For President Joe Biden, preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is a core national security objective. Biden administration officials across the government frequently state that the U.S. will do whatever is required to accomplish this goal and that all available options are on the table to ensure Tehran never becomes a de facto nuclear weapons power.
The U.S., in partnership with its allies, has sat down with Iran for about a year and a half in an attempt to bring the 2015 Iran nuclear deal back to life. Diplomacy, however, has run aground since September, when Tehran reportedly walked away from a draft agreement that would have granted the parties some major wins: economic sanctions relief for Iran and a stringent inspections regime for the U.S.
There have been no negotiating sessions since then. Iran’s nuclear program, meanwhile, isn’t standing still. According to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, Iran is “less than two weeks” from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon and months away from producing an actual nuclear warhead if it decides to do so. The situation is getting so tense that some think tanks in Washington are recommending stronger U.S. action against Iran, including military strikes and even regime change, if Iranian leaders don’t turn away from their current course.
But military action runs the high risk of Iranian military retaliation against the tens of thousands of U.S. forces stationed in the Middle East at any given time. Given the constellation of U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf in range of Iran’s ballistic missile inventory, Tehran would have plenty of targets to choose from. The risk-reward ratio of igniting a regional conflagration for the sake of temporarily degrading Iran’s nuclear program is out of whack.
Diplomacy, however frustrating it has proved to be, remains the least costly way to accomplish two of the Biden administration’s goals simultaneously: preventing an Iranian nuclear bomb while avoiding another war in the Middle East. If the White House has even a slight chance of threading this needle, it will need to revise its negotiating posture.
This may sound odd at first. Iran, after all, is the party most culpable for why the nuclear talks are in purgatory. It was Iran, for instance, that decided at the last minute to retable its demand that the International Atomic Energy Agency formally shut down its yearslong investigation in return for a signature. It is Iran that refuses to answer the IAEA’s legitimate queries about previous nuclear work. Iran continues to insist on a guarantee from Biden that economic sanctions won’t be reimposed by a future administration — a guarantee Biden doesn’t have the power to give.
Unfortunately, the current U.S. position only adds to the difficulties. When the nuclear talks began in April 2021, the White House wisely chose to separate the nuclear file from other points of dispute between Washington and Tehran, including but not limited to Iran’s support for terrorism, the civil-turned-proxy war in Yemen and the periodic rocket attacks that Iran-supported militias launch toward U.S. locations in Iraq and Syria.
The strategy was an outgrowth of President Barack Obama’s, who understood early on that tackling everything at once was a recipe for leaving the negotiating table with nothing to show for the effort.
As Obama told The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, was signed in July 2015, “We’re not measuring this deal by whether we are solving every problem that can be traced back to Iran, whether we are eliminating all their nefarious activities around the globe.” The deal, he commented, would be measured on one metric alone: whether Iran remained nuclear-free.
Biden, however, has settled on a strategy far different from his former boss’s. Rather than being siloed from each other, nuclear and nonnuclear issues are increasingly being lumped into the same basket. Tehran’s military support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, human rights abuses at home and the ongoing crackdown on anti-government protesters have become as much of a driver of the current impasse as the nuclear program itself.
If public words are any guidance, it appears as if the U.S. will settle for nothing less than Iranian policy concessions across the board. U.S. special envoy Robert Malley told the BBC on Feb. 1 that the U.S. wants Iran to come back into compliance with its nuclear obligations and stop aiding Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine.
Less than two weeks earlier, Secretary of State Antony Blinken essentially admitted during a news conference with United Kingdom Foreign Secretary James Cleverly that negotiating a framework toward the JCPOA’s reimplementation was a no longer a priority. As Blinken said at the time, “The JCPOA has not been on the agenda as a practical matter for many months now. It’s not our focus.” He then listed two issues that were: Iran’s arms shipments to Russia and the stifling of protests inside Iran itself.
Read between the lines, and the message becomes clear — if Iran still wants U.S. sanctions relief, it will have to go above and beyond respecting its nuclear obligations. Donald Trump made similar demands during his presidency, only to leave office having accomplished nothing.
The point isn’t to absolve Iran of its poor behavior. Indeed, it is possible Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believes his nation no longer needs to trade its nuclear progress for economic prosperity; the Iranians are increasingly looking East and leaning more heavily on China as an economic counterbalance to the West.
None of us can say with certitude what Iran’s political leadership is thinking at any given moment. What can be said with reasonable certainty is that by asking for too much, the White House is making a difficult situation downright impossible.
