Cutting Through Newsletter: November 23, 2020
Biden Must Re-Enter the Iran Deal Before Further Negotiations
Last Friday, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) was asked if he supported the United States re-entering the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA), colloquially known as the “Iran nuclear deal.”
Coons responded that he would “need a path forward for limits on their missile program and their support for proxies before I would support reentering the JCPOA. These need to happen at the same time.”
This stance should be raising alarm bells in every rational foreign policy observer. It is, in every practical sense, the same absurd stance that the “better deal” opponents of the JCPOA have been taking since the deal was announced more than five years ago. That alone should be cause for concern, but it gets worse.
Prior to Biden’s decision to nominate Antony Blinken for the position of Secretary of State, Coons was a leading candidate for the role and could be an alternative if the Senate blocks Blinken. Biden himself has flirted with placing conditions on the United States’ re-entry to the JCPOA, but he has made it clear that he would first re-enter the deal, then work on expanding it.
Any reasonable approach to defusing the escalating tensions with Iran starts with re-entering the JCPOA by the United States and Iran simultaneously, and Tehran has indicated its willingness to do so. But it won’t be as easy as just picking up where Trump broke things off, and adding even more obstacles to that process would be foolish.
Biden, like Coons, would like to expand the restrictions on Iran’s military capabilities beyond an agreement from Tehran to refrain from building nuclear weapons. Like Coons, Biden would like to limit Iran’s ballistic missile program and wants to end Tehran’s support for various militias throughout the region, most famously Hezbollah, but numerous others as well, especially in Iraq.
Unlike Coons, Biden has said that re-entering the JCPOA is a first step towards those goals, rather than the goals being a condition of re-entry. The distinction is crucial.
When the Obama team was negotiating the JCPOA, it was understood to be a part of a two-pronged process. The first, and most obvious, was the nuclear agreement itself. We should not forget that the entire issue of Iran’s nuclear program is something of a chimera. U.S. intelligence established that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and even before that it is not clear whether their program aimed to actually build a weapon or merely to develop the breakout capacity that many countries without nuclear weapons have.
In any case, despite this assessment, which continues to hold to this day, countries with whom Iran is in direct or indirect conflict—chiefly Israel and Saudi Arabia—consistently express concerns over Iran’s nuclear capability. Whether or not those concerns were or are as pressing as Israel, the Saudis, and Americans claim, the Obama administration took them at face value and negotiated the JCPOA.
That agreement was Obama’s greatest foreign policy triumph, and it was a big and tricky one, for which he deserves a great deal of credit. Consider that Obama was able to strike an agreement with Iran which was negotiated by a broad coalition led by the United States, including Europe as well as China and Russia. That is no small feat, especially in this day and age where disagreements among those parties have paralyzed the United Nations over and over again. The Obama team got Iran to agree to allow the most intrusive inspections, by far, of any nation. They mothballed most of their high-speed centrifuges, eliminated one of their underground sites, and gave up 97% of their stockpile of enriched uranium.
That’s a remarkable accomplishment in exchange for the U.S. releasing Iranian funds they had frozen decades earlier, lifting the sanctions related to the Iranian nuclear program, and agreeing to encourage investment in Iran to help shore up the economy, an agreement the United States reneged on long before Trump got elected.
Iran stuck with the agreement. Obama gambled that his successors, whomever they might be, would, at minimum, see the obvious benefits and continue to work to bring Iran into the circle of Persian Gulf countries, moving past the long-held animosities. Hillary Clinton clearly planned to do just that, and while we can’t know what any of the Republican contenders would have done, it is virtually certain they would not have acted as Trump did.
Continuing negotiations, with the aim of stopping the regional proxy wars and reducing Iran’s missile programs—which would certainly have depended on broader peace negotiations involving the Gulf states, Israel, and the Palestinians—constituted the second prong of the plan. Of course, this would be a decades-long process, but this was the ambition. If it failed to materialize, presumably the JCPOA would still be there.
Obama didn’t anticipate Trump.
With the JCPOA now in tatters, Iran and Europe have been scrambling to keep it alive long enough to survive Trump, in the hopes that the next administration would work to revive it. Biden offers that opportunity.
While one can understand why the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia would want Iran to give up its missile program and stop backing militias throughout the region, it makes no sense at all for Iran to do so. Those three countries are significant military powers, much more so than Iran, and Iran is not about to give up what assets it has in the region in the face of those threats.
In 2019, the United States spent $732 billion on its military. Saudi Arabia spent $61.9 billion, while Israel spent $20.5 billion. Iran spent $12.6 billion, and that is a fairly typical amount—both in terms of total spending and in terms of the percentage of Iran’s GDP—for Iran to spend on its military since 1989, the year after the war with Iraq ended.
