Iran
narrows gaps between two
talks By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts - The first round
of scheduled nuclear negotiations between Iranian
officials and the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) in 2013 ended in Tehran on January
17. At first, the results appeared inconclusive;
now it is emerging that Iran has moved an
important chess piece forward.
On the day
after the talks, Iran's representative described
the two days of intensive and technical talks
between Iran and the IAEA as "progressive", while
Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi took the
opportunity to remind the West that no date or
venue has been set for the next round of
negotiations with the "P5 +1" nations (the UN
Security Council's five permanent members plus
Germany).
It's becoming clear that the
fate of the IAEA talks, which revolve around
reaching a new "modality for cooperation" whereby the
atomic agency's inspectors
would be allowed to visit suspected sites such as
the one at the Parchin military complex, is now
being directly linked by Tehran to broader
multilateral negotiations between Iran and the
P5+1.
"Imagine a situation where [Iran's
nuclear negotiator Saeed] Jalili tells the other
side 'look, we're ready to sign a deal with the
IAEA but what do you have to offer us to go
through with it'," said a Tehran University
political science professor who spoke to the
author on condition of anonymity. "Even the IAEA
is now clear that without a deal with the P5+1
there will be no deal with them." On Tuesday,
it was confirmed that the next round of IAEA-Iran
negotiations will now take place on February 13.
As of writing, the venue had not yet been
determined. The last round of negotiations between
Iran and the P5+1 was held in Moscow in June 2012.
It seems Iran is making use of the IAEA
card in its game of leverage with the West.
However, as the United States and its allies are
not offering a package that would reciprocate any
concession, Tehran must also maintain the threat
that it could reduce its cooperation with the
IAEA, thus increasing Western fears about the
nature of Iran's nuclear activities.
Playing with two hands in a delicate game
of nuclear poker", Tehran is conjoining the
"positive cooperation" with the negative
withdrawal, even though on the whole it is still
committed to its safeguard agreement with the IAEA
"as long as the Western exemptions to the oil
embargo continue", to paraphrase the Tehran
professor.
Some 20 countries are exempted
from the embargo, as a result of which Iran's oil
exports continue, albeit at a reduced level, to
keep the country from submitting to the "crippling
sanctions". This could change almost overnight if
a few months from now the Barack Obama
administration decides to end the exemptions and
thus tighten the screws on Iran, which would be
tantamount to a declaration of economic warfare.
As long as those exemptions continue and the
petrodollars keeping coming to Iran to cover the
government's budgetary priorities, Iran is apt to
survive the sanctions indefinitely.
According to a number of Tehran policy
experts, Washington is well aware that if it
escalated the pressure by ending the oil
exemptions, Iran may react by ending its
cooperation with the IAEA, which serves as the
eyes and ears of the outside world with respect to
Iran's controversial nuclear fuel cycle.
In such a "nightmare scenario", the
outside world would have no way of ascertaining
whether Iran's uranium enrichment had exceeded the
current 20% ceiling and reached the
"weaponization" level of 90% or higher.
The US and its allies (including Israel)
would be wise to ponder such a future scenario,
which would represent a major deterioration of the
Iran nuclear standoff and exponentially increase
the scope of their fears of an Iranian bomb.
Given the huge regional and international
costs associated with the military option, the US
and its Western allies would be wise to unlock the
diplomatic chest that has hitherto offered
precious little to the Iranians, an issue even
recognized by a growing number of Iran experts in
the US.
With the US foreign policy team in
transition, the next round of multilateral talks
may be too soon to culminate in a real deal. That
may have to wait until Obama's new secretaries of
state and defense, as well as Central Intelligence
Agency head, are confirmed by the US Congress and
have had time to settle in their positions and
formulate a sound Iran policy. Yet, the problem
with any further delay in Iran nuclear deal-making
is that it would need to reckon with another
political transition - in Iran, in light of the
upcoming June presidential elections.
The
latter is not such an insurmountable problem, as
the nuclear file is in the hands of the country's
Supreme National Security Council, headed by
Jalili, who is also the Supreme Leader's
representative. In other words, the Iranian
election timeline does not pose too much of a
problem in terms of the ability of Iranian
negotiators to strike a deal, if the conditions
are right.
There is a "ripening" process
already under way, reflected in the Iran-IAEA
talks, which as stated above present a real
opportunity to achieve a breakthrough that would,
in turn, alleviate the external concerns about
Iran's nuclear "intentions". This is a fragile
process that has moved an inch or two forward as a
result of the January 16-17 Iran-IAEA talks, to
the point that it is no longer possible for the
Western representatives to feign ignorance of the
direct linkage between the two talks.
This
was also the case at last May's talks in Baghdad
between Iran and the Western powers, when the
European Union officials denied that the two
tracks had any relations with each other. On the
contrary, Iran has now fairly clearly established
the error of making such an assumption, by hurling
the issue of its future cooperation with the IAEA
on the agenda of the next round of multilateral
talks.
It is too premature to say whether
Iran's nuclear game will yield final results; for
now, however, it is clear that on the tactical
level it already has. The relationship between
tactic and strategy is, however, always determined
in part by the other side's counter-moves. So, as
Obama settles in after being sworn into office for
a second term on Monday, it will be interesting to
see how his administration responds to Iran's
chess move.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is
the author of After Khomeini: New Directions
in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For
his Wikipedia entry, click
here. He is author of Reading In Iran
Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge
Publishing , October 23, 2008) and Looking for
Rights at Harvard. His latest book is UN
Management Reform: Selected Articles and
Interviews on United Nations CreateSpace
(November 12, 2011).
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