Longer-Term Deal With Iran Faces Major Challenges
Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: November 24, 2013 87 Comments
LONDON — The Obama administration’s successful push for an accord that would temporarily freeze much of Iran’s nuclear program has cast a spotlight on the more formidable challenge it now confronts in trying to roll the program back.
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For all of the drama of late-night make-or-break talks in Geneva, the deal that Secretary of State John Kerry and his negotiating partners announced early on Sunday was largely a holding action, meant to keep the Iranian nuclear program in check for six months while negotiators pursue a far tougher and more lasting agreement.
By itself, the interim pact does not foreclose either side’s main options or require many irreversible actions — which was why the two sides were able to come to terms on it. That was also a reason for the sharp negative reaction the deal elicited on Sunday from Israel, an American ally that is deeply suspicious of Iranian intentions.
Named the “Joint Plan of Action,” the four-page agreement specifies in terse language the steps Iran would initially take to constrain its nuclear effort, and the financial relief it would get from the United States and its partners.
A few technical details are left to footnotes. The agreement’s preamble says that a more comprehensive solution is the eventual goal, and the broad elements of that solution are given in bullet points on the final page. The agreement allows Iran to preserve most of its nuclear infrastructure, and along with it the ability to develop a nuclear device, while the United States keeps in place the core oil and banking sanctions it has imposed.
The questions that the United States and Iran need to grapple with in the next phase of their nuclear dialogue, if they want to overcome their long years of enmity, are more fundamental.
“Now the difficult part starts,” said Olli Heinonen, the former deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Even the planned duration of the comprehensive follow-up agreement is still up in the air. It will not be open-ended, but there is as yet no meeting of the minds on how many years it would be in effect. The interim agreement says only that it would be “for a period to be agreed upon.”
“The terms of the comprehensive agreement have yet to be defined, but it is suggested that that agreement will itself have an expiration date,” said Ray Takeyh, a former State Department official and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It would be good if the comprehensive agreement was more final.”
Iran’s program to enrich uranium also needs to be dealt with in detail. The Obama administration has made clear that it is not prepared to concede at the start that Iran has a “right” to enrich uranium. But the interim deal, reflecting language proposed by the American delegation, says the follow-up agreement would provide for a “mutually defined enrichment program with practical limits and transparency.”
So the question appears to be not whether Iran will be allowed to continue enriching uranium, but rather what constraints the United States and its negotiating partners will insist on in return, and how large an enrichment program they are willing to tolerate. The interim accord makes clear that it must be consistent with “practical needs.” Iran and the United States are likely to have very different ideas of what those needs are.
“This, of course, will be one of the central issues in the negotiations for a comprehensive agreement,” said Gary Samore, who served as senior aide on nonproliferation issues on the National Security Council during the Obama administration and is now president of United Against Nuclear Iran, an organization that urges that strong sanctions be imposed on Iran until it further restricts its nuclear efforts.
“We will want very small and limited,” Mr. Samore said, referring to Iran’s enrichment efforts. “They want industrial scale.”
The negotiators will confront other difficult questions regarding elements of a comprehensive agreement that would be difficult to reverse. Will the underground Fordo enrichment plant have to be shut down? Will the heavy-water reactor that Iran is building near the town of Arak, which could produce plutonium for weapons, have to be dismantled or converted into a light-water reactor that is not useful for weapons development?
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The interim deal “did not do enough to narrow down the limitations that will be in a final deal,” said David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
Hoping to reassure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who called the easing of sanctions on Iran “a historic mistake,” President Obama told him that the United States would press for a comprehensive solution to the Iranian nuclear question in the months ahead.
The diplomats who worked out the interim agreement left open the possibility that it might be extended beyond six months. The text of the deal says it is “renewable by mutual consent.”
Some analysts said that hammering out a comprehensive solution seems so onerous that there may never be an enduring accord but only a succession of partial agreements. Even if a more comprehensive agreement is never reached, experts say, a limited agreement can still be useful.
