The Road From Lausanne

On April 2, 2015,  in Lausanne, Switzerland, the so-called P5+1 group – the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China, and Germany – and Iran announced that a framework understanding had been reached on Iran’s nuclear program. In the days since the triumphant press conference that evening, when Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, and Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran, stood side-by-side and announced the “key parameters of a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” it quickly became clear that the road to June 30 – the deadline for a final agreement – would be long and difficult.

A few hours after Zarif left the lectern, having delivered remarks identical to Mogherini’s in Persian outlining the JCPOA, he took to Twitter, as he is known to do, and expressed concern regarding a fact sheet the United States’ negotiating team had publicized, detailing the specifics of the JCPOA – he described the fact sheet as “spin.” Zarif also raised concerns about sanctions relief, primarily whether it would be comprehensive and immediate following the entry-into-effect of a final agreement or gradual. Meanwhile, Iranians were out celebrating in the streets of Tehran and, in a historic step, Iranian broadcasters showed U.S. President Barack Obama’s address outlining the JCPOA on state television – a first for any U.S. presidential address since the 1979 revolution.

The U.S. fact sheet outlined in some detail the concessions Iranians had agreed to, but was short on details about sanctions relief. We learned that Iran would be down to just 6,000 IR-1 first-generation centrifuges from an all-time high of just over 20,000, be restricted to enriching uranium up to 3.67 percent (far from weapons-grade), and carry out all its enrichment activity at Natanz under the watchful eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – and those are just the highlights. The list of Iranian concessions was lengthy, representing a coup for the P5+1. Diplomacy, however, is about quid pro quo and it quickly became clear that Iran’s expectations on sanctions relief were proportional to its technical concessions.

Increasingly Slim

After days of caffeine-fueled, all-night negotiating sessions, diplomats in Lausanne managed to produce a breakthrough, but the chances of a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear program arriving by the June 30 deadline are appearing increasingly slim. Difficulties persist on a number of levels. Resolving sanctions relief to the satisfaction of both sides without rolling back any of the already agreed technical concessions will be a difficult task. Amplifying the difficulty of this, skepticism toward the terms of the JCPOA continues to grow in both Washington and Tehran.

In all likelihood, we may witness a third extension in the long-running negotiation process should June 30 prove unrealistic for both sides to arrive at a comprehensive deal. The JCPOA shouldn’t be seen as a milestone marking the beginning of the end in the Iran talks. Rather, it marks the end of the beginning: The process of committing technical matters to a final agreement that the seven negotiating parties can sign will prove challenging.

What has made these negotiations complicated from the start is the deeply turbulent relationship between Iran and the United States. Though relations have improved considerably from the days when Iran was led by the irascible and uncompromising Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, geopolitical developments in the Middle East have ensured that the final months of negotiating an Iran deal won’t be insulated from the vagaries of domestic politics in both Tehran and Washington D.C. Further complicating matters, in the days since the Lausanne announcement, Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional arch rival, has led a coalition of Arab states in bombarding the Iran-supported Zaydi Houthi rebels in Yemen, with reluctant U.S. backing. To the north, Iran and the United States find themselves on the same front of an increasingly messy campaign against the Islamic State in northern Iraq. These international variables are complicated by domestic political forces in Washington and Tehran, eager to make the diplomatic process toward a final deal more challenging.

In the days before the JCPOA was announced, a group of 47 U.S. Republican politicians, primarily in Congress, made headlines for a letter they sent Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei implying that any final nuclear agreement would last as long as the incumbent administration did in the White House. Two weeks after the breakthrough in Switzerland, Congress succeeded in passing a bipartisan bill which will guarantee U.S. legislators the chance to approve or reject any final Iran deal – the Obama administration has said it will comply with bill and withhold a veto. At the same time, rhetoric hardened in Iran: Khamenei took aim at the United States, stating that the United States “created the myth of nuclear weapons so they could say the Islamic Republic is a source of threat. No, the source of threat is America itself, with its unrestrained, destabilizing interventions.” Gen. Hossein Salami, the deputy leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, added that any foreign inspectors on Iranian military facilities would essentially amount to an “occupation” of Iran.

Domestic Audiences

Of course, much of this hard-headed rhetoric from Iranian leaders is for the purposes of posturing for domestic audiences. Iran’s hardliners, both within the nation’s Majlis (parliament) and outside, want to ensure that any final agreement will respect Iran’s sovereignty and, perhaps above all else, initiate immediate sanctions relief. These hardliners want to be very certain that the Iranian government, led by Rouhani, will not sign on to a losing deal. Somewhat oddly, Iranian negotiators have highlighted the reluctance of the U.S. Congress to back the deal as a sign that the terms of the JCPOA are actually in Iran’s benefit. Seyed Abbas Araghchi, a senior Iranian nuclear negotiator and a man known to have the Supreme Leader’s ear on nuclear issues, told an audience in Tehran that if the path charted at Lausanne was a loss for Iran then U.S. hawks and critics should be pushing Obama’s hand. Instead, the hawks have found much to scrutinize after Lausanne.

One criticism from U.S. hawks is that lifting sanctions would free up a massive economic capability for Iran to use as it sees fit to support terror and proxy groups across the Middle East. That in itself may be a fair criticism, but the problem for these critics is not Iran’s nuclear weapons program – it’s Iran’s foreign policy and national interests. What these critics would like is for the Obama administration’s diplomats to practice issue linkage by bringing Iran’s foreign policy, long- and medium-range ballistic missile programs, and support for proxy groups such as Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis, to the negotiating table. Raising these issues in the context of the P5+1 process would be diplomatically unproductive and imprudent.

What such critics overlook is that these issues can only be addressed following a U.S.-Iran detente over the nuclear issue, as part of a broader bilateral “grand bargain” – a comprehensive bilateral understanding that, in theory, would address the major chronic issues causing a rift between the United States and Iran since the 1979 revolution. Iran offered to negotiate such an agreement with George W. Bush but the offer encountered a swift death at the hands of a U.S. administration wholly disinterested in the proposal. Ultimately, diplomacy of the sort being exercised by the representatives of the P5+1 and Iran will only succeed if it remains focused on Iran’s nuclear program.

As this heads to print, international diplomats – who have grown quite close after several sleepless nights around the negotiating table in Geneva, Lausanne, and elsewhere – are preparing to reconvene to commit to paper the terms of a final agreement. A final agreement, if concluded, would have tremendous geopolitical implications; it would precipitate Iran’s economic reintegration with the global economy, and open the door for peaceful rapprochement between Tehran and the West. A scenario where diplomacy fails would serve to amplify international tensions and increase the possibility of kinetic conflict. These negotiations have taken years, and even though diplomats see the light at the end of the tunnel, we remain far from a “done deal.”