Prospect of a nuclear deal with Iran grows dimmer

The prospect of reviving the Iran nuclear deal has grown dimmer based on the latest developments. The White House recently announced that it was imposing new sanctions on an Iranian oil smuggling and money laundering network comprising 10 individuals and nine companies in several different countries. US officials specifically alleged that the network’s operations were directed by the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Insofar as they target the IRGC, the new sanctions are arguably among the strongest indicators so far that the administration of President Joe Biden intends to maintain or expand upon all existing pressure. The administration has previously faced criticism from various foreign allies and US lawmakers, including some from the president’s own political party, for declining to rule out the prospect of removing the IRGC from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.
This month, Canada also canceled a planned friendly soccer match with the Iranian national team after a torrent of public criticism. Critics claimed that Tehran should be held accountable for the IRGC shooting down a passenger airliner in January 2020, which killed all 176 passengers aboard the plane, 90 of whom were Canadian citizens and residents.
The Iranian regime has imposed the demand for the delisting of the IRGC during negotiations in Vienna which aim to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Tehran seemed to dig its heels in even further in March, after the negotiations were paused as a result of Russian demands that new sanctions on Moscow would not interfere with the prospective expansion of Russian trade relations with Iran. Russian officials later said vaguely that they had received the requested assurances, but the same pause persists to this day, with Iranian negotiators saying they will only return to Vienna to sign an agreement that reflects American capitulation to the demand for delisting the IRGC.
The prospect of that has grown dimmer since then, and it seems that the Vienna negotiations and the JCPOA are effectively dead, though participating governments still refuse to accept them as such. Nevertheless, some American and European officials have shed their former optimism in recent weeks and months and have begun to acknowledge that it is very unlikely, albeit not impossible, that the current impasse will be overcome.
This trend was once again evident when Rob Malley, the State Department’s special envoy for Iran, appeared before a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and faced questions from lawmakers whose skepticism about a nuclear deal has been a matter of public record for months, if not years. Sen. Bob Menendez, the Democratic chair of that committee, declared it an “increasingly obvious reality” that there is no imminent return to a deal he considers “not in the US strategic interests.” Malley himself stated that the prospect of re-implementing the JCPOA was “tenuous” and that the Biden administration was actively preparing for a situation in which the Vienna talks fail and the agreement is finally declared dead.

The Vienna negotiations and the JCPOA are effectively dead, though participating governments still refuse to accept them as such.

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

In addition, the latest assessments from the International Atomic Energy Agency indicate that Iran has stockpiled 90 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent, while still refusing to cooperate with inquiries into the origin and status of the nuclear material that was found to have been present at three undeclared nuclear sites, including the Parchin military base. That base returned to international headlines last week when it was reported that an “accident” at a defense research unit had caused the death of an engineer.
The incident is likely to raise new questions among Western policymakers about the nature of military projects currently being pursued inside the country, as well as the limitations that would be imposed on monitoring of those projects even if the JCPOA were re-implemented. Regarding the newly announced sanctions, Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh emphasized the regime’s intention to continue expanding its activities in the region. Much of Tehran’s influence is through Shiite militant proxies that the IRGC helps to establish and finance in places such as Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Tehran has a long history of portraying all US sanctions as aggression against the Iranian people, despite the fact that there are carve-outs in those sanctions for trade in humanitarian goods such as essential foodstuff and medicine.
The regime’s narrative has seemingly been rejected by the public during a number of recent anti-government uprisings, one of which has been going on since food prices jumped by as much as 400 percent in early May. Among the slogans which define those uprisings is a chant that says the enemies of the Iranian people are inside the clerical regime and that “they are lying when they say it is America.”
The National Council of Resistance of Iran, the leading opposition group, has openly embraced the notion of expanded sanctions on the Iranian regime, arguing that an influx of foreign capital to the country would not reach the general public anyway.
Indeed, the prospect of reaching a nuclear deal with the Iranian regime has grown dimmer.

• Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a Harvard-educated Iranian-American political scientist.
Twitter: @Dr_Rafizadeh