, by Trita Parsi, is an account of how a long-running fear that Iran was intent on acquiring nuclear weapons was resolved by diplomatic means. President Barack Obama, and his view of Iran, so very different from that of President Donald Trump, is at the center of the story.

Obama entered the White House intending to negotiate with Iran. By the end of 2009, the violent consequences of a disputed Iranian presidential election and Tehran’s hesitant reaction to Obama’s opening gambit had undermined his resolve. He switched to a policy of coercion, “ratcheting up the pressure” through a range of sanctions. But, during 2012, it became apparent to him that sanctions were a losing and dangerous tactic. Iran had responded by expanding the nuclear capability that caused most concern: enriching uranium for reactor fuel but, also, potentially for nuclear weapons. The Israeli government had threatened to bomb Iranian facilities, hoping that this would bring about a US military intervention.

So, after his re-election, Obama switched back to diplomacy. He was able to take advantage of an top secret channel to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, created by the Sultan of Oman in 2012. He could also count on the wholehearted support of John Kerry, his new secretary of state. Kerry shared Obama’s aversion to war and, as a senator, had encouraged the sultan’s initiative.

At a secret meeting in Oman in March 2013, the Iranians heard what they had wanted to hear for 10 years: The United States could tolerate an Iranian enrichment capability, subject to stringent international monitoring and restrictions, to be agreed. The odds on a deal had shortened.

They shortened further when Hassan Rouhani won Iran’s 2013 presidential election and appointed Javad Zarif foreign minister. Both were highly able realists. Both had a thorough understanding of the nuclear problem from their roles in negotiating with Britain, France and Germany a decade earlier. (A “no” to Iranian retention of enrichment technology had caused that process to fail.) Obama still faced opposition to a compromise solution from the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia, and from their many friends in Congress.

Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, sets out evidence that these governments were less worried about nuclear advances in Iran than their public statements implied. What they really feared was an end to the policy of containing Iranian power and influence. They saw portraying Iran as a nuclear proliferator and a threat to their existence as a means to an end of minimizing Iran’s ability to compete regionally. In 2010 Robert Gates, then secretary of defense, had said of the Saudis that they were always eager to “fight the Iranians to the last American.”

Israeli and Saudi goals put them at odds with Obama. Obama believed that “Iran will be, and should be a regional power.” These differences came to a head in the weeks that followed a final agreement with Iran on July 14, 2015. Congress had demanded and obtained an opportunity to pass judgement on the deal, despite it being a political agreement, not a treaty. That congressional battle resulted in defeat for Israel and Saudi Arabia. Obama, who, at one point, said to an ally in the Senate, “I think you over-estimate the rationality of the body in which you serve,” was able to limit the number of senators wanting him to repudiate what his negotiators had achieved.

Obama won by framing the deal as the only alternative to war, by exploiting the American public’s disillusionment with war as an instrument of policy and by mobilizing the pressure of pro-diplomacy activists on members of Congress. This success could have been followed by an attempt to alter how the average American views Iran. Parsi only alludes to this and does not explain why Obama let that opportunity pass.

Instead, the author explores whether the deal can survive without a broader improvement in US-Iran relations. He concludes it cannot. President Trump’s Iran policy will test this thesis by eliminating all possibility of an improvement for the foreseeable future. An alternative view would be that the deal can survive a worsening of relations and even US withdrawal from the agreement, as long as US allies resist US pressure to follow suit.

Provided Iran remains in compliance with its nuclear non-proliferation obligations, and provided international inspectors find no evidence of undeclared nuclear activities or material in Iran, allied resistance is likely. Europe and Asia have much to gain from the agreement and a strong interest in encouraging Iran to prize it. US participation was essential to the birth of the deal; its rearing can be entrusted to the rest of the world.

US withdrawal might even be welcome to Iran’s supreme leader and Iranian conservatives, whi fear an improvement in US-Iran relations as a potential threat to the survival of Iran as an Islamic Republic. They make political use of US hostility.

Losing an Enemy can please and enlighten the general reader, and serve as a reliable quarry for students of international and US politics. It does admirable justice to one of the few major diplomatic achievements of the last 16 years.

*[Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy is published by .]

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The journey to a comprehensive agreement offering the US and its European allies an opportunity to feel more confident about the peaceful nature of has been a long one. It began in the summer of 2003, following Iran’s admission of secret contacts with the A.Q. Khan nuclear supply network, and of covert development of dual-use (civil and military) nuclear technology: uranium enrichment.

Can one make unashamed use of hindsight to identify lessons that may come in useful if the West is ever again confronted with a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) hiding nuclear activities?

The question is worth asking because in the Iranian case, the US and Europe have ended up taking a diplomatic sledgehammer to crack a nut. The deal that emerged in Vienna on July 14 is remarkably similar in its essentials to the deal that , and could have negotiated with Iran in 2005, if they had been ready to concede Iran’s right under the NPT to enrich uranium for use as reactor fuel.

Assumptions about intention

In 2003, the United States and the (EU) saw only one explanation for the “policy of concealment” that Iran had pursued for 18 years: Iranian decision-makers wanted nuclear weapons. This judgment determined the West’s policy in those early years of the journey: Iran must be persuaded or coerced into surrendering its dual-use enrichment equipment—as well as abandoning construction of a reactor that had potential to be a good source of weapon-grade plutonium.