The interim deal includes improved verification, constraints on Iran’s installation of new centrifuges, and the requirement that Iran dilute its existing stock of uranium enriched to 20 percent, or else convert it to oxide, a less readily used form. Moreover, the cap imposed on Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 5 percent would increase the time that Iran would need to make a dash for a bomb, adding several weeks or perhaps a month. “This may seem a small time,” Mr. Albright said. But because the interim deal also includes provisions that would make it easier to spot cheating swiftly, the added time “would be significant,” he said.
The United States successfully opposed Iran’s demand that it be allowed to continue installing components at the heavy-water plant at Arak. The interim pact also stipulates that Iran cannot test or produce fuel for that reactor or put it into operation. As it sought to strengthen the accord, the United States added a sweetener. As the talks progressed, the amount of oil revenue frozen in foreign banks that Iran would be allowed to retrieve was raised to $4.2 billion from $3.6 billion.
Mr. Kerry said on Sunday that he was as committed to “the really hard part,” obtaining a comprehensive follow-up agreement, “which would require enormous steps in terms of verification, transparency and accountability.” Speaking in London before a meeting with William Hague, the British foreign secretary, he said, “We will start today, literally, to continue the efforts out of Geneva and to press forward.”
Israeli Leaders Denounce Geneva Accord
Pool photo by Abir Sultan
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel declared the interim nuclear deal with Iran a “historic mistake” on Sunday.
By JODI RUDOREN
Published: November 24, 2013
JERUSALEM — Having failed to stop Sunday’s signing of a nuclear deal between Iran and six Western powers despite a relentless campaign of criticism, Israeli leaders say their mission now is to ensure that, as several put it, this first step is not the last step.
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To influence the final deal that the Obama administration and its partners in the Geneva talks intend to hammer out over the next six months, Israel will supplement its public and private diplomacy with other tools. Several officials and analysts here said Israel would unleash its intelligence industry to highlight anticipated violations of the interim agreement.
At the same time, with many Israelis viewing the United States as having abandoned its credible military threat against Iran, they have stepped up talk of a strike of their own.
Though the White House insists the deal signed Sunday is an interim move intended only to buy time to negotiate an agreement that would prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, Israel is deeply worried that there will be little further progress. The sanctions relief in the interim accord relieves the pressure that brought Iran to the table, Israeli officials argue, so Iranian leaders might not stay. Further, they say, the so-called P5 + 1 nations that negotiated the pact have not agreed on or clearly identified their final goals, nor outlined the parameters for punitive measures if progress is not made within the deadline.
“The focus has to be on what happens at the end of those six months,” said Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economy minister and a member of its inner security cabinet. “A, define what our objective is, and B, define now, in advance, as soon as possible, what happens if we don’t meet those objectives,” he said. “If it’s just some open-ended vague negotiations, it’s pretty clear that Iran will retain its nuclear program and revive its economy — the worst-case scenario.”
Amos Yadlin, director of the Institute of National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said that much of the vitriol of the last few weeks was misplaced and that a shift in strategy was overdue. “They call it the deal, the deal, the deal — they should call it the initial deal that leads either to an acceptable deal or to the failure of the deal,” he said. “Then Israel should be ready, if sanctions will not be ratcheted, to go to the option that we try to avoid all the time.”
For now, Israel is expected to continue its denunciation of the agreement. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared it a “historic mistake” on Sunday, while some of his top ministers deemed it “a surrender” and “the greatest diplomatic achievement for the Iranians.”
But the reality is that the weeks of harsh and personal condemnations leading up to the agreement on Saturday left Israel sidelined in the Geneva process, and its relations with Washington under severe strain.
With its ability to influence the deal through diplomatic channels accordingly limited, Israel will now deploy its intelligence resources to monitor the process.
Among the expected areas of scrutiny will be whether construction at the heavy-water reactor in Arak is halted as demanded in the interim deal; whether Iran installs new centrifuges or uses its advanced ones in violation of the agreement; how the Obama administration enforces the remaining sanctions; and the seriousness of the promised increased inspections.
