Recalibrating US-Iran nuclear deal
ON the eve of the Munich Security Conference(Feb.20), German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Saturday that “now is the moment of truth” to determine whether Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers can be salvaged, and the Iranian leadership needs to make a choice.
Needless to say, in terms of US-Iran nuclear row, discourse to multilateral diplomacy has always been the only sensible way to address the nuclear conflict.
Yet not surprisingly, when foreign policy rides on hawkish emotional currents and succumbs to a superpower’s egoistic temptations, the result is quite obvious: wise and subtle statecraft has unfortunately gone into hibernation—endorsed by Trump’s impetuous unilateral decision (2018) to withdraw the US from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
First, some history.Six years ago in Vienna, P5 + 1, China, Russia, US, France, UK, and Germany, along with the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) and Iran agreed (in July 2015)to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)— subsequently endorsed by the UNSC Resolution 2231(Oct.18 2015).
Nevertheless, three years later, in 2018, under President Donald Trump, the US unilaterally terminated the accord—calling it as “horrible” and “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions— thereby imposing a new set of draconian sanctions against Iran.
Soon after, Tehran moved to keep international inspectors at a distance and being conjectured to be closer to being in a position to produce nuclear weapons.
In July 2015, Iran had two uranium enrichment plants – Natanz and Fordo – and was operating almost 20,000 centrifuges.
Under the JCPOA, Tehran was limited to installing no more than 5,060 of the oldest and least efficient centrifuges at Natanz until 2026 – 10 years after the deal’s “implementation day” in January 2016.
Until now, as per the Arms Control Organisation, Tehran is accused of making five breaches vis-à-vis the JCOPA.
As per the 2015 deal, Tehran and six negotiating powers were agreed that ran agreed not to produce either the highly enriched uranium or the plutonium that could be used in a nuclear weapon.
The proponents of the nuclear deal, particularly the European policy strategists played instrumental role in resurrecting the said deal.
In April 2021, Washington joined talks in Vienna aimed at reviving the Iran nuclear deal terminated by the Trump administration abandoned in 2018.
President Joe Biden has said he wants to return to the landmark accord.But the six remaining state parties are supposed to find a way for him to lift the sanctions.
Officials from the UK, France and Germany were acting as intermediaries while the Chinese and Russian were also active in this regard.
The negotiations—seeking to bring Washington back to the accord and ensure Iran returns to its commitments under the deal, were suspended in June 2021— as Iran elected ultraconservative President Ebrahim Raisi—were resumed in November.
With a new president of its own (Ebrahim Raisi) in place, Iran has declared its readiness to do so, but only if the Trump-era sanctions are first rescinded.
If the negotiations lead both sides back into the JCPOA, it would buy close to a decade of limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting many but not all of the economic sanctions.
US State Department official in January, 2022 said, “We are prepared to meet directly,” a State Department spokesperson said.
“We have long held the position that it would be more productive to engage with Iran directly, on both JCPOA negotiations and other issues,” the spokesperson said, referring to the nuclear deal between Iran and major powers.
Currently, the Biden administration restored a sanctions waiver to Iran, as indirect talks between Washington and Tehran on returning to the 2015 nuclear agreement entered the final stretch.
The waiver, which was rescinded by the Trump administration in May 2020, had allowed Russian, Chinese and European companies to carry out non-proliferation work at Iranian nuclear sites.
According to a senior State Department official, ‘We did NOT provide sanctions relief for Iran and WILL NOT until/unless Tehran returns to its commitments under the JCPOA.
We did precisely what the last Administration did: permit our international partners to address growing nuclear non-proliferation and safety risks in Iran’.
“There was some modest progress in the talks last week.We hope to build on that this week,” Ned Price US State Department spokesperson, told reporters.“(Uranium) enrichment …
continues with a maximum ceiling of 60%, which led Westerners to rush to negotiations, and it will continue with the lifting of sanctions by both 20% and 5%,” the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Mohammad Eslami, was quoted by the semi-official news agency Fars as saying.
Iran’s FM Hossein Amir-Abdollahian suggested that direct talks would only make sense if the U.S.
lifts some sanctions or releases some Iranian assets frozen in foreign banks.Subsequently, the Iranian FM said that the negotiations had “reached a critical and important stage”.
Last week, Iran’s Parliament formulated certain stipulations regarding concluding the said deal.
“We hope that some sensitive and important issues remaining in the negotiations will be resolved in the coming days with realism from the Western side,” he said at a joint press conference with his Oman counterpart Sayyid Badr al-Busaidi.
Consequent upon Trump’s termination of the Iran nuclear deal, Pakistan had shown its grave concerns, saying that the US withdrawal from the deal would have brought some unproductive consequences for the international community.
The Washington-Tehran nuclear deal, a pragmatic quid pro quo — argues to return to the original bargain of lifting sanctions against Iran, including ones that have slashed its crucial oil sales, in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear activities.
The negotiating world powers — lay out phases of mutual steps to bring both sides-US and Iran back into full compliance, and the first does not include waivers on oil sanctions, sources say since the envoys from P5+1 and Iran are still negotiating details of the draft accord amid Western warnings that time is running out before the original deal becomes obsolete.
Delegates say much of the text is settled, but some thorny issues remain.With a pragmatic revival of the JCPOA, the major confrontation between Washington and Tehran could be amicably settled while making a triumphant victory for peaceful nuclear diplomacy.
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-international law analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law.
