Journalist’s Notebook: Does the Near Death of Iran Nuclear Deal Mean the End of Diplomacy?

Former President Trump walked out on the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 because he thought it was “horrible.” President Biden has been trying to piece the pieces back together, believing the broken deal was the best chance to stop Tehran from covertly building a nuclear weapon. Iran wanted to come back for sanctions relief that would come with a new deal.

There have been many meetings between the international parties involved to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in recent years and the parties have been very close to renegotiating an agreement to prevent Iran’s nuclear program from spiraling out of control. Then, finally, the momentum died. The deal was unofficially declared dead. So what happened?

“I think basically Iran has decided it’s not that interested,” Mark Fitzpatrick, an associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), tells Fox News. “Compromises were made that satisfied their profits and then added new profits.”

Fitzpatrick said the US reluctantly agreed to a final text and thus Iran wanted guarantees that no future US president could break the deal like Trump has, which Fitzpatrick said is something Biden doesn’t. would have the power to do. Furthermore, Fitzpatrick adds, Tehran wanted the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, to suspend its investigations into Iran’s past nuclear development work and agree not to start new excavations. The United States would not and could not, Fitzpatrick says, agree to shackle the IAEA.

The secondary loop of the Arak heavy water reactor as officials and media visit the site 150 miles southwest of Tehran, Iran, December 23, 2019.
(Atomic Energy Organization of Iran via AP, FILE)

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Mohammad Marandi was an adviser to the Iranian nuclear negotiating team. He believes the Europeans at the table thought Iran’s demands were reasonable, but that US policy has once again destroyed the deal.

“The problem,” he tells Fox News from Tehran, “is that the White House hasn’t shown political will before the midterm elections. They were afraid that Republicans and their opponents would say that Biden has made too many concessions to the Iranians and that Biden is weak and that would hurt them during the election… I don’t even know if Biden is in charge in the White House,” he said. But whoever it is has to make a decision.”

But that decision was made. The White House has confirmed that the president is not looking to move forward with the deal anytime soon. Iran’s brutal crackdown on protesters since September and its sale of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine appear to have driven the final nail in the JCPOA’s coffin. Even if Iran abandoned its latest demands, according to Fitzpatrick, it would be too late.

“I don’t think President Biden could have made a deal with a regime that was killing its own people and was soon shown to be sending drones into Russia that were killing Ukrainian civilians,” Fitzpatrick said. “And there are a lot of other things that Iran was doing that made it unpleasant to make a deal with them.”

Marandi follows the Iranian government’s line that the protests are violent “riots” and disputes the widely reported death toll of more than 500, including dozens of children. His figures contradict what the White House and the West generally believe to be true, and she criticizes the United States for its criticism of the Iranian regime’s crackdown.

Iranians protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested by the morality police, in Tehran, October 1, 2022.
(AP Photo/Middle East Images, File)

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“Iranian internal affairs have nothing to do with the United States and the nuclear deal. And the negotiations to restart the nuclear deal are not related to any other issue, be it defense capability or regional policy or Iranian domestic politics. And the United States, if it’s concerned about police brutality, should look closer to home.”

Fitzpatrick says there is no comparison, noting that the United States is publicly grappling with the issue of political brutality, while Iran’s situation is very different. “It’s not like the (US) federal government is sending morality police to beat up women and then other policemen to beat up peaceful protesters. Iran has killed 71 children in its crackdown.”

This gives an idea of ​​what must have happened in those rooms in Vienna, where most of the time nuclear talks took place. Fitzpatrick says Iranian leaders, despite talk of calling for sanctions relief, may, in the end, be quite happy with where they are.

“I think one of the reasons Iran is not interested in the deal is because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, benefits from sanctions when sanctions drive out private companies,” Fitzpatrick said. “The IRGC, as a state organization, can take over trade and can levy its own taxes, hidden or not. So what’s in it for them to go back to a deal where they lose their trade and more avenues of power ?”

Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, September 15, 2022.
(Sputnik/Alexandr Demyanchuk/Pool via Reuters)

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Fitzpatrick thinks the JCPOA, while not perfect, was good business and contained Iran’s nuclear program, buying time until perhaps a better solution could be found. Buying time, he says, is also a policy. Even Marandi, at least at first glance, seems to believe that a bargain is worth it.

But as that seems unlikely, Iran’s partners in the deal find themselves at a crossroads where there is no tangible or effective Iranian policy other than the deterrence of the ominous warning that “all options are on the table” to prevent Iran from to build a bomb one day. But, concludes Fitzpatrick, above all it is important that diplomacy in this story dies last, even if the JCPOA has gone down the drain.