(Washington) When negotiations with Iran resume at the end of November, Joe Biden’s United States, increasingly skeptical of Tehran’s intentions, will have to strike a delicate balance between concessions and increased pressure, even military threats.
Iran and the other great powers announced on Wednesday that these talks would resume on November 29 in Vienna, after a five-month stalemate, to save the 2015 agreement supposed to prevent the Islamic Republic from accessing nuclear weapons.
But a lot has changed since their suspension in June.
The Iranians elected an ultra-conservative president, Ebrahim Raïssi, who made the international community wait for a long time. During this time, the Iranian atomic activities continued their rise in power considered more and more dangerous by the West.
For his part, President Biden, confident at the start of the year on his ability to revive the agreement which his predecessor Donald Trump slammed the door in 2018, no longer hides his concern. And Washington is now preparing a plan B.
By leaving the agreement, Donald Trump reinstated the sanctions against Iran that he had allowed to be lifted in 2015. In response, Tehran freed itself from numerous restrictions on its nuclear program.
The Vienna indirect negotiations between the two enemy countries, through the other signatories (Germany, China, France, United Kingdom, Russia and the European Union), aim to determine what sanctions the Americans must lift as well as the timetable for the Iranians are getting back to the nails of their commitments.
“Guarantees”
“The Biden government is going to have to move forward on a ridge line, by proving to Iran that it will benefit from a lifting of sanctions, without giving in to Iranian pressure,” Kelsey Davenport told AFP. the Arms Control Association.
Sanctions are a headache as the Trump team has woven a web that is difficult to disentangle – made even more inextricable by new punitive measures imposed by the current US government, as recently against Iranian drones.
Beyond that, Iranian leaders are demanding assurance that a compromise will not pay the price of a possible political alternation in the United States.
A guarantee impossible to give for Joe Biden: the Republicans have warned that they will torpedo the agreement if they return to power. The Democratic President however promised, in a joint declaration with his European counterparts, to “continue to respect it as long as Iran does the same”.
Russian negotiator Mikhail Ulyanov hailed “a significant step forward towards the assurances and guarantees that Iran demands”.
But the real question Westerners are asking themselves is simple: do President Raïssi and, above all, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei really want to save the deal?
The Americans risk concluding that not if, on November 29, their negotiators arrive in the Austrian capital with demands deemed unrealistic.
In a blatant change of tone, the head of US diplomacy Antony Blinken warned in mid-October that the United States was ready to consider “all options” in the face of this eventuality. A way of letting the military threat hover, brandished more explicitly, at his side, by his Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid.
“Threat of war”
In a forum that did not go unnoticed, ex-diplomat Dennis Ross, who served as an advisor to Democratic presidents, went so far as to assert a few days later that “the threat of war” had become “the only way to achieve peace with Iran ”.
“Tehran no longer takes Washington seriously. To revive the nuclear deal, the threat of military escalation must be on the table, ”he wrote for Foreign Policy magazine, deeming“ insufficient ”the“ routine ”reference to“ other options ”.
But for Kelsey Davenport, “the military threats risk turning against us”, pushing the Islamic Republic to want to openly build the bomb to defend itself.
The problem, admits this expert, is that “no option available to the United States is good” other than a return to the 2015 agreement.
Tightening of sanctions, as mentioned by elected Democrat Adam Schiff, seems difficult as they are already draconian and the rest of the world has been scalded by the about-face of the Trump era.
To keep the door to diplomacy open, the Biden government could also put on the table its other demands to stem Tehran’s interventionism in the Middle East or its ballistic missiles, suggests Kelsey Davenport.
But “a long and complex negotiation would take time, she adds, and the Iranian nuclear program could progress” to the point of pushing Israel to carry out its threat of military action, with “a risk of war escalation” .