When Iranian diplomats explained that they had been driven to a policy of concealment by Western nuclear supply restrictions, the thought occurred to their Western counterparts that the Iranians were taking them for simpletons.

It was true, of course, that the Nuclear Supplier Group, which was created in the mid-1970s, had agreed guidelines that made its members very reluctant to supply dual-use equipment to any member of the Non-Aligned Movement, especially to revolutionary regimes (which is how the Islamic Republic was perceived in the 1980s and into the 1990s).

But given those supply restrictions, why were the Iranians so determined to acquire an enrichment capability, and why were they so determined to retain it now that their policy of concealment had landed them in deep trouble in the boardroom of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)? Surely there could only be one reason: they wanted the bomb.

It was only very slowly that the West acquired a better understanding of the influence of nationalism on Iranian thinking. Mastering difficult technologies satisfies an Iranian need to reassert Iran’s identity as a major Asian civilization and a regional power. In the case of enrichment, it also guarantees against Iran feeling the humiliation it experienced in the early 1980s, when nuclear cooperation with and nuclear supply from the West were cut off.

Overestimation of the effectiveness of sanctions

In August 2005, after the collapse of Europe’s attempt to persuade Iran to give up enrichment, the West switched to a policy of coercion. It turned to the United Nations (UN) and bilateral sanctions to induce Iran to reengage and negotiate the cessation of enrichment.

To this day, the US government appears to believe that this policy has been successful. In public statements, American politicians ascribe to sanctions Iranian engagement—a diplomatic process that resulted, eventually, in the July 14 Vienna Plan of Action.

What this interpretation of events overlooks is that early in 2012, the US and the EU stopped insisting on Iranian suspension of enrichment as a precondition for talking, and that in 2011, there had been muffled indications that the first Obama administration might have been ready to accept Iran retaining a limited enrichment capability.

Of course, sanctions have supplied Iran with a motive to negotiate and the West with negotiating chips to trade off against Iranian negotiating concessions. Sanctions have been useful (albeit costly for some and painful for others). But it would be a mistake to believe that without sanctions a deal could never have been achieved—not least because of the similarities between the deal offered to the three Europeans in 2005, well before any sanctions and the Vienna Plan of Action.

Inappropriate precedents��

In 1991, after Saddam Hussein’s troops had been driven out of Kuwait, the US and its allies pushed through the UN Security Council a resolution that demanded an end to almost all nuclear activity in , where the development of enrichment for military purposes was underway. The resolution also required Iraq to allow UN inspectors to roam at will throughout the country—often referred to as “anytime, anywhere access”—and to interview whom they chose.

The memory of this achievement, which was later found to have eliminated Iraq’s nuclear weapon program, has lingered on in Washington. US politicians and policymakers have hankered after meting out to Iran the treatment inflicted on Iraq. They seem to have had difficulty grasping that the circumstances of Iraq in 1991 bore no resemblance to the position in which Iran found itself in 2003 and beyond.

Iraq had violated a fundamental international norm by invading another state. This was accepted by UN Security Council members as justification for depriving Iraq of certain sovereign rights. Iran’s offence was of a much lesser order: withholding information from the IAEA. Although the US and its European allies somehow persuaded the Security Council to accept that Iran’s infringements represented a threat to international peace and security, they could never have got the council to treat Iran as it had treated Iraq in 1991.

Outside Interference

The American and European approach to the Iranian case has suffered greatly from Israel’s political influence in Washington and European capitals, and from Israel’s security relationship with the US.

Israel is a regional rival of Iran. It resents Iran’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. It suffers from Iranian support for organizations that refuse to tolerate the way Israel treats Palestinians. For more than 20 years, some Israeli politicians have seen political advantage in propagating belief in an Iranian nuclear threat to Israel.

These and other factors ought to have made Israeli motives suspect as far as Iran is concerned. Intelligence emanating from Israeli sources ought to have been marked “interesting if true.” Policy prescriptions from that quarter ought to have been disregarded. Attempts to countervail the Israeli influence on Congress and pro-Israel campaign contributors ought to have started in early 2012, when US President Barack Obama decided to recommit to a diplomatic solution to the problem.

None of that happened. Instead, to this day, Israeli influence continues to bedevil rational problem-solving. The US administration and European governments have at last emancipated themselves, made wise by the deranged nature of Israeli Prime Minister ’s opposition to a deal with Iran. But far too many members of Congress remain in thrall.

In the End

All this begs the question of whether there will be any further cases of non-compliance with nuclear non-proliferation obligations.

In the NPT nuclear-weapon states (the US, Britain, France, Russia and China), there is a tendency to imagine that the non-nuclear-weapon states are itching to get their hands on a few nukes. That may come from overestimating the value of their own nuclear arsenals and underestimating the security and political benefits that non-nuclear weapon states experience from collective compliance with this non-proliferation norm.

Since the NPT entered into force in 1970, there has been proof of only two non-nuclear-weapon states (Iraq and North Korea) having decided to go all the way to weapon acquisition. A larger number of states have renounced acquisition plans and adhered to the NPT or reverted to compliance. At this point, there is no hint abroad that any non-nuclear-weapon state is secretly seeking nuclear weapons, and all but five states—of whom four are already nuclear-armed and the fifth is a recent creation—are NPT parties.

