There Are No Good Deals With Iran

Last week, Iran transferred four dual U.S.-Iranian nationals wrongly incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin Prison to house arrest. The transfer is reportedly the first step in a sequence that will ultimately secure the freedom of five U.S. citizens. In exchange, Iran will be able to tap into nearly $6 billion of its existing frozen assets for carefully monitored expenditures on food and medicine.

Not surprisingly, the reaction from critics who tend to see the Islamic Republic as Satan’s finger on earth has been predictable. U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton called the deal “ransom” and “a craven act of appeasement.” Sen. Jim Risch opined that it would provide “a windfall for regime aggression.”

Perhaps. But let’s not forget that five Americans will be freed, some of whom have been unjustly imprisoned for years, and that Iran won’t have direct access to its funds, which will be strictly monitored for humanitarian purchases only. To critics of the arrangement, of course, there’s no getting around the fact that money is fungible and will free up funds that Iran can use for nefarious purposes. If they had their druthers, the only U.S. interaction with the Iranian regime would be to apply more pressure.

And there may be more not to like. Separate from the hostage release, U.S. officials have been working to establish a set of informal, unwritten understandings with Iran designed to deescalate tensions, especially on issues such as uranium enrichment, and perhaps at some point to return to a more formal agreement like the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

But here’s the bottom line: There are no good deals with Iran, only bad and worse ones. For a U.S. administration with a plate full of headaches—from Ukraine and Russia to China—and a presidential reelection campaign to run, trying to preempt a serious crisis over Iran’s nuclear program is the smart and responsible play. The last thing the Biden administration needs is a Middle East crisis over an uncontrolled Iranian nuclear program that’s enriching uranium at weapons-grade levels.

Indeed, if its strategy and luck hold (and no one should underestimate the possibility of some Iranian or Israeli provocation that might trigger a blow-up), the Biden administration might be able to manage the Iran file until after the next presidential election, when more options might become available.

But let’s face it: The U.S. is dealing with an authoritarian, repressive regime that imprisons, tortures, and kills its own citizens; seeks major influence in at least four Arab capitals (Beirut, Lebanon; Damascus, Syria; Sanaa, Yemen; and Baghdad, Iraq); supports attacks against U.S. forces; and is now playing a major role in supporting Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

And then there’s the nuclear issue. To put it simply, the United States has a strategic problem with Iran but lacks a strategic solution. All of Washington’s efforts—from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement to the latest effort at de-escalation through a set of understandings—are transactional, not transformational; interim, not final; and compartmentalized, not comprehensive. And all diplomatic efforts are constrained by U.S. and Iranian domestic politics, which severely define the limits of what’s possible.

Iran is now a nuclear weapons threshold state—that is to say, it has the capacity to develop all the elements required to make a bomb, including the ability to produce enough fissile material at weapons-grade level for at least two nuclear weapons. That doesn’t mean Iran is well on its way to weaponizing or has even decided to do so. But Iran has the knowledge, technology, and resources to weaponize, according to some, within two years.

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The only way to guarantee that Iran never acquires nuclear weapons would be a change in the regime to one that has no need or desire to acquire these weapons, is much less adversarial to the West, and is more integrated into the region and not focused on spreading its revolutionary ideology abroad. Frankly, that’s hard to imagine anytime soon, or perhaps at all. The most likely successor to the current regime, dominated by a supreme leader, would be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-controlled government that might be much more risk-ready when it comes to weaponizing. And in any event, it’s beyond Washington’s capacity to determine who governs Iran. That should rightly remain in the hands of the Iranian people.

Short of a change in regime, all available options including diplomacy and economic and political pressure produce only temporary fixes. Even the use of military force might at best delay Iran’s program—and according to Tamir Hayman, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, force could even accelerate Iran’s desire for a bomb.

A strong case can be made for pursuing an approach based on deterrence: sustained economic sanctions and political pressure as well as the preparation of a credible military option, accompanied by both private and public warnings that the United States would be prepared to strike if certain enrichment or weaponization redlines are crossed. But Iran would still be left “a screwdriver’s turn away” from a nuclear weapon. And without some diplomatic track to determine whether Iran’s nuclear program might be constrained by a formal agreement, it might only be a matter of time before regional tensions lead to a conflict.

Indeed, Israel and Iran have been engaged in a dangerous game of strike and counterstrike on the air, land, sea, and cyber fronts encompassing Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf for years. And Israel’s threshold for military action, especially when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program, is far lower than the United States’.

