As Deadline Nears for an Iran Nuclear Pact, the Fingers Are Pointing
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Version 0 of 1. WASHINGTON — With less than three weeks until a deadline for a final agreement between Iran and the West on the future of Iran’s nuclear program, it is not just the country’s 10,000 working centrifuges that are spinning. So are the key negotiators. Secretary of State John Kerry published an op-ed on Tuesday warning the Iranians that while they have engaged in serious talks, they have yet to make any tough decisions. “Their public optimism about the potential outcome of these negotiations has not been matched, to date, by the positions they have articulated behind closed doors,” he wrote. He described what failure would look like: “International sanctions will tighten.” He was immediately one-upped by Mohammed Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, who took to YouTube with a video making the case that if the talks fail in coming weeks, it is the Americans who will be at fault — for failing to recognize Iran’s reasonableness and basic rights. “To those who continue to believe that sanctions brought Iran to the negotiating table, I can only say that pressure has been tried for the past eight years, in fact for the past 35 years,” he said, as he strolled on a campus in Tehran, looking very much like the urbane professor he was until last spring. “It didn’t bring the Iranian people to kneel in submission. And it will not now, nor in the future.” Behind the posturing on both sides was the opening of what could be the final round of negotiations — or, just as likely, an extension of the talks as both sides try to square face-saving compromises with their previous declarations of red lines they could not cross. But the enterprise is complicated by the fact that the talks are about more than the question of whether Iran can only be trusted to have 3,000 or so centrifuges in operation — the West’s argument — or whether it must have upward of 40,000 or more, which the Iranians say they will need to fuel nuclear reactors they have not yet built. The public sparring is clearly an effort to seize the larger narrative of a negotiation that is ultimately about how Iran settles a long-running internal debate about whether to settle its decades-long estrangement from the West, and achieve its ambitions to establish itself as the Middle East’s most influential player. The declarations by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Zarif seemed aimed at setting a predicate for who would be at fault if the talks collapse. Mr. Zarif, who for months has sounded publicly optimistic and privately far more pessimistic that a deal is in the offing, used his video to recap his view of the years of tension and to argue that now was the time to “make history” and “end an unnecessary crisis that has distracted us from addressing together our common challenges, such as the horrifying events of the past few weeks in Iraq.” That was the closest he came to suggesting that this is a moment when the United States and Iran have a common goal in the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But he also argued that sanctions and sabotage, which American officials credit with forcing Iran to the negotiating table, actually had the opposite effect. “Sanctions did not cripple our nuclear program,” he argued. “Neither did the murder of our nuclear scientists,” a reference to assassinations widely attributed to Israel, “and the sabotage of our nuclear facilities, with potentially disastrous environmental consequences,” an apparent reference to the American and Israeli computer attacks that destroyed roughly 1,000 centrifuges at the main nuclear facility at Natanz. Mr. Kerry argued that the time had come for Iran’s leadership to make a decision that it has so far hedged on whether it wants sanctions relief more than it wants a threshold capability to build a weapon. He argued that an extension on the talks is not automatic, writing that “our partners will not consent to an extension merely to drag out negotiations.” But calling a halt to the talks would invite Iran to resume large-scale enrichment, including of higher-purity uranium that is closer to bomb-grade. One of the mysteries of this latest round of talks, which begins Thursday morning in Vienna, is how much leeway Mr. Zarif, viewed with suspicion by Iran’s military and many of its clerics, has to strike a deal on his own. He reports to President Hassan Rouhani, who was elected last year on a platform of freeing Iran from the sanctions that have made it so difficult for Iranians to move money abroad, sell oil or to travel. But Mr. Rouhani will not decide what deal to take. That decision will be made by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is believed to have scuttled an agreement in 2009. “It’s not clear right now what is more dangerous for the supreme leader,” Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “A deal, or the absence of a nuclear deal?” At the opening of this latest round the chief American negotiator, Wendy R. Sherman, was joined by two officials who opened a secret channel to the Iranians in 2012: William J. Burns, the deputy secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The number of spinning centrifuges is only one issue. Whether Iran will sign on to a protocol that allows inspections in many other areas of the country, whether it will allow interviews of its nuclear scientists, whether it will explain away a dozen questions posed by international inspectors about suspected weapons designs are all on the table. “It’s all about a comprehensive package,” said one senior administration official, “that involves enrichment, enhanced monitoring, and access to the inside of the program.” That mixture allows room for additional spin. The United States — along with Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — has been trying to come up with solutions that would allow the Iranians to argue at home that they gave up none of their nuclear rights, and allow the West to claim that they slowed Iran’s ability to build a weapon. But there is only so much face-saving that is possible. In the end, it is hard to spin how many centrifuges are spinning — or whether Iran’s nuclear laboratories have been opened up. “I can’t think of a harder deal to be negotiating in public,” one senior Obama administration official said, “or to explain simultaneously to the Congress and the Iranian mullahs.” |