June 25, 2021
by Warren L. Nelson
The negotiations to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) are apparently marking time until the new president and his administration take office in early August.
Ali Rabii, the spokesman for the Rohani Administration said June 2 that the negotiators don’t expect to finalize any agreement until there is a new president in office in Tehran to put his imprimatur on the agreement.
Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the same thing in an interview June 16. “Everyone knows that, at this point, it will be necessary to wait for the new Iranian government.”
It isn’t clear that is what President-elect Ebrahim Raisi wants, however. Some analysts think Raisi wanted Rohani to seal a deal so that Raisi could then blame Rohani for ineptitude if anything went wrong with it in the future. If a deal isn’t signed until Raisi is in office, then he can’t evade blame for any problems that emerge from it.
By all accounts, the talks have been serious and progress has been made. But major issues remain unresolved. There are at least six issues which are outstanding, according to news reports, and could sink the negotiations.
1) The IAEA has complained about insufficient access to Iran’s nuclear sites and the US wants a guarantee of more access.
2) The European powers are pushing for specific language committing Iran to negotiate in the future over Iran’s ballistic missile program and its involvement in Syria, Yemen and Iraq.
3) Iran demands that the US lift every sanction that was imposed by the Trump Administration, while Washington points out that the 2015 agreement specifically allows sanctions for human rights violations and other causes. It only bans sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program. The Americans have conceded that some of the Trump sanctions imposed for non-nuclear justifications actually have an impact on Iran’s nuclear program and has agreed to lift those.
4) Iran also insists on guarantees that a Trump-like withdrawal from the JCPOA will not happen again in the future. But no US president can bind a future president. The only way to bind a president would be to make the JCPOA into a treaty, but there is no way the JCPOA would garner the two-thirds majority in the Senate required for a treaty.
5) The JCPOA only allows Iran to use its antiquated IR-1 centrifuges for the duration of the agreement. But Iran has installed hundreds of more advanced centrifuges, which the JCPOA banned Iran from building. The US and European powers all say a return to the 2015 agreement requires Iran to destroy those centrifuges. Iran wants to put them in storage.
6) The JCPOA barred Iran from doing much research and development work, but Iran has conducted much forbidden R&D. An open question is what to do about that, since R&D progress cannot simply be reversed despite Iran saying that everything it has done in the last two years can easily be reversed.
These are not all minor issues and could still block any revival of the 2015 agreement. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a congressional hearing June 7 that the two sides were still far apart and “not even close to the stage of returning to compliance for compliance.” Iran had long said that there was no problem to reviving the pact, that all the Americans had to do was pledge to come back into compliance with the terms of the agreement and Iran would immediately come back as well. Iran has ceased saying that.
Blinken said, “We’ve been engaged in indirect conversations for the last couple of months and it remains unclear whether Iran is willing and prepared to do what it needs to do to come back into compliance.”
“What we do know, unfortunately, is that meanwhile [Iran’s nuclear] program is galloping forward,” he said. “It has lifted restraints imposed on it by the agreement including the amount of enriched material that it has material that’s now, in some cases, enriched up to 20 percent and even a small amount to 60 percent. It has started to deploy some more advanced centrifuges.”
He went on to say that “the longer this goes on, the more their breakout time gets down.” The agreement had pushed it to a year or more, Blinken said, “it’s now down by published reports to a few months at best. And, if this continues, it will get down to a matter of weeks, exactly what we sought to avoid and what the agreement stopped.”
The talks in Vienna began April 6.
Meanwhile, the IAEA’s Grossi caused gasps around the world when he commented about Iran’s enrichment to more than 60 percent, observing that “only countries making bombs” enrich to that level since there is no use for that level other than for weapons.
