Saeed Ghasemi-Nejad, Emmanuel Otolenghi
A year after signing a temporary agreement with Iran, the U.S. government has realized that reaching a comprehensive nuclear agreement is far-fetched. Barack Obama, the President of the United States, believed that the temporary agreement was a calculated risk; a risk worth assessing Iran's readiness and willingness to reach a sustainable agreement. However, the reality is that a year of marathon negotiations has yielded no results. The only tangible outcome has been the gradual erosion of the West's red lines. These red lines have faded in exchange for efforts to keep Iranian negotiators at the negotiating table. The West has lost its leverage over Iran, which was sanctions, and it is only the drop in oil prices that has saved the West from being completely powerless at the negotiating table. Meanwhile, Iran's economy is gradually improving after recent international sanctions. Over time, the pressure from multinational companies will break the fragile framework of sanctions.
So why has the Obama administration extended the temporary deal for another seven months, with the possibility that more time may be needed? The reason is that President Obama has become a prisoner of his own arguments against critics of the temporary agreement. The Obama administration has labeled these critics as warmongers from the outset. Now that the talks have been extended and negotiations have yielded no results, the White House claims that the only alternative to the current process is war.
In word and appearance, Obama and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, have repeatedly stated that no agreement is better than a bad agreement. However, throughout the past year of negotiations conducted under the guise of a temporary agreement, it has become increasingly clear that the White House believes that no agreement is a worse option than a bad agreement.
With the initial news of the extension, reports and media interpretations indicated that this rhetoric from the White House has successfully taken hold. At the same time, reports and analyses regarding the possibility of war in the event of a failure to reach an agreement have been published.
The assumption of an unavoidable, horrifying choice between the current diplomatic process and war is a false and incorrect dichotomy. This dichotomy is based on the belief that there has been no prior negotiation and that there can be no negotiation after the failure of the temporary agreement. However, the reality is that the international community has been negotiating with Iran since 2003.
Eleven years of negotiations provide strong evidence against the idea that the failure of negotiations will lead to war. For example, the idea currently under consideration in the nuclear negotiations, that most of Iran's enriched uranium may be transferred to Russia for fuel production, is merely an updated version of the temporary agreement that had previously been offered to Iran. Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's then-representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, brought this idea back to Iran for final approval after an implicit agreement. However, the Iranian leader rejected the agreement, eliminating the possibility of compromise. Efforts by Turkey and Brazil to salvage the agreement and align it with Iran's wishes were also fruitless, leading to the issuance of UN Security Council Resolution 1929, which imposed the most severe UN sanctions against Iran at that time and paved the way for unilateral EU sanctions.
This diplomatic failure was large-scale but nonetheless did not lead to war. Ultimately, negotiations resumed and continued intermittently until the temporary agreement was reached on November 24, 2013. What has repeatedly allowed for Iran's return to the negotiating table has been the pressures the West imposed through increased sanctions and the mention of the possibility of military operations against Iran.
For this reason, the assumption of war occurring if the temporary agreement fails is naive. It is likely that the failure of this agreement on November 24 would have led to a repetition of previous events. This means that if Tehran chose the path of opposition, more sanctions would be imposed by the Obama administration and European allies against the Iranian regime, Tehran would become isolated, and ultimately the Islamic Republic would have to negotiate from a weaker position.
Since Iran's secret nuclear program was revealed, there have always been discussions. There is strong evidence to believe that if the P5+1 had informed their Iranian counterparts that the temporary agreement was over and that no more money would be injected into Iran's economy, the government in Tehran would ultimately find a way to set aside its pride. After all, it was Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's Foreign Minister, who told reporters, "Iran has never left the negotiating table and will not do so." And why should it when everything is going according to its wishes?
What could have compelled Iran to make a heroic concession to reach a result was Iran's fear of a severe Western reaction in the event of a failure of negotiations. Since Obama has "effectively" shown that continuing negotiations at any cost is better than other options, Iran continues to stubbornly negotiate because it knows that the other side will not leave the table with the intention of raising a stick but only has a carrot in hand. In the market, many times to finalize a deal, one must be prepared to break the deal; everyone in the Tehran market knows this from experience.