Guided by domestic concerns, Biden aims to reenter Iran deal as ‘first step’

AP — A lot of the characters are the same for US President-elect Joe Biden as they were in 2015, but the scene is far starker, as he reassembles a team of veteran negotiators to get back into the nuclear deal with Iran.

US President Donald Trump worked to blow up the multinational deal to contain Iran’s nuclear program during his four years in office, gutting the diplomatic achievement of predecessor Barack Obama in favor of what Trump called a maximum pressure campaign against Iran.

Down to Trump’s last days in office, accusations, threats, and still more sanctions by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as well as Iran’s decision to spur uranium enrichment and seize a South Korean tanker, are helping to keep alive worries that regional conflict will erupt. Iran on Friday staged drills, hurling volleys of ballistic missiles and smashing drones into targets, further raising pressure on the incoming American president over a nuclear accord.

Even before the Capitol riot this month, upheaval at home threatened to weaken the US hand internationally, including in the Middle East’s nuclear standoff. Political divisions are fierce, thousands are dying in the pandemic and unemployment remains high.

Biden and his team will face allies and adversaries wondering how much attention and resolution the US can bring to bear on the Iran nuclear issue or any other foreign concern, and whether any commitment by Biden will be reversed by his successor.

“His ability to move the needle is… I think hampered by the doubt about America’s capacity and by the skepticism and worry about what comes after Biden,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Nasr was an adviser on Afghanistan during the first Obama administration.

Biden’s pick for deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, acknowledged the difficulties, in an interview with a Boston news show last month, before her nomination.

Then US undersecretary of state for political affairs Wendy Sherman testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, October 3, 2013, before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. (AP Photo/ Molly Riley)

“We’re going to work hard at this because we have lost credibility, we are seen as weaker” after Trump, said Sherman, who was Barack Obama’s lead US negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. She was speaking of US foreign objectives overall, including the Iran deal.

Biden’s first priority for renewed talks is getting both Iran and the United States back in compliance with the nuclear deal, which offered Iran relief from sanctions, in exchange for Iran accepting limits on its nuclear material and gear.

“If Iran returns to compliance with the deal, we will do so as well,” a person familiar with the Biden transition team’s thinking said, speaking on condition of anonymity, as one who was not authorized to speak on the record. “It would be a first step.”

But Biden also faces pressure both from Democratic and Republican opponents of the Iran deal. They do not want the US to throw away the leverage of sanctions until Iran is made to address other items objectionable to Israel, Sunni Arab neighbors, and the United States. That includes Iran’s ballistic missiles, and substantial and longstanding intervention in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq. Biden promises to deal with all that too.

Getting back into the original deal “is the floor and not the ceiling” for the Biden administration on Iran, said the person familiar with the incoming administration’s thinking on it. “It doesn’t stop there.”

“In an ideal world, it would be great to have a comprehensive agreement” at the outset, said Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “But that’s not how these negotiations work.”

In this photo released January 16, 2021, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, missiles are launched in a drill in Iran. (Iranian Revolutionary Guard/Sepahnews via AP)

Connolly said he thought there was broad support in Congress for getting back into the deal.

Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser for the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who worked as an Iran adviser for the Trump administration in 2019 and this year, questioned that.

Lawmakers in Congress will balk at lifting sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and other Iranian players that the US and other countries regard as supporters of terrorism, and balk, too, at giving up on financial pressure meant to block Iran from moving closer to nuclear weapons, Goldberg predicts.

“This is a real wedge inside the Democratic Party,” Goldberg said.

Sanctions by Trump, who pulled the US out of the accord in 2018, mean that Iran’s leaders are under heavier economic and political pressure at home, just as Biden is. The United States’ European allies will be eager to help Biden wrack up a win on the new Iran talks if possible, Nasr said. Even among many non-US allies, “they don’t want the return of Trump or Trumpism.”

Biden served as Obama’s main promoter of the 2015 accord with lawmakers, once the deal was brokered. He talked for hours to skeptics in Congress and at a Jewish community center in Florida. Then, Biden hammered home Obama’s pledge that America ultimately would do everything in its power to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons, if diplomacy failed.

Then-US vice president Joe Biden, left, watches then-US president Barack Obama, center, at Conmy Hall, Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Virginia, on January 4, 2017. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh/File)

Besides tapping Sherman for his administration, Biden has called back William Burns, who led secret early talks with Iran in Oman, as his CIA director. He also selected Iran negotiators Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan as his intended secretary of state and national security adviser respectively, among other 2015 Iran players.

It is not yet clear whether Biden will employ Sherman as his principal diplomatic manager with Iran, or someone else, or whether he will designate a main Iran envoy. Sherman was also instrumental in US negotiations with North Korea.

The implicit threat of military action by the Obama’s administration against Iran if it kept moving toward a weapons-capable nuclear program might be less convincing than it did five years ago, given the US domestic crises.

A new Middle East conflict would only make it harder for Biden to find the time and money to deal with pressing problems at home, including his planned $2 trillion effort to cut climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions.

“If war with Iran became inevitable, it would upend everything else he’s trying to do with his presidency,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran and US Middle East policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Biden and his team are very mindful of this. Their priorities are domestic.”

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