The Clock Keeps Ticking on a New Iran Nuclear Deal

Likelihood diminishes for a new nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran as the Biden administration faces new bipartisan pressure.

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For months, undercover Turkish agents watched quietly as Iranian spies stalked 75-year-old Yair Geller. From the Israeli-Turkish business owner’s Istanbul home to his workplace, the foreign operatives tracked his location and photographed his movements. When local officials gathered enough intelligence to confirm the group’s intent—to assassinate Geller in response to the killing of Iranian nuclear chief Mohsen Fakhrizadeh two years prior—they intervened and arrested eight of the nine planners. 

It wasn’t the first and likely won’t be the last of Iran’s assassination plots on Turkey’s soil.

Armed with the knowledge of the Iran’s covert global reach, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators sent the White House a clear message last Wednesday: We don’t negotiate with terrorists. 

With the support of 16 Senate Democrats—including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—the upper chamber passed a Republican-led motion to bar the Biden administration from removing the foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designation on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The militia’s delisting has become a key sticking point for Iranian negotiators in stalled talks to revive portions of the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, putting the Biden team in a precarious political position as the regime continues to target Americans at home and abroad. 

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  1. Sam

    I'm honestly not sure what people are advocating for, or what the best scenario would be for this situation.

    We pulled out of the JCPOA, why would Iran go back to the original deal with nothing extra in it for them? Even the people who were screaming about the deal like Saudi Arabia have conceded that it was preferable to nothing.

    Why are we conflating the terrorism Iran pursues with the nuclear deal? We're not going to get Iran to stop their proxy battles, stop their state-funded terrorism, AND get them to stop pursuing nuclear weapons--there's no point to conflate these issues. Shouldn't any Iran agreement just focus on their ability to procure nuclear weapons? Pakistan and India both created nuclear weapons despite our objections, and if Iran's committed to creating nuclear weapons, nothing's going to stop them. We're just delaying the inevitable. We are going to have to make some sort of trade off, so what's worse: Iran stopping their nuclear program while using the money from the sanctions being lifted to fund terrorism, or them producing a nuclear weapon and being "cash-strapped".

    Also, we negotiate with terrorists and human rights abusers all the time. Pakistan, China, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and dozens of others. Why do the human rights abuses committed by Iran matter more than the ones committed elsewhere? It's like how we team up with Saudi Arabia to "fight" the terrorism that they funded and spread all across the world.

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  2. PaulJP

    Israel may have a bomb or 10 to say about this issue.

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    The Bell Tower

    I feel like Robert the Bruce slamming his despicable father against the wall screaming

    “Why!? Why!?”

    I don’t understand the desperate need to pursue this utterly contemptible deal. I see nothing in the pro ledger that makes any sense.

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      Paul Reichardt

      The logic of the JCPOA was clear. It may have failed ultimately, as skeptics always argued, but that would have only made it just as bad as all their proposed alternatives—including the one we’re on now. Just because you can’t see the reasoning doesn’t mean there wasn’t any.

      Regardless, it’s all water under the bridge now. Thanks to Trump’s intransigence and Biden’s cowardice, we’ll now learn to live with a Iran as a nuclear threshold state and beyond just as we did for Pakistan.

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        The Bell Tower

        Obviously I understand that just because I can’t see the reasoning doesn’t mean there isn’t any.

        And I do get the original reasoning though I didn’t agree with it.

        But now?

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          Paul Reichardt

          From my pro-deal perspective, if it’s any consolation, I don’t exactly understand what the Biden administration’s logic is either. He campaigned on restoring the deal, built a policy team for that purpose, sunk over a year in indirect negotiations to get a new deal, and now he’s walking away from it at the 5 yard line over this mostly symbolic designation on the IRGC (the Quds force, formerly under Soleimani, was the real terrorist arm of the government and sanctions on it and its leadership will remain in place regardless of any new deal)

          Biden’s already taken the domestic political hit for taking on the negotiations in the first place and now he “owns” US Iran policy when it inevitably fails. He shouldn’t have even bothered in the first place and just blamed Trump for tearing up the original JCPOA. I can’t imagine there’s anything he knows now about the Iranians that he didn’t know when taking office.

