The Iranian Nuclear Negotiation on the Brink – Pierre Haski

In a high-intensity negotiation, the last to surrender usually wins. The problem is that if no one gives in, then it goes towards insured failure. A similar moment is the one we are experiencing with regard to the Iranian nuclear negotiation, now on the brink of the precipice.

You are forgiven if you have not followed the latest ups and downs of this interminable negotiation, the stakes of which are the possibility for Iran to dispose of the atomic weapon.

So a summary is a must: in 2015 Iran signed an agreement giving up its nuclear program in exchange for the cancellation of the sanctions against it. Optimism was widespread at the time. But in 2018 Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the deal, for the simple fact that it was one of the successes of his predecessor Barack Obama.

A foreign condition
Since then, the deal has struggled to survive until Joe Biden’s advent in 2021. The Democratic president wanted to resurrect the deal with Iran, but that’s where the matter got complicated.

After months of indirect negotiations in Vienna (because the Americans and Iranians speak to each other through the intermediary of the Europeans), a text has finally been agreed, ready for signature. The deal would have allowed for the partial cancellation of US sanctions and a return of Iran to the 2015 mechanism.

But at the last moment Tehran placed a condition that had no connection with nuclear power, namely that the United States excluded the guardians of the revolution, the army of mullahs, from the list of terrorist organizations. After Washington’s refusal came a stalemate that lasted for weeks.

The problem is that in the meantime the nuclear program has restarted, in violation of the commitments made. The centrifuges are running at full capacity and Iran is approaching the famous “threshold”, the moment in which a state is in a position to produce an atomic weapon.

Since then the tension has continued to rise, and today we are dangerously close to breaking point.

On 9 June Iran announced the deactivation of 27 cameras installed in the nuclear facilities of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, a UN institution based in Vienna. The cameras were part of the surveillance system required by the agreements.

The decision is a retaliation one day after a resolution with which the IAEA leaders have condemned the repeated violations of the agreement by Tehran. The resolution was received very negatively in Iran, where President Ebrahim Raissi, a conservative on the national political scene, exclaimed: “Do you really believe that by adopting an IAEA resolution you will make us back down? In the name of god and of our great nation, we will not even step back ”.

And now? Now we are on the verge of bankruptcy, and one wonders if the war in Ukraine, with the dangerous game of Russia (a signatory of the agreement with Iran like China) is not further muddying the waters.

In the event of a rupture we can foresee extreme tensions in the region. The new alliance between Israel and the Arab Gulf countries does not want an atomic Iran, and will be tempted to react. There is a time when diplomacy reaches its limits and one enters unknown territory. Today this moment seems dangerously close.

(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)