“Israeli intelligence will be required to make a double effort,” Ron Ben-Yishai, an analyst for the Israeli news site Ynet, wrote Sunday. “Ensure that Iran is not deceiving,” he explained, “and that the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors are not cutting corners.”
Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, predicted a “carefully timed injection of intelligence-derived information into the public space” to put pressure on the talks.
While most experts here said they could not imagine Israeli military action while the Geneva negotiations are underway, officials from Mr. Netanyahu on down were already raising the specter of a potential Israeli military strike on Iran. Mr. Netanyahu on Sunday repeated his mantra that “Israel has the right and the obligation to defend itself, by itself, against any threat.” Mr. Bennett added, for good measure, that Israel “is capable of defending itself.”
Indeed, Yaakov Amidror, who until last month was Israel’s national security adviser, told the Financial Times last week that Israel’s air force had been conducting “very long-range flights” to prepare for an attack on Iran, and that there was “no question” that Mr. Netanyahu was prepared to make the decision to strike if necessary. Mr. Amidror also said Israel’s military could stop Tehran’s nuclear program “for a very long time.”
Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, published a paper on Thursday describing an Israeli strike as “complex, but possible.” He said the number of facilities that would have to be hit to “deal a significant blow to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is generally overestimated” and that Iran’s ability to retaliate “is quite limited.” Arab states whose airspace Israel would need to fly over, Professor Inbar added, “would turn a blind eye or even cooperate” because of their own concerns over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
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“At a time when appeasing Iran seems to be in vogue, an Israeli strike could invigorate elements in the international arena who are unwilling to accept an Iran with a nuclear breakout capability,” he wrote. “In addition, many people around the world would be reminded that muscular reactions to evil regimes are often truly necessary.”
There has been near-unanimity among Israeli leaders across the political spectrum that the interim deal was a major setback. There is mounting division, though, on whether the public prosecution of the case put too much stress on Jerusalem’s relationship with Washington or only highlighted its diminishment.
One radio host on Sunday repeatedly played clips of President Obama, during his visit here in March, reassuring Israelis, in Hebrew, that “you are not alone,” and then said ominously, “We are in fact alone.” Mr. Spyer, the Herzliya analyst, described the communication between the White House and the prime minister’s office in recent weeks as “a dialogue of the deaf” that revealed a growing gulf in approach to Middle East policy.
Mr. Obama called Mr. Netanyahu on Sunday to discuss the agreement with Iran, the White House said in a statement, adding that the two men “agreed to stay in close contact on this issue.”
Tzipi Livni and Yair Lapid, two centrist ministers in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, both called Sunday for better cooperation with the United States and a quieter, more dignified diplomacy campaign in the days ahead.
“We’ve lost the world’s ear,” lamented Mr. Lapid, the finance minister and head of Parliament’s second-largest faction. “We have six months, at the end of which we need to be in a situation in which the Americans listen to us the way they used to listen to us in the past.”
Nuclear Accord With Iran Opens Diplomatic Doors in the Mideast
Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Obama boarding Air Force One on Sunday. He said Saturday night that a final agreement with Iran “won’t be easy.”
By MARK LANDLER
Published: November 24, 2013
WASHINGTON — For President Obama, whose popularity and second-term agenda have been ravaged by the chaotic rollout of thehealth care law, the preliminary nuclear deal reached with Iran on Sunday is more than a welcome change of subject.
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Pool photo by Carolyn Kaster
Secretary of State John Kerry at a London airport on Sunday, after reaching an interim accord with Iran that raises many questions for the Obama administration.
It is also a seminal moment — one that thrusts foreign policy to the forefront in a White House preoccupied by domestic woes, and one that presents Mr. Obama with the chance to chart a new American course in the Middle East for the first time in more than three decades.
