Trump’s antagonism towards Iran means making a new deal won’t be easy for Biden if he wins the presidency

If Democrats want to avoid the potentially catastrophic armed conflict towards which US-Iran hostilities are drifting, they need to create a strategy now, writes Borzou Daragahi

Joe Biden will look to change US foreign policy if he makes it to the White House (Getty)

Iran has become a big sore spot in US politics, with Donald Trump’s antagonism towards Tehran pushing the two countries further and further apart.

According to Joe Biden’s election platform, the Democratic nominee would seek to drastically dial down tensions with Iran should he capture the presidency, in a return to one of the issues that helped define the tenure of Barack Obama, who had Biden as his vice-president.

But would Iran be willing to come back to the negotiating table? Just four or five months after a new Democratic administration would take office if Biden wins, Iran is due to hold its own presidential elections that could establish a hardline administration in Tehran in no mood to talk with the US about much of anything.

The Democrats’ proposal calls for an “urgent” return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 nuclear deal that has been torpedoed by Trump. The draft describes the JCPOA as “the best means to verifiably cut off all of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear bomb” and criticises the current policy of “maximum pressure” against Iran, which has led to it ramping up its nuclear programme as the US has tightened sanctions.

“The Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA isolated us from our allies and opened the door for Iran to resume its march toward a nuclear weapons capacity that the JCPOA had stopped,” the draft says. “That’s why returning to mutual compliance with the agreement is so urgent.”

However, the proposal also sketches more ambitious diplomacy on Iran, building on the JCPOA to address other matters of concern – including Iran’s missile programme, its human rights record, and its support for armed militants in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.

The aim of the renewed diplomacy, according to the Democratic draft, is to end America’s useless and costly foreign military entanglements.

A Biden administration would face several obstacles to returning to the JCPOA. Even before the Iranian election, which has yet to be given a date but is expected in May or June of 2021, things could careen off the rails, especially during the 11 weeks between election day and the inauguration. In the transition period between the administrations of George W Bush and Obama in 2009, Israel launched a ground invasion of Gaza that set the tone for much of the eight ensuing years.

A mysterious spate of industrial accidents and fires throughout Iran have raised suspicions of a covert US or Israeli effort to set back Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes and possibly goad Tehran into a reckless overreaction, radically changing any prospect for diplomacy. When asked about one such fire, the Israeli defence minister, Benny Gantz, said: “Not every incident that transpires in Iran necessarily has something to do with us.”

Whether or not Biden is elected, Iran may decide it needs leverage ahead of any potential negotiations. It may decide to seize more boats in the Persian Gulf or allow the militias it backs in Iraq to launch missiles towards US forces to increase the pressure on Washington.

“A lot can go wrong,” says Ariane Tabatabai, a Middle East scholar at the German Marshall Fund and at Columbia University. “Even starting in November, things may get racy. You’re already seeing explosions and fires throughout the country that look like they’re part of a large coordinated operation.”

A rare alignment of politics and diplomacy – relative moderates firmly in power in Tehran and a White House open to allowing Iran to continue to some level of uranium enrichment – set the stage for the landmark 2015 nuclear deal, a non-starter under Republican administrations captured by Washington special interests. Iran’s foreign minister Mohamed Javad Zarif and Obama’s second-term secretary of state, John Kerry, had a good rapport. A similar arrangement may be difficult to concoct.

The well-funded “regime change” crowd in Washington has become noisy and emboldened, with leaked emails suggesting coordination of its strategy with powerful Arabian peninsula monarchs. There are also signs of a rapprochement with the Democratic Party establishment.

On the other hand, by the time 2021 rolls around, Republicans may be so humiliated, the clique of hardline hawks who enabled Trump so discredited and Americans so exhausted after a year of politics, economic crisis and the pandemic, that Biden’s team could possibly be able to ram through whatever it wants on foreign policy.

“A President Biden would be able to do a lot more than a typical Democratic president after a Republican president,” says Tabatabai

Iran itself will be exhausted. It is suffering through the worst coronavirus outbreak in the Middle East. Widespread anger over corruption, mismanagement and repression, and several years of US sanctions that have crippled the civilian economy, threaten the regime. It can easily reverse its decisions to downgrade adherence to the nuclear deal as soon as US sanctions are repealed.

But details of a return to compliance with the nuclear deal will be key. With a stroke of a pen, Biden can remove all the sanctions that Trump has imposed on Iran since 8 May 2018 and bring the US back into compliance with the nuclear deal. Some say he should move quickly, even act on 20 January.

“Each passing day will make it harder to re-enter the deal, as political capital dwindles and opposition hardens,” wrote Edoardo Saravalle, a former US Senate researcher, in Foreign Policy last year. “US wavering in January will suggest that the new administration does not actually want to rejoin, boosting Iranian politicians sceptical of diplomacy.”

Other US foreign-policy hands disagree, however. They suggest that America conditions a return to compliance with the JCPOA with a quick Iranian rollback of its nuclear advances that are in breach of the deal. Still others argue any new administration should use the “leverage” that Trump has built up to demand talks on regional issues and other matters first.

“There is not really a consensus in this city and among Democrats,” says Tabatabai. “We know Biden wants to return to the JCPOA and build on the JCPOA. The order at which that would happen has not been decided.”

The draft Democratic Party platform says JCPOA “was always meant to be the beginning, not the end, of our diplomacy with Iran”.

The biggest impediment to any deal with Iran may be the return of a hardline administration in Tehran, like the one that boosted Iran’s nuclear programme and wasted the time of diplomats under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Quickly restoring the pre-Trump status quo ante with Iran could actually bolster the credibility of Iran’s moderates and help them in the late spring 2021 vote.

If Democrats want to avoid the potentially catastrophic armed conflict towards which US-Iran hostilities are drifting, their foreign policy figures need to start thinking about and drawing up an Iran strategy, not just after the 3 November vote or the 20 January inauguration but right away.