None of this will deter so-called counter-proliferation experts in the nuclear-weapon states from lying awake and trying to devise ways of eroding what few rights the non-nuclear-weapon states possess. But for the rest of us, the peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem presents an opportunity to celebrate the contribution of the NPT to international peace and security.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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As heads of government arrive in New York for the this year’s United Nations General Assembly — where the US, European Union, Russia, China and Iran have resumed negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear future — optimists are an endangered species.

The sense of hope generated nearly a year ago by the celebrated telephone call between President Barack Obama and newly-elected President Hassan Rouhani has faded, to be replaced by fear that neither the US, nor Iran is ready to do what is needed to avoid a potentially disastrous break-down.

One might have imagined that the US would be eager to negotiate a solution to a problem that, unresolved, has the potential to be a source of still more Middle East bloodshed, of disruption to the global economy, and of weakening an international regime that has limited the number of states possessing nuclear weapons to nine.

One might have thought that Iran would want to erase the stigma attached to international mistrust of its nuclear intentions, and would want the resumption in trade and investment that can boost living standards in the country.��One might have hoped that both Iran and the US would want to use a nuclear agreement to cap 35 years of sterile animosity and as a platform on which to build a framework for cooperation. Both know they have a common interest in combating Islamist terrorism, in countering narcotics trafficking in Southwest Asia, and in turning the Middle East into a zone free of nuclear and chemical weapons.

But, no, at this point neither the US, nor Iran seems adequately motivated to eliminate the no man’s land lying between their two positions on the nuclear issue.

Of course, it is not uncommon for negotiators to hold back until the last hours, each hoping that the other will be the first to make a concession that will leave the second-mover with a small advantage. And it may be that recent calls from both sides for the other not to let an opportunity slip are simply symptoms of a ritual in which both feel obliged to engage.

However, it would be easier to believe in that interpretation, if the US and Iran had not been facing off in this way once before: In the run-up to a two and a half week negotiating session in July that was supposed to deliver an agreement, but ended in an extension of the negotiation to November 24, with positions still, reportedly, far apart.

The Crucial Issue: Iran’s Uranium Enrichment Program

Moreover, all the recent calls for movement from the opposing partner have concerned an issue that cannot be left unresolved until the final hours, because much else depends on its resolution: Iranian use of centrifuge machines to enrich uranium.

The growing band of pessimists may yet be wrong-footed. There is potential for a crucial breakthrough — if each side can stop pointing fingers at one another and start recognizing what is an opportunity common to both of them.

The US position on uranium enrichment is more reasonable than it used to be. Ten years ago, the US was demanding that the recently-completed enrichment facility at Natanz be dismantled, even though the use of this technology for peaceful purposes is not outlawed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and although it had not been shown that the Natanz facility had a non-peaceful purpose. Three years ago, the US was still insisting on the suspension of all enrichment activities as a prelude to nuclear negotiations. Now, the US accepts ongoing operations at Natanz and that eventually Iran will operate industrial enrichment plants to produce fuel for large, electricity-generating nuclear reactors.

Nonetheless, the US can still be thought as unreasonable for two reasons. First, it is pursuing its stated objective of blocking all potential paths��to Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapon by limiting to a few thousand the number of centrifuges in the two facilities that have been open to international inspectors since their completion — and this possibly for as long as 20 years. That is tantamount to an illogical mismatch of means and end. Demanding that Iran “roll back” the number of centrifuges at its disposal to a few thousand will not block all paths; it will leave some paths still open.

Second, the US seems unready to make allowances for the domestic political pressures to which Iran’s negotiators are subject, even though the US negotiators are themselves subject to analogous pressures from the government of Israel and friends of Israel in the US Congress. The history of Iran’s relations with the West colors Iranian perceptions of this negotiation. It makes it impossible for any Iranian government to accept terms that their opponents could portray as humiliating or offensive to Iran’s dignity as an independent, sovereign state.

For its part, the Iranian position is also flawed. First, Iran is insisting on a massive expansion of its enrichment capacity between now and 2021, for the purpose of producing fuel for the Bushehr reactor, despite the fact that, for technical reasons, fuel for Bushehr cannot be produced without the consent of the Russian reactor supplier — and the supplier has no interest in granting consent. It would be more logical for Iran to offer to bide its time, perfecting its mastery of centrifuge technology, and expanding capacity only when large Iranian-made reactors are nearing completion.

Second, the Iranian negotiators are failing to offer enough to satisfy a very legitimate US need: grounds for confidence that Iran’s nuclear program is and will remain exclusively peaceful. A lack of confidence on that score is not a Western plot to humiliate Iran or deprive Iran of its rights. It is a phenomenon that results from Iran’s failure to observe certain international legal obligations between 1985 and 2003.

During that period, Iran’s leaders may have believed that this nonobservance was justified by security-related considerations. Nonetheless, its revelation by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2003 shocked many more parties to the NPT than the US and its allies. It has left Iran with a credibility problem. That problem can be resolved, but only if Iran does everything to suggest it no longer wishes to hide anything nuclear from the international community.

The Way Toward a Deal

A����written for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and published on September 4 argues that the contours of an agreement on enrichment are not hard to see. The US should stop insisting on a cut in operational centrifuges to a few thousand. In return, Iran should offer to maintain its operating capacity at the current level, until the first Iranian-made large reactor is nearing completion.

That is the kind of deal foreign ministers can cut, leaving it to their officials to negotiate the finer details, and to work their way through what the deal implies for the other items that are on the negotiating agenda — which is set out in the November 24, 2013, Joint Plan of Action.

