‘Highly Unlikely’: Biden’s Middle East Adviser Says JCPOA Revival Doubtful Anytime Soon
© AFP 2023 / AHMAD ABDO
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Revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal has stalled on a handful of highly sensitive details, including the otherwise-unrelated removal of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from Washington’s terrorist list - something analysts say might be necessary for Iranian opposition parties to swallow the deal’s return.
New doubts were cast on the potential for the US to return to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Wednesday by a top adviser to US President Joe Biden.
Brett McGurk, a longtime Washington envoy in the Middle East who now serves as the White House Middle East coordinator, told a group of think tank academics that it was “highly unlikely” the JCPOA would be revived in the near future, three of those figures who were on the call told Axios.
According to Axios’ sources, McGurk believes that Iranian negotiators don’t know what they want to do, including whether to try and win new concessions from Washington to help Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei swallow the pill of a new deal with the West.
A similar theory was floated by academics at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington, DC-based think tank, in an article published last month. One of Tehran’s demands, that the IRGC, a branch of the Iranian military, be removed from the US State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, was not part of the original JCPOA.
That deal, reached in 2015 by the Obama and Rouhani administrations, imposed strict limitations on the quality and quantity of uranium-235 Iran could refine, leaving it with enough for a few small nuclear power plants and a medical research lab. In turn, the US lowered economic sanctions against Iran, allowing it to develop economically and build new trade links from Venezuela and France to India and China. Tehran also disavowed the pursuit of a nuclear weapon - the use of which Khamenei had ruled years earlier to be against Islam.
In 2018, then-US President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of the deal, accusing Iran of secretly continuing its nuclear weapons program. New sanctions followed, part of a “maximum pressure” policy designed to either provoke a war with Iran or to bring down the Iranian government, and new economic troubles returned. CIA Director William Burns recently revealed that US intelligence believes Iran did not, in fact, resume its nuclear weapons program after abandoning it in 2004.
Talks to revive the deal began after Biden took office in 2021 and seemed nearly complete by early 2022, having stalled on a handful of items, most notably the status of the IRGC. New talks were held in Doha, Qatar, late last month, but with no appreciable progress made.
Meanwhile, a conservative government under Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi came into office in August 2021 that is far more skeptical of negotiating with the West than former President Hassan Rouhani was, further complicating negotiations.
Iran has characterized the problems as stemming from Washington, the party that left the JCPOA. On Monday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani told reporters that the deal could easily be revived, but that Tehran would “not sacrifice the country’s fundamental interests ... with a rushed process.”
“If the US acts constructively and positively, an agreement is close,” he added.
A month after Raisi took office, Iran was accepted into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Eurasian economic and political bloc that includes Russia, China, and India, as well as nations like Pakistan and Tajikistan - all of which Iran has expanded its trade and cooperation with in recent years.
Tehran has also sought to join the BRICS bloc, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, another effort by industrializing nations to develop financial institutions and trade relationships not centered on Europe, the US, or Japan - the centers of the capitalist world, where that socioeconomic system first developed.
