Nuclear negotiations between Iran and an international coalition are set to resume once more, with both sides seemingly far from agreement. I can’t remember how many times I have written that sentence – or iterations of it – over much of the last two decades, but I’m guessing it’s well over a hundred.
This time, the resumption of talks is largely thanks to the efforts of the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, who has pushed for them for a while now. After meeting Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Tehran on Saturday, he got the result he wanted. “There are decisions that have to be taken in Tehran and in Washington,” he said. “But we agreed today that this visit will be followed by the resumption of negotiations … to try to solve the last outstanding issues.”
Iran has cast its ambivalent shadow across my life from the moment I was born. My maternal family fled from Tehran in the 1970s, guessing correctly that the Islamists they feared would take power in the country were unlikely to be hospitable to Jews. They had already experienced how things could suddenly turn. Just two decades earlier, they had fled Iraq — a place my family inhabited for centuries, if not longer – shortly after the establishment of the state of Israel.
I am, then, aware of Iran’s duality: of the horror and philistinism of the Islamic Republic, a squalid regime squatting on an educated, warm and largely western-leaning people. At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s a regime that can never be allowed to get a nuclear bomb.
After former President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the 2015 deal, Iran restarted various nuclear activities (though, pointedly, ones that were easily reversible). President Joe Biden came to office pledging to sort the problem out. Talks restarted in April last year between Iran and the P4+1 (China, Russia, France, the UK, and Germany) in Vienna.
Biden is caught between a variety of bad choices and bad outcomes, while trying to deal with a negotiating partner that won’t speak directly to him. Instead, he has to make do with “indirect talks’’, mediated by the EU.
Some say this is the last chance. But then again, maybe it isn’t. If no deal is reached, then what happens? Iran will continue to push on with its programme. Pressure will increase, its people will suffer. But then they suffer anyway, and the regime will take care of its own, as it always does.
It will get to the point where only military strikes can work, and only the United States has the firepower to do those effectively. That would probably mean some sort of regional war and no one, least of all Washington, wants that.
Make no mistake, a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic is not something the world needs. If Iran were to get a bomb, I believe it would not – despite much ill-informed and breathless speculation – nuke Israel. The Mullahs and the Quds Force who run Iran are programmed above all to self-perpetuate. They have zero interest in killing themselves; they’re too busy getting rich.
But a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic is one that will become – to employ that most slippery of phrases – more “geopolitically assertive” across the region. What this means is that it will kill even more people in Lebanon and Syria and Iraq and everywhere else it sends its murderous emissaries.
So the world must do whatever it can to stop this outcome, and so the haggling begins once more. And, believe me, no one haggles and wriggles like the Iranians in negotiations (except maybe the French).
Most urgent is the question of how much sanctions relief Washington would be prepared to give Tehran in exchange for nuclear curbs. But the Iranians are also demanding that Washington removes the military branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from its foreign terrorist organisation list. The Americans, rightly, are refusing. “We are prepared to immediately conclude and implement the deal we negotiated in Vienna for mutual return to full implementation of the JCPOA. But for that, Iran needs to decide to drop their additional demands that go beyond the JCPOA,” a US spokesperson said.
But the pressure to find a way forward is great. And it is growing. All sides publicly agree that a JCPOA II nuclear deal would be the best outcome. Again, no one wants war. And there’s something else, too. A deal would mean the return of Iranian oil to international markets, which, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is needed more than ever.
As always, the outcome of negotiations is hard to predict, save for one thing. I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing those opening words again in the not-too-distant future.
