Deal or no deal? These 5 leaders will decide.
For the diplomats who have been stuck in a room trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program, it’s crunch time. After seventeen months of high-fraught, nail-biting negotiations that included an interim agreement and several extensions, P5+1 and Iranian negotiators are roughly four weeks away from a late March deadline that they themselves set for a comprehensive agreement. If all goes according to plan, the world will know by April 1 how many centrifuges Tehran will be allowed to keep; how large Iran’s uranium-enrichment stockpile will be; how quickly U.S. and international sanctions will be lifted; how frequently verification and monitoring will happen and how long the verification regime will last.
All of these issues have ruined negotiations in the past, and there is nothing guaranteeing that the same problems won’t ruin them today. Indeed, based on public reports that have leaked out of the negotiating room, Tehran is looking to retain a far greater number of centrifuges than the P5+1 is willing to allow. The fact that two six-month extensions have already been used exemplifies just how complicated these negotiations have been.
If Iran and the P5+1 are unable to come to a compromise by the upcoming deadline, there’s a high probability that the talks will be break into a million tiny pieces. President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have all declared that a third extension would not be useful. “[T]he issues now are sufficiently narrowed and sufficiently clarified where we’re at point where they [the Iranians] need to make a decision,” President Obama said in a joint press conference with German chancellor Angela Merkel.
In other words, there will be no more extensions. The fate of the Iran nuclear talks—a year and a half in the making—rests on the next several weeks. And, it rests on the actions and decisions that the following people will make.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
If Iran’s top decision maker on foreign- and national-security policy wants the nuclear talks to succeed, they will likely succeed. But, if he refuses to authorize the types of nuclear concessions that need to be made, all of Javad Zarif’s work will be for naught.
As the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei holds the most important post in Iran’s political system. Therefore, his comments on the ongoing nuclear negotiations are especially important. No agreement can be officially signed into the history books without Khamenei’s go-ahead, and there’s history to prove it. In the fall of 2009, then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad agreed in principle to ship all of Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium to a third country for conversion into fuel for Tehran’s nuclear reactor. Yet, when Ahmadinejad came back to Iran with the proposal, Khamenei nixed the concept, in part due to the vocal objections of hardliners in the Iranian parliament.
Khamenei has kept his cards close to his chest throughout the talks in Vienna, a reality that has raised more questions than answers as to what the Supreme Leader really thinks about the venture. In July 2014, Khamenei stated that Iran would eventually need a capacity of 190,000 centrifuges for an industrial-size nuclear program for the country. Yet seven months later, he commented to Iranian media that he would “go along with any agreement that could be made,” as long as it served Iran’s national interest.
It’s simple: if Khamenei accepts the terms that are struck in Vienna, Iran and the United States will have made history. If he doesn’t, the standoff could get a lot worse.
Bob Corker
As the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker holds perhaps the most weighty position in the U.S. Congress as far as Iran’s nuclear talks are concerned. Although members of Congress don’t have a place at the negotiating table in Geneva, lawmakers like Sen. Corker have consistently pressed the White House and the State Department to provide as few concessions to the Iranians as possible. The Congress—Republicans and Democrats alike—takes President Obama’s “no deal is better than a bad deal” mantra incredibly seriously, and Senator Corker is often the one leading the charge.
Keeping the administration on its toes on foreign policy in general is something that Senator Corker considers his duty as chairman of a critical Senate committee. This is especially the case with Iran; Corker introduced a bill last year that would force President Obama to submit any permanent nuclear agreement struck with the Iranians to Congress for review and a vote of approval or disapproval. Days before Netanyahu’s address to Congress, Corker introduced his latest iteration of the legislation—a lengthy bill that would mandate the administration to provide a series of reports to Congress on Iran’s compliance with a deal, and a mechanism that would provide the House and Senate with the means to register its approval or disapproval. Reclaiming Congress’ role in the development of U.S. foreign policy has been a prime agenda item for the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, so it’s not at all surprising that Corker is seeking to ensure that the legislative branch gets a say on a critical national-security priority.
How Iran takes a possible vote on Corker’s legislation is anyone’s guess. Iranian officials who are already wary or outright opposed to the negotiations will view the bill as a clever way for Congress to scuttle any agreement that is reached. But will Iran’s negotiators—and more importantly, the Supreme Leader—view it in the same way?
