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Is there a way to de-escalate the dangerously growing confrontation between the USA and Iran for the past three years and thus a chance for the two states to return to the agreement to limit Tehran’s nuclear program to non-military purposes? The first meeting of government representatives of all seven original contracting states, planned for Tuesday in Vienna, gives rise to little hope.
Unilateral termination despite compliance with the contract
The agreement concluded in July 2015 was unilaterally terminated under ex-President Donald Trump in May 2018. Since that exit, the Trump administration had pursued a strategy of “massive pressure” against Tehran. This pressure included new sanctions, some in violation of international law: They are not only directed against Iran itself, but also against companies and banks in third countries in order to force them to give up all economic relations with Iran. Iran meticulously complied with the agreement in the first three years from July 2015. Both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama confirmed this to Congress in Washington every three months in their regular monitoring reports.
Nevertheless, the United States got out of the treaty under Trump. After the remaining five signatory states did little to counter the US sanctions and did nothing to compensate for their devastating effects on the Iranian economy, the leadership in Tehran began in 2019 with gradual violations of the agreement. The most recent violations to date were passed by the parliament in Tehran, which is ruled by conservative hardliners, with the tacit approval of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khameni, but against the express will of President Hassan Ruhani and Foreign Minister Mohammed Sarif. Both emphasize again and again that they want to stick to the nuclear agreement.
Both sides want advance payments
Immediately after his election victory in November last year, Joe Biden announced his government’s willingness in principle to return to the agreement. However, only on the condition that Iran “first undo all breaches of the treaty”. Representatives of the Iranian leadership, however, demanded that the US first lift “all sanctions”. Otherwise there will be «no negotiations with the USA». The meeting in Vienna is now an indication that both sides have given up their maximum positions and that the question of who will take the first step is no longer a blockage. The Biden administration is ready for talks about a “mutual return” of the US and Iran to the nuclear agreement, the White House said on Friday. There are already ideas for parallel steps or steps that have been agreed with one another in their sequence.
The renowned arms control expert Professor Götz Neuneck from the Hamburg Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, together with ex-Federal Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, proposed in a contribution to the Berlin “Tagesspiegel” on Saturday that the USA could first lift the “secondary sanctions” against companies and banks from third countries and those sanctions currently preventing the delivery of drugs and medical supplies to Iran. The latter is “of outstanding importance, especially in times of the corona pandemic”. In addition, “a small part of Iran’s frozen accounts could be released from the oil business”. Iran must “in return, for example, stop violations of the treaty such as the development of new centrifuges” or limit the uranium enrichment, which has been ramped up to 20 percent in recent months, to the “3.7 percent” permitted in the nuclear agreement.
Not only the nuclear program, but also missile armament should be negotiated
But even if steps like this by the USA and Iran should ultimately bring about a complete return on both sides to the existing nuclear agreement, a problem remains: the Biden administration also wants an agreement with Tehran to limit and contain the country’s conventional missile armament Washington criticized Tehran’s role in the region as “destabilizing”. This refers to support for the Syrian regime, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. These demands are supported by the governments in Berlin, Paris and London. In contrast to his predecessor Donald Trump, President Joe Biden no longer insists on including corresponding agreements in the existing nuclear agreement. But Tehran has so far also been unwilling to negotiate new, separate agreements with restrictions that would only apply to Iran. Iranian diplomats explain that they would be prepared to limit their own missile armaments – but only within the framework of a multilateral arms control agreement in which other states in the region – such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey or Egypt – would have to be involved.
Iran is fighting back and holding up a mirror to the West
The Iranian leadership is resisting accusations of Iran’s “destabilizing” role in the region. The accusation that the governments in Washington, Tel Aviv and Riyadh has frequently raised in recent years that Iran is “the largest state sponsor of global Islamist terrorism” is countered by official Iranian interlocutors. They point to the massive support that Al-Qaeda, the “Islamic State” and other Sunni terrorist organizations have received and continue to receive from the Saudi Wahabis and the governments of Qatar and the United Arab States over the past three decades. The political and military support of these all undemocratic regimes by democratic states in the West makes their criticism of the role of Iran in the perception of Iranian officials completely untrustworthy. The same applies to the criticism by Western governments of the Iranian regime’s massive human rights violations against its own people.
Time is of the essence, elections are coming up
The time to de-escalate US-Iranian relations and rescue the nuclear deal is pressing. A prolonged or even further escalated confrontation – as always before in the conflict over the Iranian nuclear program, which has been simmering for almost 20 years now – would play into the hands of the hardliners in Tehran and increase the risk of one of their, possibly even the candidate, being a candidate the revolutionary guards, particularly hostile to the US, who won the presidential election next June 18th.
Subject-related interests of the author
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