Iran's Reform Front Calls For A Nuclear Deal, New Foreign Policy

Enrique Mora, the European Union official who chaired year-long talks in Vienna aimed at reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), is acting as a mediator between the teams led by Rob Malley, the United States special envoy, and Ali Bagheri-Kani, a deputy Iranian foreign minister.

Bagheri-Kani met Mora Tuesday in what signaled the beginning of the process, which is expected to last two or three days. With a wave of criticism in Tehran from critics of the 2015 deal and pundits generally cautious, IRNA has offered no information on these initial contacts.

Joseph Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief tweeted that “my team is as of today in Doha to coordinate and facilitate indirect exchanges between US and Iranian negotiators.” Borrell used the phrase “proximity talks.”

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Reuters news agency last week cited an Iranian and European official that Tehran had signaled it might drop a demand for its Revolutionary Guards to be removed from the US list of ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’ There have for weeks been suggestions from analysts that the issue, which is contentious in both Tehran and Washington, could be kicked into the long grass.

Borrell, in a trip to Tehran accompanied by Mora, announced at the weekend a new phase in talks, which had up to mid-March been based in Vienna and involved the remaining JCPOA signatories – China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, and the United Kingdom – with the US, which left the agreement in 2018, taking part indirectly through a team in a separate hotel.

Iran has apparently refused face-to-face talks with the Americans, both within JCPOA structures and the kind of informal contracts that led up to the JCPOA in 2015. Qatar – which has good relations with both Tehran and Washington, and is relatively distanced from JCPOA-opponent Saudi Arabia – has played a quiet role mediating between the two sides.

Mora and Borrell have both expressed guarded optimism over prospects while suggesting substantive issues remained. Mora last week tweeted a picture of himself, Borrell and Malley at dinner, over which the US envoy expressed what Mora called “firm US commitment to come back to the deal.”

In Tehran Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a vice-president under reformist president Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), tweeted that “opportunities can go as quickly as passing clouds.”

In a communique from Elmau, Germany, the G7 (Group of Seven – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) placed the onus on Tehran to take “the opportunity to conclude a deal.” They said the G7 was committed to “working together, and with other international partners, to address the threat posed to international security by Iran’s nuclear escalation.”

The leaders also called on Iran “to stop all ballistic missile activities and proliferation inconsistent with UNSCR 2231 and other UNSC resolutions.” United Nations Security Resolution 2231 both endorsed the 2015 nuclear deal – the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) – and called on Iran “not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons…” Iran says none of its missile are designed for atomic weapons.

The G7 also condemned “the continued human rights violations and abuses in Iran.” They called on Iran “to end arbitrary arrest and detention of foreign and dual nationals for the purposes of political leverage.” Foreign governments and human rights organizations have accused Iran of detaining foreigners to secure concessions.

G7 leaders urged Iran to provide “technically credible information” to the International Atomic Energy Agency over what the agency says are unexplained uranium traces in sites related to work before 2003.

The meeting signals the start of indirect talks between Iran and the United States to resolve their outstanding differences for restoring the 2015 nuclear agreement known as the JCPOA.

Mora has been the EU coordinator in the nuclear negotiations, that lasted 11 months in the Austrian capital Vienna and now are set to resume between Tehran and Washington in Doha.

The complicated negotiations aimed to restore the JCPOA that former US President Donald Trump abandoned in May 2018.

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IRNA has so far not offered any details of what discussed between the Iranian and EU diplomats.

During a trip last weekend to Tehran the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell agreed with Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian to resume talks with the US, but the two sides changed the venue to Qatar.

The talks in Vienna came to a standstill in March apparently on Iran’s demand asking the US to remove its Revolutionary Guard from Washington’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The Biden Administration has so far not accepted the demand, but Iran has agreed to resume indirect talks with EU mediation.

With the change of venue, Russia and China, signatories of the JCPOA, apparently will not be present in the talks.

On June 28, 1981, a bomb hidden in the microphone, or the audio system, exploded at a meeting of the Islamic Republican Party killing around 70 top officials of the new revolutionary government. The chief prize for whoever was behind the plot was ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, seen at the time as the number two figure after the founder of the clerical regime, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Beheshti died.

The Supreme Leader paid his utmost respects to Beheshti in his speech, but introduced him as a top judicial official, not as the powerful figure he was at the time.

Khamenei reminisced the tough months in the summer of 1981, when the Mujahedin organization (MEK) and a variety of leftist and Marxist groups challenged Khomeini and the Islamic Republic.

“They threw everything they had at us,” but the regime survived and has continued to survive for four decades, the aging leader boasted.

