Reviving the Iran nuclear deal was a campaign promise of U.S. President Joe Biden. In the White House, Mr. Biden appointed a special envoy for Iran, starting indirect negotiations with the country and direct talks with other signatories of the 2015 agreement to meet this objective. But almost one and a half years later, there has still been no breakthrough in one of the most contentious issues he faces in West Asia. Multiple rounds of talks in Vienna made progress in bringing the deal back on track, which had sought to scuttle Iran’s nuclear programme in return for lifting international sanctions. But the talks collapsed earlier this year as the Biden administration reportedly refused to remove the terrorist designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a critical arm of Iran’s armed forces. Last week, Qatar, which hosted the U.S.-Taliban talks that led to the February 2020 agreement between the Afghan Sunni fundamentalist insurgency and the Trump administration, held indirect talks between the U.S. and Iran. However, as Mr. Biden prepares for his first West Asia tour as U.S. President later this month, a deal is still elusive. While Iran says the Doha talks were positive, U.S. officials say the prospects of reviving the agreement are now worse. That they stay engaged in talks shows that both sides are still keen on a solution, but they face structural impediments.
To be sure, the current mess was created by Donald Trump. The Obama administration and the Rouhani presidency, along with other world powers, had engaged in painstaking negotiations to reach the 2015 agreement, which practically cut off Iran’s path towards building nuclear capabilities. Iran was fully compliant with the agreement’s terms when President Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the agreement. He had hoped that Iran, under economic pressure, would renegotiate the agreement. Instead, Iran began enriching large amounts of uranium to a higher purity and developing advanced centrifuges, besides strengthening its military presence in the region through its proxies. Mr. Biden, like Barack Obama, also sees a negotiated agreement as the best way to limit Iran’s nuclear programme. But he is facing pressure from America’s allies in West Asia, especially Israel, to include Iran’s weapons programme in the ambit of a fresh agreement. Iran is strongly resisting any attempt to expand the scope of the agreement. As negotiations go on, Israel has stepped up its shadow war with the Islamic Republic, targeting its military and nuclear personnel and weapons facilities. This is a dangerous slope. What the world wants now, at a time when it is struggling with the after-effects of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, is not another open conflict. The U.S. and Iran should start direct negotiations to overcome differences and find common ground on the deal before it is too late.
