BY MICHAEL HIRSH
U.S. President Joe Biden is intent on restoring the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, and with talks resuming in Vienna on Thursday after a weeklong break, his chief negotiator, Robert Malley, is beginning to develop a road map on how to get there.
According to sources close to European and U.S. negotiators, Malley is expected to offer Tehran a Goldilocks-style deal: just enough sanctions relief so Iran will return to the pact but not so much that it would leave Biden vulnerable to attacks from hard-liners at home, including those in his own party who oppose any concessions at all to Iran.
“Until now, no specific sanctions were discussed, only the broad outlines of ways to establish trust,” said Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group (ICG), who was senior advisor to Malley when the latter was head of the ICG. “What they’re doing this week is to finalize a list of measures on both sides to come back into compliance with the accord. The next step is to sequence these to allow both sides to save face.”
This involves what a senior U.S. official described as the “painstaking” process of separating out and agreeing to remove or ease some of the sanctions that former U.S. President Donald Trump imposed as “poison pills” to ensure that the 2015 deal, which Trump had repudiated in 2018, could never be restored. These include more than 700 sanctions imposed outside the nuclear pact, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that were levied at the end of Trump’s term to ensure Iran’s isolation and break its economy altogether.
Under the “maximum pressure” campaign, the Trump administration in particular sanctioned the Central Bank of Iran, the National Iranian Oil Co., and the National Iranian Tanker Co. for financing state-sponsored terrorism. The Trump team knew that even if the JCPOA were resurrected, such new sanctions would invalidate the deal’s effects because these companies would be banned from international commerce. Together, they oversee Iran’s oil industry, and the central bank controls most of Iran’s foreign exchange reserves and revenues from the country’s oil sales. And new energy revenues are what Iran most demands if it is to return to compliance with the 2015 pact.
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