Much will depend, of course, on whether the United States and the other major powers ever reach a final agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions. Mr. Obama himself said Saturday night that it “won’t be easy, and huge challenges remain ahead.”
But the mere fact that after 34 years of estrangement, the United States and Iran have signed a diplomatic accord — even if it is a tactical, transitory one — opens the door to a range of geopolitical possibilities available to no American leader since Jimmy Carter.
“No matter what you think of it, this is a historic deal,” said Vali R. Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It is a major seismic shift in the region. It rearranges the entire chess board.”
Mr. Obama has wanted to bring in Iran from the cold since he was a presidential candidate, declaring in 2007 that he would pursue “aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iranian leaders, and ruling out the concept of leadership change, which was popular at the time.
But the president has sought to avoid being consumed by the Middle East, in part so he could shift America’s gaze to Asia. He has tended to view Iran through two narrower prisms: his goal of curbing the spread of nuclear weaponsand his desire to avoid entangling the United States in another war in the region.
On Friday, Mr. Obama huddled in the Oval Office with Secretary of State John Kerry over the fine points of a proposal to the Iranians. He was intent on making sure that Iran halted all testing at a heavy-water reactor, a senior administration official said, and in tying any reference to Iran’s enrichment of uranium only to a final agreement.
Still, pursuing a broader diplomatic opening, Mr. Nasr said, could alter other American calculations in the region — from Syria, where the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah is fighting alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s government, to Afghanistan, where the Iranians could be helpful in brokering a postwar settlement with the Taliban.
The prospect of such a long-term strategic realignment is precisely what has so alarmed American allies like Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates and Israel, whose leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on Sunday condemned the deal as a “historic mistake.”
It is also what has stirred opposition from lawmakers, including those of Mr. Obama’s party, who complain that the deal eases pressure on Iran without extracting enough concessions.
“It was strong sanctions, not the goodness of the hearts of the Iranian leaders, that brought Iran to the table,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Sunday.
Mr. Schumer said he would support a push in the Senate to pass additional sanctions against Iran after Congress returns from the Thanksgiving break. A day earlier, Mr. Obama had warned that new sanctions would “derail this promising first step, alienate us from our allies and risk unraveling the coalition that enabled our sanctions to be enforced in the first place.”
On Sunday, administration officials called lawmakers to defend the deal and head off the legislation, while Mr. Obama called Mr. Netanyahu to hear his concerns before the next round of talks.
To some extent, Mr. Obama finds himself in a predicament similar to that of his policy toward Syria, where allies like Saudi Arabia favor more robust support of the rebels fighting Mr. Assad. Some experts predicted that the tensions over Iran would only deepen because the administration would be determined to prevent the deal from unraveling.
“The administration is now a little bit hostage to Iran’s behavior going forward,” said Elliott Abrams, a foreign policy official in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. “Iran’s bad behavior — whether it’s the Revolutionary Guard in Syria or the ayatollah’s vicious speeches about Israel — it’s going to be linked to the deal.”
The bitterness in Israel may hurt another of Mr. Obama’s priorities: a peace accord between the Israelis and Palestinians. Administration officials said they believed Mr. Netanyahu would be able to separate his anger about the Iran deal from any decision about whether to make concessions to the Palestinians. But outside experts have their doubts.
“The Palestinian issue is the big casualty of this deal,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former administration official who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Now that they have an Iran deal, over the strong objections of Israel, it’s going to be very hard to persuade Netanyahu to do something on the Palestinian front.”
For Mr. Obama, resolving the threat of Iran’s nuclear program might be worth taking that chance. He has risked angering European allies, particularly France, by authorizing secret negotiations between the United States and Iran conducted in parallel to the multilateral talks involving Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
Those talks, reported earlier by The Associated Press, fleshed out many of the principles that wound up in the interim agreement in Geneva. Mr. Obama was briefed on their progress by Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who conducted the talks with the deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns.
Over the course of the negotiations, aides say, Mr. Obama became well-versed in the minutiae of Iran’s nuclear program. At a presentation last week with lawmakers, he ticked off the elements of sanctions relief that the West was prepared to offer Iran.
