U.S. and Iranian officials said an initial day of talks in Vienna on returning to the 2015 nuclear deal was “constructive,” but the Biden administration cautioned that no immediate breakthroughs were anticipated on one of the new president’s top foreign policy goals. The European-led diplomatic effort featured mediators shuttling between Iranian and American envoys, a far cry from the intensive face-to-face discussions held by U.S. and Iranian diplomats who brokered the original agreement. The goal now is agreeing on a road map toward lifting U.S. sanctions that were imposed under President Donald Trump and recommitting Tehran to its agreements under the accord, a complicated undertaking with no guarantee of success.
The talks will not resolve the core disagreement over which side, Iran or the United States, is at fault and should make the first move to repair the agreement. While both sides still publicly maintain that the onus is on the other, in recent weeks they have moved, with help from European signatories to the deal, toward negotiating a list of sequential, simultaneous steps to return to compliance. A U.S. team led by President Biden’s special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, was in Vienna for the discussions, which are scheduled to continue Friday. The Americans and Iranians are staying in separate hotels, and U.S. officials do not anticipate direct talks between the two delegations. For the United States and others, the hope is that diplomacy can persuade Iran to scale back its uranium enrichment to the agreed levels. Iran wants an end to sanctions initially lifted under the accord and reimposed by Trump, as well as more than 1,500 new measures Trump levied to force Iran’s leaders to make a new deal, which they never did. Backers of the pact see an urgency to get it back on track: the dwindling breakout time before Iran is expected to be able to produce enough fissile material for a potential nuclear weapon, alongside approaching elections in Iran that may usher in a more hard-line government.
This article makes clear what many in the United States don’t grasp: the Biden administration is not trying to “re-join” the JCPOA, but it is trying to leverage Trump’s exit into a better deal than that negotiated by the Obama administration over the course of years. This is not a recipe for success. Iran is less, not more, willing to negotiate now, and why would it agree to harsher terms than those it accepted when sanctions pressure came from the EU, China, and Russia in addition to the United States? The Biden administration would be better served to demonstrate its trustworthiness by rejoining the original deal and use the resulting improved relationship as a basis for future agreements on additional items of importance to the United States. As it stands now, Biden’s Iran policy differs from Trump primarily in tone, while the overarching aim – to use withdrawal from the JCPOA and increased sanctions as leverage for a better deal – is the same.