Yet those three countries all come together to threaten Iran as a single bloc. This isn’t a question of who is right or wrong in the various disputes involved. The point, rather, is that it is ridiculous to suggest, under these circumstances, that Iran simply abandon its missile program or support for its allies in the region. That would be suicide, given the hostility of its neighbors and the global military superpower.
The view Coons is espousing is, therefore, indistinguishable from that of the hawks who have been insisting on a “better deal” since before the JCPOA was put to paper. There was never a better deal because, despite the absurd arguments put forth by Israeli, Saudi, and American hawks, the JCPOA was an unusually good deal from the American perspective. To argue for a better deal was either an exercise in ignorance or, more often, a thin cover for “no deal” as long as the Islamic Republic that won power over forty years ago is still in charge.
There is no better deal, there never was. But it is possible is to negotiate these issues. It is in Iran’s interest to find a way to settle its differences with its enemies. That axiom was the basis for the Obama efforts, and the fact that Tehran was willing to accept the intrusive inspections, the limits, and the compromises in the JCPOA proved how much they needed to make progress. The dire economic condition Iran is in today and the ravages the coronavirus pandemic has caused only increases the possibility of finding accommodations.
But the clock is ticking, and the U.S. credibility tank is empty.
Most hawks, except the most fanatical, recognize that the “maximum pressure” campaign has been a disastrous failure. But soon-to-be-President Biden must work hard to convince Iran that the economic benefits they never saw even before Trump tore up the JCPOA will be forthcoming. That goal is clearly mutually exclusive with trying to make the JCPOA even more favorable to U.S. hawks, and Biden must hold firm against pressure to try to do so.
His time will be short. Presidential elections will be held in Iran in June 2021, and if a hardliner is elected, the path back to the JCPOA might be closed. That would be a grave mistake for everyone concerned. Biden must convince not only the current Iranian leadership but the people of Iran—whom we have thoroughly betrayed—that Trump was an anomaly and diplomacy can still work.
That won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible, if Biden can stay on message and show himself to be reasonable. Chris Coons is certainly going to have Biden’s ear. On this point, the president-elect must not listen.
Latest Articles
Mike Pompeo called BDS a cancer and declared it antisemitic, which has implications for State Department funding, and will certainly be used as a cudgel by anti-Palestinian forces in and out of government. I argue that it is not enough to say BDS advocacy must be tolerated as a matter of free speech, but that it must be fully supported as legitimate even by those who oppose applying economic action against Israel. One need not agree with a tactic to agree that it is legitimate and that arguments in its favor are worth engaging with in open, fair debate. See Pompeo’s attack on BDS is an assault on free speech at Responsible Statecraft.
The cynical use of antisemitism as a political weapon reared its ugly head in Georgia, as Rev. Raphael Warnock was attacked by his racist and corrupt opponent, Kelly Loeffler, as anti-Israel, with a barely thinned accusation of antisemitism behind it. Unfortunately, Warnock’s response left a lot to be desired. Both sides of this need to be looked at with a critical eye, because both are not good for either the fight against antisemitism or the fight for the future of the United States in general. Check out The cynical use of Israel creeps into the Georgia Senate race also at Responsible Statecraft.
Podcasts
In the latest episode of the ReThinking Foreign Policy Podcast, I expand on the issue of Pompeo and BDS, and on Coons’ attempt to place obstacles into the U.S.’ re-entry into the JCPOA. I expand a good deal on the points made in the articles I wrote about both subject. I also look at the recent signing of the RCEP, a trade deal among Asian and Pacific countries and how this should be an object lesson for progressives. That might be seen by some as controversial, so please check it out and leave me feedback.
You can hear the episode here or you can always find the podcast on your listening platform of choice just by searching for ReThinking Foreign Policy.
Recommended Articles
Why Biden must ignore Sen. Coons’ ‘caveats’ and stay on course to return to the Iran deal
By Assal Rad, Responsible Statecraft, November 23, 2020
The Palestinian leadership chooses captivity
By Amjad Iraqi, +972 Magazine, November 21, 2020
Biden may offer some key opportunities for Palestinians and their allies
By Noura Erakat, Washington Post, November 17, 2020
Ten Foreign Policy Fiascos Biden Can Fix on Day One (and Should)
By Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies, Informed Comment, November 20, 2020
Representative Ilhan Omar: ‘I Hope President Biden Seizes This Opportunity.’
By Ilhan Omar, The Nation, November 20, 2020
Ceasefire Ends in Occupied Western Sahara After U.S.-Backed Moroccan Military Launches Operation
Democracy Now!, November 16, 2020
And don’t forget, you can now pre-order a copy of my first book, co-authored with Marc Lamont Hill, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
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