Vahid Salemi/AP Photo
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, left, prepares to depart Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport to attend the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, September 19, 2022.
It looks like the opponents of the Iran nuclear deal are close to killing the agreement for good, which would put an end to over two decades of hard-nosed negotiations over Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Despite surprising initial openness to rejoin the deal from the hard-liner Iranian regime elected last year, recent overtures by European negotiators have been met with what Secretary of State Antony Blinken described as a “step backward” from the Iranian side. No mutually satisfactory agreement will be reached prior to the American midterm elections, if at all.
The closer Iran gets to achieving the capability to launch a nuclear weapon, the more likely war becomes. In a recent trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia, President Biden affirmed that he would use force “as a last resort” to stop Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon. The Iranian regime, for its part, may see a nuclear arsenal as its only guarantee of survival, learning the lesson of Iraq, Gaddafi’s Libya, and more recently Ukraine, which gave up its Soviet-era weapons in exchange for “security guarantees.” North Korea may be its example of how an authoritarian regime can survive as long as it retains the nuclear threat.
In the absence of a deal, the situation could potentially escalate into the worst of all possibilities—open war. Should that happen, government officials responsible for the breakdown of negotiations will largely be left unscathed, but many civilians across the Middle East won’t.
Biden has slow-walked re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), since his election, putting the onus on Iran to move first—rather than acknowledge the damage done by President Trump’s totally groundless 2018 withdrawal, or his “maximum pressure” campaign that culminated in the assassination of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi hasn’t helped matters by demanding an end to an investigation of undeclared uranium traces found at undeclared Iranian sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Cooperation with the IAEA would be essential to any renewed agreement, as it is the entity responsible for monitoring Iran’s nuclear facilities under the JCPOA.
Though the buck stops with Biden and Raisi, ostensible U.S. allies, especially Israel, have undermined negotiations at every turn with both aggressive military action against Iran, and interference with American domestic politics. It’s well past time American political leaders acknowledged and confronted these toxic relationships, and reasserted the primacy of American national interests in American foreign policy.
In recent years, Israel has simply tried to blow up critical Iranian facilities potentially used to create a nuclear weapon, or assassinate any scientist who has the ability to make its nuclear ambitions a reality. Last year, Mossad reportedly used an unmanned aerial vehicle to attack a factory making centrifuges crucial for producing weapons-grade uranium, and recruited Iranian scientists to sabotage the Natanz nuclear plant. In 2020, it used a remote-controlled machine gun to kill top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
Despite these efforts (or perhaps because of them), Iran has only moved faster in its efforts to enrich enough uranium to make a weapon possible. According to Daniel Larison of Responsible Statecraft, the Iranian nuclear program has “reached new heights with 60 percent enrichment,” and troublingly reduced cooperation with the IAEA. “Israel’s efforts at sabotaging the [JCPOA] negotiations have been more successful than their efforts at sabotaging the nuclear program,” writes Larison.
None of this means that Biden or his negotiators should listen to the voices arrayed against peaceful diplomacy.
Complementing these military and clandestine operations is the open lobbying effort by the Israeli government and its closest American allies to get Biden to back down from re-entering the deal. According to Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, recent overtures from him and other top officials have influenced American draft decisions on a renewed deal, which he said is “a bad deal” in its current form.
One recurrent demand from the Israeli government is for the United States not to concede on its designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a “foreign terrorist organization” (FTO), a designation that happened under Trump. This would be a relatively meaningless (though politically volatile) concession for the American side, but it is very important to the Iranians. As Anchal Vohra writes in Foreign Policy, the listing has not slowed the IRGC’s attacks in the region nor those of its militias, and some experts contend that the IRGC would remain under sanction from other programs.
Republicans are obviously hostile to any deal with Iran; Mike Pompeo, for instance, is busy peddling bogus polling data on how Americans hate the idea of a renegotiated JCPOA. (In reality, the policy has enjoyed majority support since it was agreed upon in 2015.) The more intimate concern for Biden, if he wants to revive the deal, is that much of his own party toes the anti-peace Israel lobby line, and those who don’t are viciously attacked.
Israel partisan Rep. Josh Gottheimer, or “perennial obstructionist,” as Prospect contributor Austin Ahlman has dubbed him, is naturally the lead author of a draft letter decrying the possibility of a revived JCPOA. Ahlman reports in a recent Intercept article that the draft letter, with 30 Democratic co-signers, largely mirrors the talking points of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the flagship anti-peace Israel lobby in Washington.
AIPAC has recently changed its policy on political campaigns to now aggressively fund candidates who will be amenable to its policy positions, and crush candidates who attempt to rein in America’s near-total deference to the Israeli government. As Alex Sammon has reported in the Prospect, AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel PAC were some of the biggest players in the Democratic primary season, spending millions of dollars to prop up centrist candidates and crush progressive ones—most often with attacks that have nothing to do with Israel policy, or Middle East policy.
The upshot of all of this is to bolster the anti-peace Israel lobby’s influence in Washington, get rid of its most vocal opponents, and scare the rest of the Democratic caucus into ambivalence on the issue.
These attacks may be more intense in the electoral space, but none of these tactics are that new. Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes, chief negotiator of the original JCPOA, recounted intense flak from the hard-liner Israel lobby when he was a part of the Obama White House. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt also spoke of organized backlash to their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which scrutinized the special American-Israeli relationship.
To be sure, the Israeli government and its domestic allies are not the only ones organizing against the renewed JCPOA. Saudi threats to cut oil production may have been retaliation over the proposed deal. Saudi Arabia sees Iran as both a security threat and a rival in energy exports. The United Arab Emirates, as a close Saudi ally, would also likely be displeased with an American-Iranian agreement.
Of course, none of this means that Biden or his negotiators should listen to the voices arrayed against peaceful diplomacy, nor does it mean there is universal agreement on the undesirability of the JCPOA agreement within those governments. Indeed, at least one senior Israeli military official said it was a mistake to leave the deal. But for the United States at least, given the strategic catastrophe of the previous wars in the region, America’s interest in peace is undeniable.
A negotiated agreement that prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon would be better for the region and the world; an added bonus would be to show that the United States won’t be nagged by ungrateful allies out of doing the right thing.