On the Iranian side, the understandings reported in the press include capping enrichment at 60 percent, ending proxy attacks on U.S. forces in Syria, and not transferring ballistic missiles to Russia. On the U.S. side (presumably with the Europeans in tow), they include not tightening sanctions, not seizing oil bearing tankers, and not seeking punitive resolutions against Iran at the United Nations or International Atomic Energy Agency.

Having been in and around Middle Eastern negotiations for nearly 20 years, I believe two observations are in order. First, whatever the press is reporting is not necessarily the whole story of what has been or will be agreed. Second is the issue of what’s written down and what’s not. To avoid triggering the U.S. Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) of 2015—which obligates an administration to submit to Congress within five days any nuclear agreement reached with Iran as well as a detailed verification assessment report and certification for a specified review period—the Biden administration is not negotiating a formal written accord with Iran.

Rather, it is seeking what appears to be a series of mutually agreed but unwritten understandings to be implemented unilaterally, perhaps with some degree of coordination. Some of these are apparently already being implemented: The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Iran has “significantly slowed the pace at which it is accumulating near-weapons-grade enriched uranium and has diluted some of its stockpile.”

The process gets even fuzzier, though, because much of what’s being reported wouldn’t require either side to implement anything, just to exercise restraint and not take certain actions. The release of U.S.-Iranian dual nationals of course—on separate track but clearly very much a part of this orchestration—falls into a different category. Those arrangements would need to be formalized and carefully monitored. The last thing the Biden administration needs in the wake of an already controversial deal—freedom for imprisoned U.S. citizens in return for Iran’s tapping into $6 billion in oil revenue—would be for Iran to take some provocative action, such as enriching uranium to 90 percent (weapons-grade level).

Still, as the old aphorism frequently attributed to the great Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn has it, “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” Let’s hope Goldwyn’s wrong.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has gone to great lengths to assert that the administration is not seeking a nuclear agreement with Iran, and just last week he maintained that the recent efforts to free U.S. citizens will not provide Iran with sanctions relief.

But whatever their terms, even informal understandings are going to be received in Congress and in Israel with a range of reactions from skepticism to open hostility. Not one to miss a beat when it comes to Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the agreement as providing money to terror groups under Iran’s auspices.

U.S. House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul sent a letter to President Joe Biden on June 15 urging the administration to remember that, in McCaul’s reading, U.S. law requires any agreement, understanding, or arrangement, “even informal,” with Iran to be submitted to Congress and that “any continued obstruction will rob the American people, and in particular Gold Star families whose loved ones were killed by Iran-backed terrorism, of answers about why the United States is facilitating the lining of Iran’s coffers.” Sen. Lindsay Graham said it was “insane” to put billions of dollars on the table.

Not all Democrats enthusiastically support negotiating with Iran, either. Sen. Tim Kaine questioned how an Iran cracking down on its own citizens could have credibility to deliver a deal. And joined by Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez and Richard Blumenthal, Graham introduced legislation that would require the director of national intelligence to notify Congress within 48 hours of Iran producing or possessing uranium of greater than 60 percent purity.

So what’s the benefit? The advantage lies almost exclusively in the assessment and calculation of risk. Since then-President Donald Trump’s 2018 JCPOA withdrawal, we have been living in what the International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez calls a “no deal, no crisis” environment. There have been plenty of tensions—including the U.S. killing of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani; attacks by pro-Iran militias against U.S. forces and contractors in Iraq and Syria; maritime tit-for-tats in the Persian Gulf; and scores of Israeli strikes against Iranian assets in Syria—but no major clash over Iran’s nuclear program.

If you believe that Iran and Israel will go to considerable lengths to avoid an escalation that might lead to a serious confrontation, then you might conclude that no understandings, written or otherwise, are necessary and that there’s no advantage to making any deals with Iran.

If, alternatively, you were sitting in Washington with a full foreign-policy agenda, trying to avoid potential entanglements and distractions from the challenges you’re already struggling to manage, you’d probably see things differently. You would want to work proactively to keep as many issues as possible off your plate, especially ones that could, without much imagination, easily produce a Middle East conflict involving U.S. military action. And you’d want to do everything in your power to bring home Americans who have been cruelly imprisoned for years by Iran. At the same time, you would have just deployed thousands of U.S. troops to the Gulf region, offered to put U.S. Marines on commercial vessels threatened by Iran, and added hundreds of new sanctions against Iran during your time in office.

Biden’s approach to Iran isn’t bold or pretty. It can’t begin to strategically address the United States’ Iran problem; it has downsides; and it’s going to bring on a good deal of heat from Republicans. But in the cruel and unforgiving world of dealing with Iran, where options run from bad to worse, it’s hard to imagine coming up with a better alternative.