So, the growing band of pessimists may yet be wrong-footed. There is potential for a crucial breakthrough — if each side can stop pointing fingers at one another and start recognizing what is an opportunity common to both of them.

*[An earlier version of this article was originally published in Farsi by the��.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The understandings reached by the foreign ministers of Iran, the US, Russia, the UK, France, China and Germany, as well as the High Representative of the European Union, in the early hours of November 24, are a fine diplomatic achievement. They reflect creditably on all parties to the negotiation as they bear the hallmarks of a determined and creative search for the common ground that is the Holy Grail of wise and honorable negotiators.

The agreement addresses Western and Israeli concerns that Iran has gradually been moving towards a position from which it could hope to produce enough weapons-grade enriched uranium for one device in so short a time, that the UN Security Council would be left flat-footed. It also outlines some of the elements of which a “comprehensive solution,” to be negotiated in the coming months, is to be composed.

To address the so-called “break-out” or “critical capability” concerns, Iran has volunteered several important measures:

• It will dispose its stock of gaseous uranium enriched to 20 percent U235 (a short hop, technically, from 90 percent U235) by converting it into the oxide form needed for fuel assemblies or by down-blending it, and will halt the production of 20 percent U235 material for at least six months.
• It will convert whatever gaseous uranium enriched to 3.5 percent produced during the next six months into oxide form.
• It will refrain from expanding its installed and operating centrifuge capacity for at least six months.
• It will facilitate enhanced monitoring of its nuclear program by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), notably by allowing daily access to its two enrichment facilities and access to its centrifuge production workshops to the IAEA inspectors.

These measures enable the Iranian government to demonstrate that it has no interest in “breaking out,” but do not compromise a vital point of principle for Iran: all states are entitled to make peaceful use of nuclear technologies, including uranium enrichment technologies.

Meanwhile, the detailing in the text of the “Joint Plan of Action” of the “core elements” of a comprehensive solution, suggests that the parties have made good use of their negotiating time to develop certain understandings concerning the long-term basis for nuclear activities in Iran. This is very encouraging, since it was the absence of such shared understandings that proved fatal to the agreement which Iran negotiated with the UK, France, and Germany in October 2003.

It is in this part of the text that, reading between the lines, one can infer that the US has at last signaled to Iran that it will not do whatever is necessary to force Tehran to close down and abandon all uranium enrichment. The US will want Iran to agree to “parameters” and will no doubt try to ensure that these are as narrow as possible, which Iran will certainly resist.

So diplomatically “hard pounding” lies ahead. But it now seems unlikely that the process will break down over Iran’s oft-trumpeted “right to enrich” – and this is a big step towards the peaceful resolution of this long-running dispute.

This part of the text also suggests that the parties will make a big effort to resolve Western and Israeli concern about the 40MW reactor nearing completion at Arak. Concern centers on the design of this reactor. The reactor is due to be an inefficient producer of medical isotopes, but a very efficient producer of plutonium. 

Iran will be asked to dismantle the plant or, failing that, to find a way of building confidence that its plutonium production is not the purpose for which the plant was conceived. Relatively minor modifications to the design, before completion, may offer a solution.

Problematic Lifting of Sanctions

The most problematic of the core elements looks to be the commitment given by the US and its partners to lift UN, multilateral, and national nuclear-related sanctions in accordance with a schedule to be agreed upon. One can imagine the European Union (EU) quickly reaching a consensus to lift EU sanctions, and the five Permanent Members persuading the UN Security Council (UNSC) to lift UN sanctions once Iran has fully allayed the concerns expressed in several UNSC resolutions. But US sanctions are a different matter.

Congressional opposition to the Obama administration’s search for a diplomatic solution is already such, that various senators and representatives have been arguing for adoption of additional sanctions — no doubt hoping that this would provoke Iran into walking away from the negotiating table. These spoiling tactics are likely to intensify in the coming months, thanks to the manipulations of lobbyists who take their cue from the Israeli government.

By bringing the US public opinion, which is supportive of diplomacy, to bear, the Obama administration may be able to avert the imposition of further sanctions. However, persuading the Congress to repeal nuclear-related sanctions (and refrain from re-designating them as terrorism or human rights-related sanctions) is going to be very difficult.

A solution may have to pass by way of Israel. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appears so viscerally suspicious of Tehran (or, strategically, has relied so heavily on Israeli-fostered US suspicion of Iran) that only the boldest of punters would bet on his renouncing the tactics of sabotage. But wiser heads can be found within Israel’s political class and among senior figures that have had experience of defining Israel’s security interests. So, a determined campaign to shift the official Israeli position, which would reduce Congressional opposition, need not be hopeless.

This is all the more so in that the position of Saudi Arabia, hitherto seen by Netanyahu as an ally, appears to be shifting. On November 25, the Saudi government stated: “This agreement could be a first step towards a comprehensive solution for Iran’s nuclear program.”

Overall, the outlook is positive. A comprehensive solution need not be a mirage. But countries like India can play a helpful role by offering encouragement to the parties and persuading potential spoilers to revisit their cost/benefit calculations.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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Observers of the relationship between the US and Iran recently lived through one of those rare weeks when the colored glass in the kaleidoscope shifts and the outlook changes. It was a momentous week, possibly a historic week.