In a phone call Saturday afternoon with Mr. Kerry, who was then in Geneva, Mr. Obama went over the final wording, focusing on the preamble, which refers to a “mutually defined enrichment program” with Iran — essentially the provision that will allow Iran to enrich uranium, a privilege it does not currently have from the United Nations.
As Mr. Obama looks ahead, however, it is not the fine details but the big picture that is likely to dominate his attention. Among the decisions he faces is whether to treat Iran’s nuclear program as a discrete problem to be solved, freeing him up to focus more on Asia, or as the opening act in a more ambitious engagement with Iran that might give it a role in Syria, Afghanistan and other trouble spots.
Aides say that he is open to that, but that it will depend on factors that are out of America’s control, like moderates’ gaining ground in Iran. And given the extreme sensitivities the interim deal has aroused in the Middle East and on Capitol Hill, the White House is being careful to cast the coming negotiations narrowly.
“First and foremost, this has been a multifaceted, multiyear process to address a serious security concern,” said Tom Donilon, the former national security adviser to Mr. Obama, who coordinated Iran policy before leaving the White House in July.
U.S. and Saudis in Growing Rift as Power Shifts
Pool photo by Jason Reed
Secretary of State John Kerry was escorted by the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, as he arrived in Riyadh on Nov. 3.
By ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: November 25, 2013 226 Comments
WASHINGTON — There was a time when Saudi and American interests in the Middle East seemed so aligned that the cigar-smoking former Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, was viewed as one of the most influential diplomats in Washington.
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Those days are over. The Saudi king and his envoys — like the Israelis — have spent weeks lobbying fruitlessly against the interim nuclear accord with Iran that was reached in Geneva on Sunday. In the end, there was little they could do: The Obama administration saw the nuclear talks in a fundamentally different light from the Saudis, who fear that any letup in the sanctions will come at the cost of a wider and more dangerous Iranian role in the Middle East.
Although the Saudis remain close American allies, the nuclear accord is the culmination of a slow mutual disenchantment that began at the end of the Cold War.
For decades, Washington depended on Saudi Arabia — a country of 30 million people but the Middle East’s largest reserves of oil — to shore up stability in a region dominated by autocrats and hostile to another ally, Israel. The Saudis used their role as the dominant power in OPEC to help rein in Iraq and Iran, and they supported bases for the American military, anchoring American influence in the Middle East and beyond.
But the Arab uprisings altered the balance of power across the Middle East, especially with the ouster of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, a close ally of both the Saudis and the Americans.
The United States has also been reluctant to take sides in the worsening sectarian strife between Shiite and Sunni, in which the Saudis are firm partisans on the Sunni side.
At the same time, new sources of oil have made the Saudis less essential. And the Obama administration’s recent diplomatic initiatives on Syria and Iran have left the Saudis with a deep fear of abandonment.
“We still share many of the same goals, but our priorities are increasingly different from the Saudis,” said F. Gregory Gause III, a professor of Middle East studies at the University of Vermont. “When you look at our differing views of the Arab Spring, on how to deal with Iran, on changing energy markets that make gulf oil less central — these things have altered the basis of U.S.-Saudi relations.”
The United States always had important differences with the Saudis, including on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the spread of fundamentalist strains of Islam, Mr. Gause added. But the Obama administration’s determination to ease the long estrangement with Iran’s theocratic leaders has touched an especially raw nerve: Saudi Arabia’s deep-rooted hostility to its Shiite rival for leadership of the Islamic world.
Saudi reaction to the Geneva agreement was guarded on Monday, with the official Saudi Press Agency declaring in a statement that “if there is good will, then this agreement could be an initial step” toward a comprehensive solution for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
In recent days, Saudi officials and influential columnists have made clear that they fear the agreement will reward Iran with new legitimacy and a few billion dollars in sanctions relief at exactly the wrong time. Iran has been mounting a costly effort to support the government of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, including arms, training and some of its most valuable Revolutionary Guards commandos, an effort that has helped Mr. Assad win important victories in recent months.
