of sanctions relief and the investment and trade that should have gone with it. No one expects the U.S. to make good on those past losses, but the least that it can do is to stop suffocating the Iranian economy with sanctions that should never have been imposed. If the Biden administration offers Iranian negotiators something they can show to their leaders as proof that salvaging the agreement gets them real benefits, they may be surprised at how quickly they can reach a compromise.