It culminated in US President Barack Obama telephoning Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as the latter was driving to the airport from downtown Manhattan to fly home. Shortly after, Obama gave the American people an account of what passed between the two presidents in the first contact at that level since 1979.

The two of them discussed ongoing efforts to reach an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program. President Obama reiterated to President Rouhani that, while there will surely be important obstacles to moving forward and success is by no means guaranteed, he believes that a comprehensive solution can be reached.

Obama went on to tell the US public of his belief that there is a basis for resolving the long-running nuclear dispute. Iran’s supreme leader has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. President Rouhani has indicated that Iran will never develop nuclear weapons. The US president has made clear that Washington respects the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear energy, provided Iran meets its non-proliferation obligations.

First Steps Towards a Final Settlement?

The ground for this conversation was prepared on September 26, when the foreign ministers of Iran and the US met in the margins of the UN General Assembly. The two ministers agreed that talks between Iran and the P5+1 would resume in Geneva on October 15, and that the parties would strive to reach a settlement of the nuclear dispute within six months, or a year at the most.

They also discussed in broad terms what a final settlement would look like and the steps needed to get to it – including a first step designed to address immediate concerns about the proliferation potential of Iran’s nuclear activities.

In recent days, both the US and Iran have intimated that they seek a broad improvement in relations, but that they will initially concentrate their efforts on resolving their nuclear differences. This is wise. 

Although the US has long been unhappy about Iranian support for groups such as Hezbollah – which are seen as a terrorist threat by Israel – and, more recently, by Iranian support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war, and although Iran’s human rights record is seen in the West as leaving much to be desired, it is the nuclear issue that has the potential to lead to a conflict that could have momentous humanitarian and economic consequences.

Moreover, for many years there has been concern in the US that Iran, though an original party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), may be intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. US intelligence believes that Iran abandoned the quest for nuclear weapons in 2003, but in the Congress and parts of the US administration, suspicion of nuclear weapons intent lives on.

So it is imperative for the US to obtain from Iran’s leaders, demonstrations that they have no interest in producing the highly enriched uranium (HEU) or the plutonium that fuel nuclear devices.

What explains the dramatic developments of recent days? Several factors may have contributed:

• Some very deft diplomatic foot-work and stroke-play by President Rouhani and his highly accomplished foreign minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif
• The power of personal contact: exposure to the Iranian president and minister over several days may have led senior members of the US administration to believe that they can afford to take a political gamble
• The constructive position of Iran following the use of chemical weapons in Syria on August 21
• A realization within the US administration that, in the absence of a diplomatic settlement, Congressional pressure for an assault on Iran will grow.

Obstacles

President Rouhani needs the early easing of the oil and financial sanctions that are crippling the Iranian economy.

What are some of the obstacles to which President Obama referred?

Negotiators will have their work cut out to reconcile the continuing production of low-enriched uranium for Iran’s nuclear power reactor at Bushehr, with denying Iran the capacity to “break-out” (i.e. succeed in making — unimpeded — enough HEU for one weapon). A tension that has long existed, between Iranian enjoyment of its NPT rights and Western demands for non-proliferation assurances going beyond what is envisaged in the NPT, persists.

The prime minister of Israel will bend every sinew and go to all manner of lengths, including falsehoods, to put President Obama under pressure to break off negotiations.

He fears that the resolution of this dispute will deny him means to distract attention from his reluctance to make peace with the Palestinians and from Israeli possession of nuclear and chemical weapons, and that it could affect Israel’s special relationship with the US and freedom of action in West Asia. The prime minister has unique influence in Washington, thanks to the hold on Congress of pro-Israel lobbies.

It may be that President Obama, in so quickly informing the American people of the new course he has set, hopes that public opinion will act as a restraint on Congress, as it did a month ago when the use of force against Syria was under consideration. Time will tell.

In any case, for now hope is permissible; hope that a further conflict in the Persian Gulf can be avoided; hope that sanctions which have penalized Western and Asian consumers and businesses will be lifted; and hope that a historic reconciliation between the US and Iran will be a force for stability in Southwest Asia.

The stakes are such that the process deserves all the support it can get from third parties such as India. The US and Iran will need encouragement to persist, when obstacles appear insuperable, and to ride out the storms that will blow in from Israel and from Arab states that share Israel’s antipathy to an improvement in US-Iranian relations.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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Readers who recall that four years ago a new US President seemed eager to defuse the West’s quarrel with Iran over its nuclear activities may wonder why we are all still waiting for white smoke. I am not sure I know the answer, but I have a hunch it has something to do with a lack of realism on one side and a profound mistrust on the other.

The lack of realism is a Western failing. The US and the two European states, France and the UK, that still have the most influence on the EU’s Iran policy, ten years after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) first reported certain Iranian failures (long since corrected) to comply with nuclear safeguards obligations, are still reluctant to concede Iran’s right to possess a capacity to enrich uranium.

These Western powers know that the treaty which governs the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), does not prohibit the acquisition of uranium enrichment technology by the treaty’s Non-Nuclear-Weapon States (NNWS). 

They know that several NNWS (Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa) already possess this technology. 

They know that the framers of the treaty envisaged that the monitoring of enrichment plants by IAEA inspectors would provide the UN Security Council with timely notice of any move by an NNWS to divert enriched uranium to the production of nuclear weapons.

Nonetheless, they cannot bring themselves to tell Iran they accept that Iran, as a NNWS party to the NPT, is entitled to enrich uranium, provided it does so for peaceful purposes, under IAEA supervision, and does not seek to divert any of the material produced.