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            The Bell Tower

            This is pretty fair. The sunken costs are a significant factor.

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            Probably Wrong

            That last sentence I might dispute - every President we’ve elected since at least 2000 seems very much to have gone into office with the presumption that this stuff can’t be THAT hard, and the last guys in charge were just loony. Biden could very well have had some comfortable narratives stripped away from him.

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    Tmcke

    Let's stop the word games about terrorism. It means little. And we negotiate with "terrorists" all the time - so the USSR and China to name 2. The nuclear deal may be a bad deal. But since Europeans live much closer, let's understand that the Iranian risk is real.

    Nor is it an easy matter to force Iran to de-nuclearize. The acts that help years ago only forced Iran to change how the went about things. Thus we simple can't bomb an easy to destroy facility, nor will hackers be able to disable their centrifuges.

    If Pakistan has the bomb and NK has the bomb - we already face real danger.

    So we need serious thinking, not word games.

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      The Bell Tower

      Do you really think a deal will prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons?

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        Tmcke

        I have no clue. But the "bomb" is 76 year old technology. So stopping Iran is not going to be easy. The original deal at best stalled things - but more than that is a pipe dream. What happened when we reneged on the deal is that we told Iran we cannot be trusted.

        That was a terrible think to make true.

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          The Bell Tower

          Democracies change leadership and Iran can’t be trusted anyway so I don’t feel bad about it. I just don’t see any reason for us to keep engaging them on this.

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            Paul Reichardt

            I’d argue that the apparent “do nothing” alternative to renegotiating a deal is not a neutral position—it keeps the unilateral “maximum pressure” sanctions in place and keeps us on a trajectory towards inevitable war with Iran. As the article states, the biggest obstacle is that China is not going to fully participate in our sanctions, so how then do you enforce them? When Iran hijacks South Korean tankers and drone strikes Saudi oil fields to spread the economic pain of sanctions around, what does the US do then? At some point the tools of economic coercion give way to a need for naval blockades and overt acts of war. Add a few miscalculations from either side and it’s game-on.


            It’s like advocates for a US-enforced “no fly zone” in Ukraine mistakenly believing it to be a neutral position—the Russians can’t fly there, we can’t fly there, so what’s the problem?

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            Tmcke

            Then let's give that as a reason. Of course if you ever hope for change, you need to stop fucking Iran around. They have good reasons to hate the west. (And we have good reasons to despair re them).

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    DougCLE

    I am far more frightened of a nuclear Iran than all of Russia’s nuclear posturing.

    At the very least, a nuclear Iran means a nuclear Saudi Arabia, and a nuclear SA probably spreads the tech to other Arab states. The Middle East is the home of weak governments who pay Danegeld to their homegrown terrorist groups. The chance of one of these groups having sympathizers in the government’s nuclear program, who could smuggle them either an existing device or the technology to build their own, is high. Even the governments themselves aren’t to be trusted to act in their own long-term interests; most would respond to the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction with “Your Terms Are Acceptable.”

    Thus, a nuclear Iran either leads to a nuclear war, which may-or-may-not stay local to the ME, or worse, it leads to a nuclear 9/11, although probably in Europe, not here. Iran cannot be allowed to nuclearize, period. Anyone who says it’s inevitable at this point is saying they’re willing to accept a future of much greater danger of WWIII than at the very height of the Cold War. No outcome is inevitable until all the cards have been played.

    All of this is a very long-winded way of saying we need to drop the weak-sauce JCPOA, which from the outset has been a plan to delay Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not end them - i.e. literally a plan for defeat - and figure out a way to put paid to them for good. Nothing should be off the table, militarily or diplomatically, if it is viable and likely to succeed. I’m hoping at some point someone high enough up the ladder will recognize that.

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