Catherine Ashton
She may have left her post as the European Union’s High Representative on Foreign Affairs, but Catherine Ashton has kept her job as Europe’s coordinator on the Iran nuclear talks. A diplomat who was largely unknown outside of select European circles in 2009 has turned into a critical force multiplier for the negotiations over the past two years—and it’s Ashton who has the responsibility of keeping the broader P5+1 coalition united behind a common position.
A Haaretz profile of Ashton and a separate profile in Foreign Policy magazine credited her with keeping Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif in the room during an intense period before the JPOA was signed. But her role is far more important than persuading negotiators to keep negotiating; as the top official in the European Union on the Iran nuclear file, Ashton is responsible for keeping the entire diplomatic coalition informed. Ashton talks with the key players in the room, makes sure that Europe’s interests are communicated clearly and keeps the European Union updated through briefings.
If Iran and the P5+1 do eventually get to a stage where a comprehensive deal is signed, Ashton will rightly be given part of the credit for keeping the multilateral coalition together. For if France, Great Britain and Germany had been divided on the negotiating strategy, the talks would have long ago deteriorated into a shouting match with three or four separate positions, not including Iran’s own. Because of Ashton, we have only two positions: one from Iran, and the other from the P5+1 coalition.
Benjamin Netanyahu
If Barack Obama and John Kerry are the open-minded diplomats trying to find a way out of the Iranian nuclear conflict, Israel’s prime minister is the bull who has been doing everything in his power to ensure that Iran’s nuclear capability is limited to the most minimalist extent possible. From his infamous cartoon bomb at the United Nations General Assembly in 2012 to allegations last week that his office was selectively leaking details of the negotiations to the news media, the prime minister’s views regarding the Iran-P5+1 negotiations have been crystal clear: Tehran is too dangerous and unpredictable to possess even a small uranium-enrichment program.
It is no secret that the Obama administration has been frustrated with what the president’s national-security advisers view as Netanyahu’s bellicose and unhelpful rhetoric. “Chickenshit” and “insulting” are just too of the adjectives that administration officials have used to describe Netanyahu (and his actions) over the past six months, both of which have caused extensive strains in the Obama-Netanyahu relationship. But for Netanyahu, the strains will be worth it if they result in an agreement that forces Tehran to capitulate far more than the United States and its partners are willing to give in exchange.
“At the end of the week, Kerry and [Iranian Foreign Minister] Zarif announced their intention to complete the framework agreement by the end of March, and that is what gives rise to the urgency in our efforts to try and halt this bad and dangerous agreement,” Netanyahu said before a February 8 cabinet meeting of his national-security and defense advisers. “We will continue to act and to lead the international efforts against the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons and we will act in every way to foil the bad and dangerous agreement that would cast a heavy cloud over the future of Israel.”
That single quote pretty much sums up Netanyahu’s position on Iran since he became Israel’s prime minister for the second time in 2009.
President Barack Obama
It goes without saying that the leader of the free world would be a make-or-break figure in the Iranian nuclear negotiations. But it’s a bit different for President Obama, a man who sees the Iran nuclear file in personal terms.
Almost immediately after his 2009 inauguration, he reached out to Ayatollah Khamenei with a series of secret letters broaching the subject of a new, more constructive relationship. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, Khamenei and his staff answered at least one of those letters with a secret letter of their own. Given that the letters are classified, we don’t know what was (or wasn’t) said. Yet the fact that Khamenei bothered to reply to them at all was a sliver of hope that the Iranians were at least open to Obama’s overtures.
President Obama has defended the talks with Iran every step of the way. Although Obama pulled back from discussions in 2010 and 2011 and opted instead for a more rigorous package of economic sanctions (which Congress was eager to pass), the move was designed to convince Tehran that coming back to the negotiating table and engaging seriously with the United States, Europe, China and Russia was a better option than waiting out the economic pain.
If the P5+1 does reach an agreement with Tehran in late March, it will be President Obama’s job to speak directly to the American people, to skeptical if not hostile members of Congress and to Washington’s friends and allies in Israel and the Arab world about how the accord keeps Iran in check and why it’s a better alternative than the use of military force. Only a president who promised to “unclench” the fist of America’s historical adversaries during his first campaign can play the role of lobbyist-in-chief.
Daniel R. DePetris is an analyst at Wikistrat, Inc., a geostrategic consulting firm, and a freelance researcher. He has also written for CNN.com, Small Wars Journal and The Diplomat. You can follow him on Twitter: @DanDePetris.
No comments:
Post a Comment