One of the reasons for this goes back a long way. When India, a non-party to the NPT, detonated a nuclear device in 1974, US officials decided that it had been a mistake to produce a treaty, the NPT, which did not prohibit the acquisition of two dual-use technologies (so-called because they can be used either for peaceful or for military purposes) by NNWS. 

The existence of a non-sequitur in their reasoning, since India was not a party to the NPT, seems not to have occurred to them. They set about persuading other states that were capable of supplying these technologies (uranium enrichment and the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel) to withhold them from NNWS. 

This could be defended, of course, on prudential grounds. However, it caused resentment among the NNWS who felt that their side of the NPT bargain was being eroded surreptitiously; ultimately, like all forms of prohibition, it was short-sighted, because it encouraged the development of a black market and enhanced the risk of clandestine programmes, unsupervised by the IAEA.

Denying Iran the right to enrich uranium, and trying to deprive Iran of technology that it had developed indigenously, (albeit with help from the black market), seemed more than prudential in 2003. It seemed a necessity, because at the time there were good reasons to think that Iran had a nuclear weapons programme.

Nevertheless, by 2008, the US intelligence community had concluded that Iran abandoned that programme in late 2003 and would only resume it if the benefits of doing so outweighed the costs.

Despite that and subsequent similar findings, this prohibitionist mind-set is still prevalent in Washington, Paris and London. It is one explanation for a lack of progress since President Obama first stretched out the hand of friendship four years ago.

Another explanation is Israel. Israel shares with North Korea, Pakistan and India the distinction of being one of only four states that do not adhere to the NPT. It nonetheless enjoys considerable influence over US, French and British nuclear non-proliferation policies. Israeli ministers are deeply opposed to Iran possessing a uranium enrichment capability. 

They may or may not believe what they frequently claim: that Iran will use its enrichment plants to produce fissile material and will use that fissile material to attack Israel with nuclear weapons, directly or through Hezbollah. In reality, few outside Israel believe this, and many inside are sceptical. However, they do not want Israel’s room for military manoeuvre to be reduced by the existence of a south-west Asian state that could choose to withdraw from the NPT and seek to deter certain Israeli actions by threatening a nuclear response.

A third explanation is Saudi Arabia. Leading Saudis are as opposed as Israeli ministers to Iran retaining an enrichment capability. They are less inclined than Israelis to talk of this capability as posing an “existential” threat; but they share the Israeli fear that it will erode their options in the region. They also fear that it will enhance the regional prestige of their main political rival, an intolerable prospect – all the more so now that Iran and Saudi-Arabia are engaged in a proxy war in Syria that seems increasingly likely to re-ignite sectarian conflict in Iraq.

Finally, there remains strong hostility to Iran in some US quarters, notably Congress. This makes it difficult for any US administration to adopt a realistic policy of accepting Iran’s right to enrich uranium, relying on IAEA safeguards for timely detection of any Iranian violation of its NPT obligations, and minimising through intelligent diplomacy the risk of Iran’s leaders deciding to abuse their enrichment capability.  

On the Iranian side, the lack of trust in the US’ good faith has become increasingly apparent. It is in fact a hall-mark of Iran’s supreme decision-taker, Ayatollah Khamenei. One hears of it from Iranian diplomats. The Ayatollah himself barely conceals it in some of his public statements.

As recently as March 20, marking the Persian New Year, he said: “I am not optimistic about talks [with the US]. Why? Because our past experiences show that talks for the American officials do not mean for us to sit down and reach a logical solution […] What they mean by talks is that we sit down and talk until Iran accepts their viewpoint."

This distrust has militated against progress in nuclear talks by making Iran’s negotiators ultra-cautious. They have been looking for signs of a change in US attitudes – a readiness to engage sincerely in a genuine give-and-take – and have held back when, to their minds, those signs have not been apparent. 

Instead of volunteering measures that might lead the West to have more confidence in the findings of Western intelligence agencies (that Iran is not currently intent on acquiring nuclear weapons), the Iranian side has camped on demanding that its rights be recognised and nuclear-related sanctions lifted.

Unfortunately, this distrust has been fuelled by the Western tactic of relying on sanctions to coerce Iran into negotiating. Ironically, sanctions have had the opposite effect. They have sowed doubts in Ayatollah Khamenei’s mind about the West’s real intentions, and they have augmented his reluctance to take any risks to achieve a deal.

Compounding that counter-productive effect, Western negotiators have been reluctant to offer any serious sanctions relief in return for the concessions they have asked of Iran, whenever talks have taken place. One Iranian diplomat put it this way: “They ask for the moon, and offer peanuts.”

Here part of the problem is a continuing Western hope, despite all experience to date, that unbearable pressure will induce Iran to cut a deal on the West’s unrealistic (and unbalanced) terms.

Another part is ministerial pride in having persuaded the UN Security Council, the EU Council of Ministers, and several Asian states to accept a sanctions regime that is causing hardship among ordinary Iranians (but from which Iran’s elites are benefitting because of their privileged access to foreign exchange and their control of smuggling networks). It sometimes seems as though causing hardship has ceased to be a means to an end; it has become an achievement to be paraded, a mark of ministerial success.

Many of the factors listed in the preceding paragraphs have been visible during the latest round of talks between the US and EU (plus Russia and China), which took place in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on April 5 and 6, 2013.

