WASHINGTON — When President Obama wrote last month to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
urging him to overcome a decade of mistrust and negotiate a deal
limiting Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, it was perhaps the president’s last
effort to reach a reconciliation with Iran that could remake the Middle
East.
Today,
Mr. Obama needs a foreign policy accomplishment more than ever, and he
sees time running out on his hope of changing the calculus in a Middle
East where Americans are, against his instincts, back on the ground. But
the forces arrayed against a deal are formidable — not just Mr.
Khamenei and the country’s hard-liners, but newly empowered Republicans,
some of his fellow Democrats, and many of the United States’ closest
allies.
As
negotiators head back to Vienna this week for what they hope will be
the final round of talks, Mr. Obama’s top national security advisers put
the chance of reaching an agreement this month at 40 to 50 percent. “In
the end this is a political decision for the Iranians,” Mr. Obama told a
small group of recent visitors to the White House, a statement that
could be true for him as well.
Yet
even if a deal is struck it will be the beginning of an argument,
rather than the end of one. For many of the president’s adversaries, the
details of whatever deal he emerges with — how much warning the West
would have if Iran raced for a bomb, for example — are almost beside the
point. “In
every nation involved, this negotiation is a proxy for something
bigger,” argues Robert Litwak, a Wilson Center scholar and author of
“Iran’s Nuclear Chess: Calculating America’s Moves.”
“Here
it is a test of Obama’s strength and strategy,” he said. “In Tehran it
is a proxy for a fundamental choice: whether Iran is going to continue
to view itself as a revolutionary state, or whether it’s going to be a
normal country,” which so many of its young people yearn for it to
become. So
far, Mr. Khamenei has avoided making that choice, intelligence
assessments by the United States and its allies conclude. While he has
authorized President Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister, Mohammad
Javad Zarif, to negotiate with the United States and its partners, they
believe that the supreme leader may decide whether to approve a deal
only after his negotiators come home with the details.
That
is what happened with a much smaller deal in 2009, which he killed
after an agreement was reached in Vienna. And surrounding the ayatollah
are hard-liners who have opposed any accord, as well as leaders of the
Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is responsible for the military side
of the nuclear program. But
Mr. Litwak’s observation about how the deal is a proxy for other issues
applies equally to the rest of the key players in the negotiations:
Israel, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Western Europe.
Israel’s
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has described Iran as an
“existential threat” for so long that it is hard for American officials
to imagine any deal Israel would support. For years a succession of
Israeli governments have described Iran as just six months or so away
from a bomb; last year the Netanyahu government opposed even the modest
lifting of sanctions.
In
recent weeks Mr. Netanyahu has repeated his warning that “the Islamic
State of Iran is not a partner of America, it’s an enemy of America,”
and said Israel would not abide by any arrangement that leaves Iran as a
“threshold” nuclear state — one poised to build a weapon in a matter of
months or years.
Israeli
officials play down their influence in Congress on the issue and
disagree internally on the merits of a deal; some in the intelligence
agencies see advantages to more intrusive inspections in Iran. “We have
no formal status and no real capacity” in the talks, said Yuval
Steinitz, the strategic affairs minister who has been Israel’s primary
point man, apart from the prime minister himself, on Iran. “We can only
convince, we can only speak and explain.”
The
Saudis have a parallel worry: that any deal with Iran would be the
opening wedge to a reordering of American alliances in the region, one
in which Washington would begin to work on regional issues with the
Shiite Iranian state instead of with Sunni Saudi Arabia. No
one has been more outspoken on the issue than Saudi Arabia’s former
intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal, who in recent weeks has
warned that the Saudis will build uranium enrichment facilities to match
whatever Iran is allowed to retain — even if the kingdom has no use for
them. That has raised the specter of an arms race, even if a deal is
struck.
Perhaps
the most complex political player is Russia. It has remained a key
element of the negotiating team, despite its confrontations with the
West over Ukraine. It has been a central player in negotiating what may
prove the key to a deal: a plan for Iran to ship much of its
low-enriched uranium to Russian territory for conversion into fuel for
the Bushehr nuclear power plant. But
Russian officials may want an extension of the talks that keeps any
real agreement in limbo — and thus keeps Iranian oil off the market, so
that it cannot further depress falling prices.
Apart
from Mr. Obama, the most unambiguous proponents of reaching a deal are
the European nations, said Mark Fitzpatrick, an Iran nuclear expert at
the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Many
Europeans feel little threat from Iran, and believe that Israel, with
its own unacknowledged but widely known nuclear arsenal, exaggerates the
threat of a nuclear-able Tehran. The notable exception are the French,
who have publicly argued for tougher terms in the negotiations and say
they see their role as to serve, in the words of one Western diplomat,
as “a significant counterweight on the impulse of Obama to make
concessions.”. But
the biggest counterweight to a negotiating success with Iran may be the
new Republican majority in the Senate — including some members, like
Senator Lindsey Graham, who have argued that Mr. Obama is overly eager
for a deal.
Obama
administration officials reject the charge and say that though Mr.
Obama is hopeful, he would never sign an accord that did not put Iran a
year or more away from being able to produce enough fuel for a single
bomb. “Whatever we negotiate we will have to sell in Congress, sooner
rather than later,” said one of Mr. Obama’s senior strategists,
declining to speak on the record because of diplomatic sensitivities.
“And
that works to our advantage in the negotiating room, because it means
we can say to Zarif,” the Iranian foreign minister, “ ‘Even if we agreed
to lifting sanctions early, or letting you keep all your centrifuges in
place — and we wouldn’t — Congress would rebel.’ ”
That
rebellion has started. When Congress came back into session last week
Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who leads the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois issued a
statement saying that “as co-authors of bipartisan sanctions laws that
compelled Iran to the negotiating table, we believe that a good deal
will dismantle, not just stall, Iran’s illicit nuclear program and
prevent Iran from ever becoming a threshold nuclear state.” They would
enact new sanctions “if a potential deal does not achieve these goals.”. It
is a view the new Republican majority will back, along with many
Democrats. Mr. Obama could always veto new sanctions, but the warnings
themselves may make it harder, administration officials fear, to get
Iran to reach a final agreement.
Mr.
Obama has made clear that in the near term, he would act on his own
authority to temporarily suspend sanctions step by step, as the Iranians
complied with a deal; a vote to repeal those sanctions might not come
for several years. But he confronts that problem only if there is a
deal. If not, American officials hint, they will press for another
extension of talks — betting that the combination of falling oil prices,
the threat of new sanctions, and the possibility of more sabotage or
military action will eventually lead to an accord.
Yet
Mr. Khamenei, American and European intelligence officials say, may be
betting that time is on Iran’s side. They have concluded that the
supreme leader believes the recent election has weakened Mr. Obama, and
that the talks have already led to an acknowledgment of Iran’s right to
enrich uranium on its own soil — at least in small amounts — and an
understanding that whenever a final agreement expires, it will be able
to have an industrial enrichment ability much as Japan does.
“What
the Iranians are looking for is a narrative of victory,” one American
diplomat said last week, “a way to say the West backed down, and
admitted Iran will be able to produce its own nuclear fuel one day, in
unlimited quantity.” What Congress needs, the diplomat said, “is a
narrative that Iran was forced to dismantle what it has.”. Satisfying both, he added, “is what makes the politics of this so much harder than the physics of slowing the bomb program.”
