'Maximum Pressure' Against Iran Has Failed. What Will Biden Do Next?

 

moon of  alabama  

A week ago I wrote about Biden's failing foreign policy. With regards to the nuclear agreement (JCPOA) with Iran I remarked:

During his campaign Biden had promised to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran. But no action has followed. Talks with Tehran started too late and were filled with new demands that Iran can not accept without diminishing is military defenses.

The arrogance of the Biden administration is at full display in its believe that it can dictate the terms to Tehran:
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It is not Iran that left the UN endorsed JCPOA deal. It was the U.S. which went back on it and re-introduced a 'maximum pressure' sanctions campaign against Iran. Iran has said it is willing to again reduce its nuclear program to the limits of the JCPOA deal if the U.S. removes all sanctions. It is the Biden administration that is unwilling to do so while making new demands. That is obviously not going to work.
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If the U.S. does not come back into the JCPOA deal, without any further conditions, Iran will eventually leave the deal and proceed with its nuclear program as it wants. That would be an utter failure of Biden's hardline tactics. One wonders what the Biden administration has planned to do when that happens.

The Biden administration thinks it can tighten sanctions on China's oil business with Iran:

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was expected to discuss the prospect of tightening U.S. sanctions on Chinese entities importing Iranian oil when she met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and other officials in Tianjin, China on Monday (July 26), should agreement on a return to the nuclear pact not be able to be reached.

“We have been hoping, we could lift sanctions,” on Iran’s energy and banking sectors, including on Chinese entities purchasing Iranian oil, if the U.S. and Iran could agree on a mutual return to the nuclear deal, the US diplomat said. But “if there is no return to JCPOA…and if we are settling in for a long period of no return to JCPOA,” we will first look at our sanctions enforcement policy, he said.

But this is no longer 2012. Back then China and Russia agreed with the U.S. to put pressure on Iran. That pressure led to the nuclear deal. But today the situation is much different. It was the U.S. that left the deal. Iran, China and Russia are all in a stronger position than they were a decade ago. Why would the later two agree to support Biden's malign foreign policy and unilateral U.S. sanctions against Iran?

The former Indian ambassador M.K.Bhadrakumar draws a similar picture:

[T]he US negotiators drove a hard bargain in Vienna. They underestimated Iran’s grit to secure its core interests. They assumed that given Iran’s economic difficulties, it would bend over backward to get the sanctions lifted. And they began dictating terms and conditions.
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Khamenei, who has the last word on Iran’s state matters, declared last Wednesday that Tehran would not accept Washington’s “stubborn” demands in nuclear talks and again flatly rejected the insertion of any other issues to the deal.
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Having weathered the brunt of Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’, Tehran is in a better situation today. The international situation works in its favour too. Iran has gained strategic depth in the deepening partnership with Russia and China. It is neither possible now to ‘isolate’ Iran nor prudent to exercise the military option against it.

The former British diplomat Alastair Crooke agrees with that view:

The recent accounting of obstacles on the negotiation track listed by Iran’s envoy to the IAEA indeed seems a daunting catalogue of moveable U.S. and EU goalpost: From the original ‘no uranium enrichment’ doctrine; then to a ‘breakout’ horizon of less than one year; and now to that same threshold demand, plus the instance on assurances that Iran will immediately enter into regional and missile talks with the U.S., with any return to JCPOA.

A full post-mortem of the errors leading to this point must await the future. But, for now, U.S. officials insist that it is Iran that misreads its situation; but equally, it may be argued that the U.S. has misread how much the strategic situation in the region – and indeed the world – has changed; and the extent to which the mood of the Iranian people has shifted towards the Principal-ists’ viewpoint, over the period of the last four years.
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Is then, the U.S. threat of an international consensus against Iran – similar to that of 2012 – more plausible? Consensus …?
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Hasn’t Washington noticed that there isn’t one: not even for Washington’s aspiration to stop Russia from bringing its gas to Europe, via Nordstream 2? Haven’t they noticed the fracture in global politics? Yes, Europe is spineless, and will go with U.S., come what may, but that does not amount to a global consensus.

The U.S. attempt to press Iran into a stricter agreement than the nuclear deal Iran had agreed to and the U.S. abandoned has failed.

If the Biden administration does not pull back on its demands, the nuclear deal with Iran will be dead. Domestic pressure to 'do something' about Iran's growing nuclear technology will then increase.

But there is no global consensus to sanction Iran. Russia and China will resist any pressure to support them and Iran will have no reason to change its ways. Nor is there a military option. Iran has serious weapons that can reach any corner in the Middle East.

The Biden administration has driven its Iran policy into a blind alley. The wall in front of it is solid. But how will it reverse to get out?

Posted by b on August 4, 2021 at 18:13 UTC | Permalink

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