The Saudis fear that further battlefield gains will translate into expanded Iranian hegemony across the region. Already, the Saudis have watched with alarm as Turkey — their ally in supporting the Syrian rebels — has begun making conciliatory gestures toward Iran, including an invitation by the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul, to his Iranian counterpart to pay an official visit earlier this month.
In the wake of the accord’s announcement on Sunday, Saudi Twitter users posted a wave of anxious, defeatist comments about being abandoned by the United States.
In many ways, those fears are at odds with the facts of continuing American-Saudi cooperation on many fronts, including counterterrorism. “We’re training their National Guard, we’re doing security plans and training for oil terminals and other facilities, and we’re implementing one of the biggest arms deals in history,” said Thomas W. Lippman, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute who has written extensively on American-Saudi relations.
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And despite all the talk of decreasing reliance on Saudi oil, the Saudis remain a crucial producer for world markets.
But none of this can obscure a fundamental split in perspectives toward the Geneva accord. The Saudis see the nuclear file as one front in a sectarian proxy war — centered in Syria — that will shape the Middle East for decades to come, pitting them against their ancient rival.
“To the Saudis, the Iranian nuclear program and the Syria war are parts of a single conflict,” said Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton. “One well-placed Saudi told me, ‘If we don’t do this in Syria, we’ll be fighting them next inside the kingdom.’ ”
How the Saudis propose to win the struggle for Syria is not clear. Already, their expanded support for Islamist rebel fighters in Syria — and the widespread assumption that they are linked to the jihadist groups fighting there — has elevated tensions across the region. After a double suicide bombing killed 23 people outside the Iranian Embassy in Beirut last Tuesday, the Arab news media was full of panicky reports that this was a Saudi “message” to Iran before the nuclear talks in Geneva. A day later, a Shiite group in Iraq claimed responsibility for mortars fired into Saudi Arabia near the border between the two countries.
The Saudi-owned news media has bubbled with vitriol in recent days. One prominent columnist, Tareq al-Homayed, sarcastically compared President Obama to Mother Teresa, “turning his right and left cheeks to his opponents in hopes of reconciliation.”
American efforts to assuage these anxieties, including Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip to Riyadh earlier this month, have had little effect.
The Saudis have already broadcast their discontent about the Iran agreement, and America’s Syria policy, by refusing their newly won seat on the United Nations Security Council last month. It was a gesture that many analysts ridiculed as self-defeating.
Beyond such gestures, it is not clear that the Saudis can do much. The Obama administration has made fairly clear that it is not overly worried about Saudi discontent, because the Saudis have no one else to turn to for protection from Iran.
The Saudis have increased their support for Syrian rebel groups in the past two months, including some Islamist groups that are not part of the secular American-backed coalition.
“They are working with some people who make us squeamish,” said one United States official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “But they’re effective, they’re the real deal. These are Islamists who foresee a Syria where Alawites and Christians are tolerated minorities, but at least they’re not enemies to be slaughtered.”
In its most feverish form, the Saudis’ anxiety is not just that the United States will leave them more exposed to Iran, but that it will reach a reconciliation and ultimately anoint Iran as the central American ally in the region. As the Saudi newspaper Al Riyadh put it recently in an unsigned column: “The Geneva negotiations are just a prelude to a new chapter of convergence” between the United States and Iran.
That may seem far-fetched in light of the ferocious and entrenched anti-Americanism of the Iranian government. But the Saudi king and his ministers have not forgotten the days of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran, who cherished his status as America’s great friend in the region.
“The Saudis are feeling surrounded by Iranian influence — in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Bahrain,” said Richard W. Murphy, a retired American ambassador who spent decades in the Middle East. “It’s a hard state of mind to deal with, a rivalry with ancient roots — a blood feud operating in the 21st century.”
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