According to a draft of the proposal to be presented to Iran which Scott Peterson described in The Christian Science Monitor on April 4, the US and EU demanded:

–          the suspension of all enrichment above the level needed to produce fuel for power reactors [5% or less];

–          the conversion of Iran’s stock of 20% U235 into fuel for research reactors, or its export, or its dilution;

–          the transformation of the well-protected Fordow enrichment plant to a state of reduced readiness [for operations] without dismantlement

–          the acceptance of enhanced monitoring of Iranian facilities by the IAEA, including the installation of cameras at Fordow to provide continuous real-time surveillance of the plant.

In exchange, the US and EU offered to suspend sanctions on gold and precious metals, and the export of petrochemicals, once the IAEA confirmed implementation of all the above measures. They also offered civilian nuclear cooperation, and IAEA technical help with the acquisition of a modern research reactor, safety measures and the supply of isotopes for nuclear medicine. In addition, the US would approve the export of parts for the safety-related repair of Iran’s aging fleet of US-made commercial aircraft.

Finally, the proposal stressed that additional confidence-building steps taken by Iran would yield corresponding steps from the P5+1, including proportionate relief of oil sanctions.

The initial Iranian response on April 5 seems to have been less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic. On the first day of the talks they irritated the US and EU negotiators by failing to react directly to the US/EU proposals. Instead they reiterated their demand for the recognition of Iran’s rights and the lifting of sanctions as preconditions for any short-term confidence building curbs on their 20% enrichment activities.

On the second day, however, according to , writing for AlMonitor on April 6, and quoting Western participants in the talks, Iran “pivoted to arguing for a better deal.”  The Iranian team started to make clear what they would require in return for curbing Iran’s 20% activities, notably the lifting of “all unilateral sanctions.” These mainly comprise the oil and financial sanctions imposed in 2012.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” a US diplomat said. “There was intensive dialogue on key issues at the core of [the proposed confidence building measures].”

Will that pivot be a turning-point? The latest proposal clearly falls far short of what Iran seeks by way of clarity that ultimately the US and EU can accept Iran retaining a dual-use enrichment capability, and by way of relief from oil and financial sanctions. There has been no sign that the US and EU can bring themselves to offer significant movement on either of these points.

Yet, a scintilla of hope can be drawn from the fact that on April 6 there may have been the beginnings of a haggle. If both sides can resume their talks in that haggling mode, progress may finally be achievable. Haggling is central to any good negotiation.  Until now it has been sorely lacking in dealings with Iran under President Obama.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The winter months saw the controversy over Iran’s nuclear programme become dangerously heated. Western media were encouraged to interpret recent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) findings as proof that Iran is bent on making nuclear weapons, despite the assessment of the US intelligence community remaining that a weapons decision has not been taken and is in no sense inevitable.

The US, UK, and European Union (EU) used the concern aroused by media reporting to justify a further sharpening of their attack on the Iranian economy, while Israel pressed for a different sort of attack, to wipe out Iranian nuclear facilities before the programme enters a so-called “zone of immunity.” Iran reminded its adversaries that it could retaliate by closing the Straits of Hormuz to oil and gas shipments.

As spring has come, passions have cooled. US President Barack Obama seems to have felt able to tell Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu that a military attack is unnecessary at this juncture, even though the US President is vulnerable to Israeli influence on US public opinion in an electoral year. The five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, the EU, and Germany, have agreed to talk to Iran’s nuclear negotiator despite the latter’s failure to commit Iran to full implementation of the resolutions passed by the UN Security Council since 2006. (Notably these require Iran to suspend all production of the enriched uranium that can be converted into reactor fuel, but which Iran could divert to military use if it decided to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT], or to ignore its NPT obligations).

There are signs that the US, UK and Germany, if not France under President Sarkozy, are moving towards the Russian and Chinese position of accepting Iranian enrichment as long as Iran offers the best possible guarantees that all its nuclear material will remain in non-military use. Public diplomacy has moderated, rude aggression yielding to civility and reason.

The risk of disruption to oil and gas shipments has receded – for the time being at least – although recent US and EU measures are causing problems for some of Iran’s traditional customers, and are hurting consumers everywhere through their effect on prices.

So it is not irrational to hope that when the eight parties – Britain, China, France, Russia and the US, the permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, the EU and Iran – meet on 14th April in Istanbul, they may find some way of launching a process that can, over time, lead to agreement. At long last, perhaps there can be concurrence on handling Iran’s nuclear ambitions in accordance with the treaty to which Iran is a founder-party, the NPT.

An NPT deal would recognise Iran’s right to enrich uranium and would accept its taking advantage of that right, in return for Iran placing all nuclear material in its possession under IAEA safeguards and renewing its commitment to refrain from manufacturing or otherwise acquiring nuclear weapons.

In one sense, the West approaches these talks from a position of weakness. The Iranians have shown no sign of buckling under the pressure of ever-tighter sanctions. They know that the West’s military option is deeply unattractive to any of sane mind.

In another sense, the West has many good cards in its hand. Sanctions are hurting Iran and it has an interest in having them lifted provided the price is not intolerable. Abandoning its enrichment plans would be intolerable; volunteering full access to IAEA inspectors, and other measures that can allay the concerns aroused by the clandestine nature of some of its past nuclear activities, need not be.

