Iran has returned to enriching uranium for the production of nuclear warheads. Its centrifuges are capable of obtaining 60% enriched fuel. A little more and you get to the bomb, if it doesn’t already exist.
The bad thing, in this context, is that the Iranian regime’s negotiations with the West are very close to dead center, despite Joe Biden’s willingness to repair the damage done by Donald Trump, his predecessor in the White House. All this is, in short, what the diplomat and political scientist Ali Vaez says.
Biden’s adviser on the issue and a former adviser to the UN commission that followed the issue, Vaez participated in the Hopkins Podcasts on International Politics at Johns Hopkins University.
A little of history. In 2003, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), linked to the UN, gathered evidence that the Shia Islamic Republic enriched uranium, and not just 12%, to supply electricity plants. A period of ten years began, in which the international community embarked on the concerns of the IAEA, Israel, the Sunni countries of the Middle East and the Gulf and also the UN Security Council (USA, UK, France, Russia and China), which was then joined by Germany.
Iran suffered heavy economic and military sanctions, which would only be lifted if the country gave up its nuclear-armed plans. Between 2013 and 2015, secret negotiations between, on the one hand, Iran and, on the other, the USA, the rest of the Security Council and Germany set up timetables for the visit of inspectors’ missions and another sophisticated system of cameras for the online monitoring.
From the point of view of the IAEA and the Barack Obama administration, it was doable and necessary. But in Washington, the Republican Party, with the Israeli government of then Prime Minister Netanyahu, was not satisfied.
Vaez sums up objections that weren’t his own. Iran did not include in the negotiations the construction and possession of missiles that could carry warheads towards neighboring territories. In addition, the agreement signed gave Iran a period of 14 days to provide face-to-face inspection of unmonitored sites. It’s enough for the Persian country to erase evidence, Israel argued. Quite difficult, as radioactive material only disappears after a much longer period, said the podcast guest.
Discussions were on that foot when Trump was elected with the suspicion that Obama signed a highly disadvantageous agreement for the United States. The republican surrounded himself with advisers for whom, even under pressure and surveillance, Tehran would never behave honestly.
Iran initially sought to fulfill its commitments to European partners. But the Trump administration has threatened European companies that do not adhere to the new American embargo. Iranian presidential elections brought a hardliner to power — pressured by the intransigence of religious leaders — and, thus, everything went back to square one.
Or rather, almost zero. The previous group of strict negotiations even drafted a 27-page memorandum in February to relaunch control over Iran’s nuclear program. The document would be a signal for the IAEA Board of Governors meeting in June. But lo and behold, Russia invades Ukraine and tries to entice Iran. The problems mixed, and everything returned to a regrettable impasse.
Russia is a nuclear power, and here are no more podcast observations with Vaez. In the negotiations that preceded the 2015 agreement, Moscow did not have a share comparable to that of Germany, which does not even belong to the Security Council, having been defeated in the Second World War (1939-1945).
But Russia tends to take Iran’s pains for a few reasons. The Iranians are rivals with Iraq, a former competitor for hegemony in the Gulf and which has become a kind of US protectorate.
With the Ukraine War, Moscow also tends not to mix Tehran with the anti-Putin axis that the US seeks to build with Arab countries. And finally, Moscow has never been so far from Israel when the possibility of believing in the sincerity of the Iranian ayatollahs and the need for peace comes into play, to counteract the unemployment, inflation and low economic growth that plague the Persian country.
