President Trump is applying more sanctions on Iran that would be hard to reverse. Tehran, facing elections in June, has its own demands. [ Ссылка ]
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President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has promised to move quickly to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran so long as Iran also comes back into compliance. But that vow is easier said than done.
While Mr. Biden’s pledge pleased the deal’s other signatories, who were angry that President Trump withdrew from it two years ago, returning to the way things were may be impossible, complicated by both Iranian and American politics.
President Trump, even as a lame duck, is moving quickly to increase American sanctions against Iran and sell advanced weapons to its regional enemies, policies that would be difficult for a new president to reverse.
Last week, he asked his advisers for options to launch a military strike against Iran but appears to have been talked out of it. His aides argued that an attack could quickly lead to a larger war.
Iran, where President Hassan Rouhani faces strong opposition from conservatives in elections set for June 2021, is expected to demand a high price to return to the deal, including the immediate lifting of the punishing sanctions imposed by the Trump administration and billions of dollars in compensation for them.
Those are demands that Mr. Biden is highly unlikely to meet — especially given strong congressional opposition.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has tried to pass on to Mr. Biden’s advisers through intermediaries Tehran’s insistence that the United States return to the Iran deal unconditionally before any talks resume, according to Iranian diplomats.
The diplomats say that Iran is not interested in a temporary freeze and will not stop enriching uranium or reduce its large stockpile in the meantime. They said that Iran would return to full compliance with the deal when the United States does.
Advisers to Mr. Biden do not confirm receiving any messages from Iran and say they will only deal with the issue after the inauguration.
Iran has some leverage. When Mr. Trump took office, Iran had roughly 102 kilograms, or about 225 pounds, of enriched uranium, whose production was limited by the 2015 agreement. After the United States withdrew, Iran declared it was no longer bound by the agreement and resumed enriching uranium at higher levels.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said last week that Iran now had more than 2,440 kilograms, which is more than eight times the limit set by the 2015 nuclear deal. The “breakout” time for Iran to possibly make a nuclear weapon — an ambition it denies — is now considerably shorter than a year.
During the campaign, Mr. Biden called Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the deal “reckless,” and said it ended up isolating the United States, not Iran.
“I will offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy,” Mr. Biden wrote in a September op-ed for CNN. “If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.”
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A week ago, after Mr. Biden’s victory, Mr. Rouhani welcomed the initiative, calling it “an opportunity” for the United States “to compensate for its previous mistakes and return to the path of adherence to international commitments.”
The choice of the word “compensate” was not accidental, said Robert Einhorn, a nuclear arms-control negotiator now at the Brookings Institution. Iran says it wants Washington to pay for the billions of dollars in economic losses it incurred when Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran deal in 2018 and reinstituted sanctions that it had lifted.
Since then, Mr. Trump has piled on more sanctions. This maximum pressure campaign, as the administration has called it, devastated Iran’s economy but failed to push Iran back to the negotiating table or to curtail its involvement in Iraq, Syria or Lebanon.
The administration is also trying to further limit Iran’s support for proxy militias in those countries. It is selling more sophisticated weapons to the Arab monarchies in the Persian Gulf — countries that see Iran as an enemy and have their own regional ambitions — and accelerating the transfer of F-35 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates.
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