To say that hope is permissible is not to say that the odds on yet another disappointment are long. In 2007 a promising opening vanished when Iran’s chief negotiator clashed with President Ahmadinejad. In 2009 it was President Ahmadinejad’s turn to be thwarted by domestic rivals; and President Obama, under pressure from hawks, withdrew his negotiators rather than wait for the Iranians to sort out their differences. In 2010, the timing of Iranian assent to a confidence-building proposal brokered by Turkey and Brazil cast doubt in Western minds on Iran’s sincerity.

In other words, the scope for any process to founder on distrust, misunderstanding and political in-fighting in both Tehran and Washington remains formidable. Equally disturbing are the wider political realities.

Since 1992 both leading Israeli parties, Likud and Labour, have sought to convince Washington that Iran is a mortal threat to US interests in southwest Asia. This they have done in order to maintain Israel’s value to the US as an ally in a post-Cold War Middle East and to avert a thaw in US-Iranian relations that they fear might entail a cooling in US-Israeli relations. For these Israelis, Iran’s nuclear programme, and especially its undeclared activities prior to 2003, has been a gift from heaven.

Iran’s transgressions are a matter for persuading Americans that Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, that these weapons will be used to destroy Israel, they say. Iran’s programme, if left unchecked, will precipitate nuclear proliferation in an unstable region, leading Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey to acquire similar capabilities. US conservatives, in thrall to dreams of re-shaping the Middle East and regime-change in Iran, have been eager echoers of these (highly questionable) arguments.

These constituencies, Israeli and American, have no interest in the normalisation of the Iranian nuclear case through an NPT deal. On the contrary, they have every interest in making it as politically difficult as possible for any US administration to arrive at such a deal.

Saudi Arabia has been even less transparent than Israel. It is not obvious that the Saudis have been poisoning the wells of American opinion to thwart a deal with Iran. But Saudi-Iranian rivalry, multifaceted and acute since the advent of an Islamic Republic that challenges the legitimacy of Saudi occupation of the Holy Places, seized from the Hashemites in 1924, and which shows up the undemocratic nature of the Saudi monarchy, is well-documented. There have been veiled threats that Saudi Arabia will ignore its NPT obligations if Iran is left in peace to exploit nuclear technology that the Saudis themselves are decades away from mastering without outside help. Saudi Arabia too has an interest in thwarting any deal that leaves Iran in possession of enrichment plants.

There are additional factors. Ever since the NPT opened for signature in 1968, US officials have found it hard to accept that the treaty allows non-nuclear-weapon states (NNWS) access to technologies that can serve both civil and military purposes. There’s been a 44-year itch to close what Americans see as a loop-hole, despite all the evidence that many NNWS are unready to concede a back-door renegotiation of a carefully-balanced instrument.

There is also in the US a tendency to blind self-righteousness that can lead Americans to treat non-Americans as miscreants when the latter err. Iran’s failure to respect its NPT safeguards commitments prior to 2003, ill-disposes American officials to accord Iranian representatives the respect the latter crave. There’s a risk Iran’s negotiators will be made to feel like criminal suspects invited to engage in plea-bargaining.

For their part, the Iranians have a tendency to give way to the temptation to retaliate when instead keeping a stiff upper lip would be wiser. For instance, they retaliated for the 2006 reporting of their IAEA non-compliance to the Security Council by ceasing to allow the IAEA the access it needed to arrive at the conclusion that there are no undeclared nuclear activities or material in Iran. They retaliated for recent UK sanctions on financial dealings by trashing the British embassy in Tehran, an act of vandalism ill-calculated to make it easier for the British government to accept their enrichment activities. Will they be able to resist the urge to retaliate if some indignity is inflicted on them while negotiations are underway?

These wider factors suggest that India, Brazil and South Africa could play a part in resolving this controversy if they chose. They could act as auxiliaries of their BRICS partners, Russia and China, whose role in a negotiating process will be to help narrow differences. India could use its influence in Washington and European capitals to urge patience and the turning of deaf ears to special pleading from Israel and Saudi Arabia. It could draw attention to the way in which Western slowness to accept evidence that the Iranian nuclear threat had been exaggerated, has damaged Indian economic interests.

India could also stress the unacceptability of any attack on Iran that has not been authorised by the Security Council, both on legal grounds and on account of its probable consequences for Indian living standards. It could draw on 2,500 years of cultural affinity with Iran to offer advice on Iranian sensibilities: the dos and don’ts that matter in any negotiation.

The underlying need is for the BRICS to make their voice heard on this issue, to counter-point the tunes composed by the West’s Middle East allies. The BRICS are qualified to argue against seeing Iran’s nuclear programme in isolation. They can point out that the programme is a symbol of a geostrategic shift: Iran is slowly returning to the ranks of Asia’s greater powers.

This shift is unwelcome to some of Iran’s neighbours, it seems. They have sought to prevent it by distorting Western perceptions, by encouraging Western governments to assume the worst of a state whose intentions the West finds it hard to fathom, and by playing on the negative prejudices that are the legacy of past clashes with Iran.

But this kind of shift cannot be prevented without a conflict that would entail hardship or suffering for most of mankind. So the global family has an interest in Iran’s neighbours accommodating what can hardly be prevented, and according Iran a say in the affairs of southwest Asia – what the Iranians see as their rightful place in the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

*[This article was originally published by : Indian Council on Global Relations, on April 10, 2012.]

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