Dr. Ali Vaez
Director of Iran Project and Senior Adviser to the President, International Crisis Group
I would like to talk about the prospects of the follow-on agreement, not just a nuclear agreement, but also agreements that cover other contentious areas between Iran and the West in particular. But I think that the JCPOA experience has really demonstrated two inconvenient truths. Number one is that the JCPOA doesn’t serve either side or demands. The reality is that Iran is seeking the kind of economic normalization. The kind of sanctions relief that the JCPOA offered did not and will not materialize in the future. There is a need for Iran to get more sanctions relief, especially from primary US sanctions. Some of these demands by the way are already coming up in the negotiations ongoing in Vienna. The second reason is that the deal is unstable as long as the tensions between Iran and the US and their respective alliances in the region persist. We have learned based on the experience of 2015 and 2016 that regional tensions could easily spill over into the implementation of the nuclear deal. So you need to be able to also deescalate in the region.
In all of this there lies an opportunity for one or more better for better agreements specially prior to the 2023 deadline of some of the JCPOA sunsets setting in.
One of the questions that comes up all the time is whether Iran would have enough incentives to negotiate a follow-on agreement. There are two elements to this. One is if the US goes back to full compliance with the JCPOA, which means that it has to provide Iran with significant sanctions relief, would it still have enough leverage to negotiate with Iran and incentify Iran to negotiate. The second is with the hardliners coming to power as of August in Iran, would they be interested in negotiations. I will try to answer both questions.
Number one is that what drives Iran an incentive is not necessarily the amount of sanctions the US has in its back pocket, but it’s the prospect of instability in the agreement. You just look at the calendar of JCPOA implementation. There is already a very clear milestone, the transition day in 2023 when the US Congress is supposed to lift, not just suspend, the sanctions outlined in the JCPOA. The Iranian Parliament is supposed to ratify the Additional Protocol in response. We know that the Congress is not going to do that and the Iranian Parliament is not going to ratify the AP, which means that by October 2023 both sides would once again be in violation of the JCPOA. We are not going through all this pain of reviving the agreement only to see it collapse again by 2023. Remember that’s also the time that the next round of campaign for US presidential election starts. The Iranians have already been through this experience of seeing the doors of their economy open up only to see a shutdown a year and a half later. The kind of instability and unpredictability that it creates in the economy in the view of many and Iran is even more damaging than the predictability of living under sanctions in the foreseeable future. I think that is the primary incentive that the Iranians have and you can argue that the economic promises of the JCPOA are also the reason they kept the deal alive despite the fact that it became an empty shell in the past three years. I think that incentive is going to be there two years from now.
In two years obviously we are going to have a hardline Iranian president, we still don’t know the outcome of the elections, but we are talking about different shades of grey. For sure we are not going to have a reformist open-minded pro-moderation and pro-engagement president in Iran. But having said this, I think for two reasons the next Iranian government is likely to be interested in negotiations. Number one is that you would have a much more monolithic power setup in Iran. This would reduce the obstacles that existed with the Rouhani administration from day one which was the question of mistrust. You saw Zarif’s leak that one branch of the Iranian government would not trust the other branch. This was a major problem with the Rouhani administration that I don’t think will exist with the next Iranian president. Obviously Iran will always remain divided and factionalism will remain as endemic as ever. But nevertheless, I think that the question of who reaps the political dividends of dealing with the West would diminish in the next administration. And this is not likely to be another Ahmadinejad administration, in a sense that all power will be in the hand of conservatives, but they will be bogged down by infighting. Given the fact that this president is probably going to be the Supreme Leader’s last president, the system is going to make a careful choice, that will be a highly managed election to make sure that the outcome is totally in line with the Supreme Leader’s vision. All of that might not be good news for Iran domestically, in terms of pluralism, openness of the system, but it is actually a good news for a prospect of negotiations with the West, Iran will be more confident.
If I am right in this rather optimistic projection of the possibility of negotiating a follow-on agreement, one has to take two key principles into account. One is that the core bargain in the JCPOA which was nuclear restrictions and rigorous monitoring in return for economic incentives could not apply to other areas of this agreement, because the nuclear issue, at least since 2003, was not core to Iran’s national security, whereas Iran’s ballistic missiles program or Iran’s support for partners and proxies in the region are core to its national security. Any concessions on those issues would have to be reciprocated not with economic incentives, but with security concessions. I give you an example: if Iran indeed ratifies or turns the voluntary limit it had announced a few years ago on 2,000 km range for its ballistic missiles, if it codifies that into law, in return, what could be offered to Iran is an S-400 missile defense system and not an economic incentive.
The second principle I think is that non-nuclear issues would require a different format than the P5 + 1 Iran negotiations. As you know, the scope and the membership of P5 + 1 is determined by the UN Security Council resolution, and I think it is extremely difficult and unwise to either expand the group or the scope of these negotiations. Areas of disagreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia could be addressed both bilaterally, for instance, and in a regional process, which I think now stands at much better chance of starting than ever before in the past three decades since the end of Iran-Iraq war. That opens other possibilities as well. For instance, if you have a regional process in which you have the six GCC countries plus Iran and Iraq, six plus two setup, I am not really talking about a Middle East process, because as soon as you bring in Israel, Turkey, UAE, it gets extremely complicated. It is much better to focus on the sub-regional level. If you have a six plus two process led by the United Nations or any other impartial actor, and supported by the US and other permanent members of the Security Council, you are in the position to even solve some of the issues that would be extremely difficult to solve in the follow-on nuclear deal with Iran. For instance, we all talk about extending the sunsets. It will be very difficult for the next Iranian government to agree to extending the sunsets, because they were the ones who criticized the Rouhani administration for agreeing to this 10-15-20 years’ timeline in the JCPOA. Even if they get more for it, it will be a tough sell. Plus, the Iranian main logic about not accepting permanent restrictions on their program is that they didn’t want to be treated as an outlier to NPT member states in good standing forever. Their idea was that they would build trust and confidence in a peaceful nature of their program after several years of implementing the Interim Agreement and then the JCPOA in order to become a normal NPT member state. They don’t want to create a new category among NPT non-nuclear member states, it is just Iran accepting limits that no one else accepts. For them it is giving away this part of their sovereignty, which is totally unacceptable. But, if some of these limits or monitoring measures are regionalized, then Iran is no longer an exception to the rule and it could actually be sold publicly that Iran is leading the charge as one of the early steps towards a sub-region free of weapons of mass destruction. For instance, you can imagine a sub-regional ban on any enrichment above five percent or any plutonium reprocessing. There is no reason why Saudi Arabia and the UAE and other GCC countries and Iraq would not agree to that. A joint venture enrichment facility on one of the Persian Gulf islands, for instance, which could involve Iranian neighbors as well – Emirates have a nuclear reactor, they should be interested in something like this. Or a multilateral enrichment plant in Iran, something similar to the Urenco model. Or even something that is much more of a lower hanging fruit which is to multilateralize the stuffing of Iran’s enrichment plants.
All of these seem distant prospects now, but I am just suggesting that with the restauration of the JCPOA and the change in the track perception of Iran and more consolidation of power in the hands of a single faction, there are opportunities that didn’t exist before and a clear-eyed approach which is not zero-sum could really help cultivate some of these opportunities.
