President-elect, Joe Biden, confirmed his formal strategy to deal with Iran would begin with an easy first step: rejoining Iran's 2015 nuclear deal. It was better to avert a new nuclear crisis in the Middle East, he argued, by keeping Tehran boxed.
Yet, weeks before Biden is sworn in as president, the prospects are more complicated for the
agreement to be resurrected. An oddly diverse set of adversaries are trying to ensure that the vision of Biden is never achieved. Close U.S. allies in the Middle East, Iranian hardliners, and Trump administration officials are trying to thwart Biden's goal.
Even after President Trump's unilateral withdrawal in 2018, the Obama administration's flagship foreign policy accomplishment has been on life support. But the deal has come under new pressure, on several fronts, since the election.
New economic sanctions have been imposed on Iran by the Trump administration, each
amounting to a new obstacle to resuming the agreement. This week, conservative lawmakers in Tehran tried to impose impossible time limits on Biden, passing legislation forcing Iran to speed up its enriched uranium production and kick out the U.N. Nuclear inspectors should not lift sanctions on the country's oil and banking sectors until early February, around two weeks after the inauguration of Biden.
The most disruptive was the November 27 killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist
who ran the country's military nuclear program until it was officially disbanded in 2003, by
unknown hitmen, generally believed to be Israeli operatives. The assassination is considered to be an attempt to undermine the nuclear deal by making it politically more difficult for Iranian leaders to return to the constraints of the agreement.
The nuclear deal, officially the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was the culmination of years of talks between Iran, the United States, and five other global powers: Britain, China, Germany, France, and Russia. Tehran demolished its Arak nuclear reactor in exchange for the end of sanctions on Iran's oil exports and agreed to sell or remove the bulk of its stockpile of enriched uranium.
The agreement allowed Iran to continue producing low-enriched nuclear fuel, the form used in nuclear power plants, but only under international supervision and with a limit of 300 kilograms, or 660 pounds, far short of what a single nuclear weapon would need to be installed.
But Trump called the deal "horrible" and criticized it for its sunset terms, many of which are due to expire in 2030, and for not resolving other concerns, such as the production of Iran's missiles and its funding for the Hezbollah Lebanese militia and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran started to violate the nuclear limitations of the agreement after Trump rejected the deal and introduced new sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimated last month thatIran's low-enriched uranium stockpile has swollen to nearly 8,000 pounds, around twelve times the ceiling set by the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Biden's primary advisors have accepted that it will be impossible to attempt to restore the
agreement. In outlining his strategy for Iran, Biden pledged an "unwavering commitment" to
prevent Iran from possessing a nuclear weapon, while promising "a credible path back to
diplomacy" for Tehran.
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