Indeed, the regime has survived, but Khamenei did not mention the methods used for survival. For one, he failed to mention the hundreds of people executed right after the revolution, all without a real trial, including Amir-Abbas Hoveida, the long-time prime minister during the monarchy, who had no trace of financial corruption and was known for his diligent pursuit of economic development.

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Khamenei also failed to mention the jailing of thousands of MEK members and other leftists in the 1980s, and Khomeini’s decision to massacre them in prisons while they were serving their sentences. Around 5,000 prisoners were killed in 1988 in a matter of 30 days.

He also did not mention the ‘chain murders’ of intellectuals in the early 1990s and the thousands of journalists, dissidents and ordinary people killed during protests or use of excessive force by the government in the three decades since.

Khamenei also claimed in his speech that Islamic Republic’s enemies have been looking for its demise for more than four decades, seeing signs of weakness as potential good news, but they have been disappointed.

“The enemy cannot understand that in this world, other than political calculations, there are also other considerations, which are God’s rules and traditions,” he said. Khamenei has been reinforcing his legitimacy by claiming that he is the highest Shiite authority on earth, and it is the hand of God that has secured his rule.

Khamenei also did not mention Iran’s economic decline since 1979, especially in the past 15 years as his foreign policy and nuclear program have brought about devastating sanctions. The currency rial has fallen by close to 4,500-fold since 1978, from 70 rials to the dollar to over 300,000.

Facing serious economic problems and continuing anti-government protests, he called on his followers to stick with “God’s rules”, meaning “jihad” to defend the regime.

He then repeated worn-out slogans, such as fighting corruption, while just this week news emerged about another massive embezzlement case of more than $700 million dollars in animal feed imports.

Khamenei also asked the hardliner judiciary, which is controlled by him, to deal with cyperspace to protect "people's psychological peace", implicitly encouraging a push by his followers to restrict access to the Internet.

But Qatari optimism, which has seen the Persian Gulf state mediate in recent months, was not shared by United States and European officials, nor by opponents of the 2015 deal in Tehran.

The Virginia-based Politico news-site quoted a US official with “very low expectations” and two “senior Western officials” sharing the American’s pessimism and saying they expected the talks to last only two or three days.

In announcing the new round of talks while in Tehran Saturday, the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said nuclear talks in Vienna had been suspended in March with both Iran and the US needing to answer “questions.”

Those talks – involving Iran, and six world powers including indirectly the US – reportedly reached a broad understanding of what was needed to revive the JCPOA but did not bring complete agreement over which US sanctions were incompatible with the 2015 deal, which the US left in 2018. Iran was particularly irked over the inclusion since 2019 of its Revolutionary Guards on a US list of sanctioned ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’

While there have been suggestions from analysts as to how such obstacles might be cleared, the US and Iran have continued to place the onus on the other to move.

Go-betweens

Enrique Mora, a senior EU official, chaired the Vienna talks and is expected to lead a team of European officials in Qatar acting as go-betweens for US and Iranian negotiators. Iran has refused to meet the US directly.

Qatar’s role may be less formal. The Persian Gulf state has good relations with both Washington and Tehran, and played a discrete but effective role in negotiations between the US administration of President Donald Trump and the Taliban that led to their 2020 agreement over US military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But opponents of restoring the JCPOA are vocal in both Tehran and the US. In Israel, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has slammed military and intelligence leaders – including reportedly the head of military intelligence Major General Aaron Haliva– who favor the JCPOA.

It remains unclear whether the US encouraging Israeli-Saudi military cooperation as a way to reconcile the two states to a revived JCPOA, or as a genuine attempt to bolster a new regional defense architecture against Iran and its regional allies, including Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah in Yemen.

Last chance?

Some analysts see the Qatar talks as the last chance for the US and Iran to agree over bringing back the JCPOA.

Robert Malley, the US special envoy who leads the US negotiators in Qatar, told the Senate in May that the US would continue to work to restore the JCPOA as long as “we assess that the non-proliferation benefits of a return to the deal are worth the sanctions lifting we would need to provide.”

Critics of the JCPOA argue any benefits are running out. Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told a news conference in Vienna June 9 that, given Iran’s restrictions on agency monitoring, four weeks remained to restore enough inspector’s access to avoid a “fatal blow” to the IAEA’s ability to certify the Iranian nuclear program as peaceful. Iran began exceeding JCPOA limits in 2019, the year after the US left the agreement, and is now enriching uranium to 60 percent, far above the 3.67 percent allowed under the JCPOA.