[To participants in the negotiating rooms — where the talks
dragged past the midnight March 31 deadline with a rare, public threat by the
White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, to walk away if Iran did not make some
fundamental political decisions — the differences are beginning to threaten the
viability of the whole enterprise. Iranian negotiators, highly attuned to the
politics back home, are reluctant to sign any piece of paper that lays out too
many specifics about what they would give up or put in storage, or how much
nuclear fuel they would either hand over to the Russians or dilute.]
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The head of Iran’s atomic energy
agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, during
a break Tuesday in nuclear
negotiations in Switzerland.
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LAUSANNE, Switzerland —
As the nuclear negotiations dragged into overtime here on Tuesday, some
uniquely American and Iranian political sensitivities were permeating the
marathon negotiating sessions, leading many to wonder whether two countries
that have barely spoken for 35 years are just not ready to overcome old
suspicions.
In the hallway chatter overheard in the century-old Beau-Rivage
Palace Hotel here, where Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts from five
other countries are struggling to close a preliminary political deal with Iran, the Americans talk, in a wonderfully
American way, about numbers and limits.
Yet, when Iranian officials step out of the elegant,
chandeliered rooms, where the post-World War I order was negotiated 90 years
ago, to brief the news media — primarily their own — most questions about
numbers and limits are waved away. Those officials talk almost entirely about
preserving respect for their rights and Iran’s sense of sovereignty.
To participants in the negotiating rooms — where the talks
dragged past the midnight March 31 deadline with a rare, public threat by the
White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, to walk away if Iran did not make some
fundamental political decisions — the differences are beginning to threaten the
viability of the whole enterprise. Iranian negotiators, highly attuned to the
politics back home, are reluctant to sign any piece of paper that lays out too
many specifics about what they would give up or put in storage, or how much
nuclear fuel they would either hand over to the Russians or dilute.
“We are all about quantifiables: how many centrifuges can spin,
how much plutonium can come out of the Arak reactor, how much uranium you can
have on hand,” one senior American official at the center of the negotiations
said the other day on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy the
United States is trying to enforce around the talks.
“They are all about symbolism, about avoiding the optics of
backing down,” the official said, even if it means engaging in expensive,
inefficient nuclear enrichment activity that makes little economic or strategic
sense.
There is a sense that the hurdles would be lower if the
negotiations were limited to Mr. Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz and
their Iranian counterparts. By all accounts, their working relationship is
strong; Mr. Kerry has now spent more time with Iran’s jovial, American-educated
foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, than with any other foreign minister.
Mr. Moniz talks enrichment and reactor technology with the head
of Iran’s atomic energy agency, Ali Akbar Salehi; while they have
disagreements, they are almost all about technology, not ideology. Both
Iranians were trained in the United States before the 1979 revolution, and
while they cannot say so, both clearly appear to see this nuclear negotiation
as a way to end the days of Iran’s defining itself by its opposition to the
United States.
But their hands often seem tied. As much as the American team
would like to treat the negotiations as a way to contain a dangerous
proliferation threat, they have to deal with a Congress that sees them as a
proxy for containing Iran as it flexes its muscles in the Middle East, from
Iraq to Yemen to Syria.
For the Iranians, the negotiations are a first test of whether
the United States, still sometimes called the Great Satan, can learn to
accommodate Iran’s re-emergence as a Persian power.
At various moments, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has surprised his own
negotiating team by laying down lines they cannot cross: Iran must ultimately
be able to produce nuclear fuel on an industrial scale, with 10 times the
output it has today, and it must not close nuclear facilities, which explains
the focus on how to “repurpose” the giant underground enrichment site at Fordo
into some kind of “R & D facility” that would not process uranium.
The other day, Mr. Zarif’s deputy declared anew that Iran would
not ship any of its stockpile of fuel out of the country to Russia, which
seemed like a common-sense solution for getting it out of the country without
forcing Iran to give up ownership. Many had assumed — wrongly, it seems — that
this was a done deal. Instead, the State Department spokeswoman had to concede
that even this late in the game, “the bottom line is that we don’t have
agreement with the Iranians on the stockpile issue.”
It is, said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran scholar at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, an occupational hazard in negotiating with a
country that has such divided power centers.
“A perennial challenge in dealing with Iran is that Iran’s most
powerful officials are inaccessible, while Iran’s most accessible officials
aren’t powerful,” Mr. Sadjadpour said on Tuesday. “Ayatollah Khamenei hasn’t left the country
since 1989. Qassim Suleimani hangs out in Tikrit, not Lausanne,” he noted,
referring to the immensely powerful commander of the Quds Force, who has worked
to retake Tikrit, Iraq, from the Islamic State.
It may be the first time that the United States has found itself
on the same side of a conflict as General Suleimani, and that is not an easy
place to be. He is on the United Nations sanctions list, partly for terrorist
activities, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, of which the Quds Force
is an elite subset, is the guardian of the military side of the Iranian nuclear program.
The Iranians, meanwhile, have gotten a taste of American
politics. Mr. Kerry needs shutdown and dismantlement numbers because Congress
demands them. If he and Mr. Moniz cannot make a specific case about how to
measure Iranian compliance with the deal, and how to calculate whether there is
now “one-year breakout time to a bomb,” there is a reasonable argument that
more sanctions will follow.
“The diplomatic endgame is a struggle over competing,
essentially contradictory, narratives,” said Robert S. Litwak of the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars, whose latest work, “Iran’s Nuclear
Chess: Calculating America’s Moves,” explores this division.
“To sell a nuclear agreement in Washington, Obama must make the
case that it buys time in the face of an urgent threat and that it will support
the process of internal reform within Iran,” Mr. Litwak said. “To sell a
nuclear agreement to the hard-liners in Tehran, Zarif’s team must make the case
that it recognizes Iran’s ‘rights,’ leaves Iran with a future hedge option for
a weapon, and is not putting Iran on a slippery slope to be pressured by
America for additional demands that would undermine the foundations of the
revolutionary state.”
In fact, Mr. Obama and his aides make the case that Iran’s
growing power in the Middle East is precisely why the nuclear accord is so
important. Imagine containing Iran’s ambitions if its neighbors knew it had a
nuclear weapon, or even — and far more likely — a threshold capability to
manufacture one.
That is why Mr. Kerry has said a bottom-line objective of the
talks is to ensure that Iran cannot make the fuel for a nuclear weapon in less
than a year, creating enough warning time for diplomatic action, renewed
sanctions or, if necessary, military action.
But the difficulty of putting together this accord should serve as
a cautionary tale: Even if it comes together by June 30, the chances of
remaking the relationship are small at best, at least anytime soon. As Haleh
Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar at the Wilson Center, wrote recently,
“Four decades of hostility between Iran and the United States will not be
erased overnight.”
She
should know: On a trip to Iran to visit her aging mother, she was thrown in Tehran’s Evin Prison in 2007 for 105
days.
