Senators’ Call For Zero Enrichment Highlights Fears Over Iran Talks
In opposing revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, United States senators Lindsey Graham and Robert Menendez have demanded Tehran end any uranium enrichment.
In opposing revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, United States senators Lindsey Graham and Robert Menendez have demanded Tehran end any uranium enrichment.
Speaking at a press conference in Jerusalem Monday, the two senators highlighted an earlier plan that the US ‘allow’ Iran and other Middle Eastern states to have nuclear power provided all enrichment takes place outside the region.
Graham and Menendez have been in Israel as part of a senate delegation. Menendez, a Democrat and consistent opponent of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, chairs the Senate Foreign Relations committee, whereas Graham is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and has recently spoken of “riots in the streets” should the former president be prosecuted.
The US pressed that Iran end uranium enrichment at the time of Europe-Iran talks 2003-05. While Tehran at that time suspended enrichment as a ‘goodwill gesture,’ it refused to give up a ‘right’ it said was enshrined in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
When Trump in 2018 withdrew the US from the 2015 deal – the JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – ending uranium enrichment was one of 12 demands stated as aims of ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions.
Washington’s links with Europe
While Iran greatly expand its nuclear program since February 2021, the administration of President Joe Biden has sought to mend Washington’s links with Europe, damaged under Trump, and to take a joint approach over Iran with the three European JCPOA signatories – France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the ‘E3.’
While the US reviving a demand for zero enrichment could strain relations with the E3, and for sure with Russia and China, the Biden administration has found itself in talks with an Iran emboldened by surviving ‘maximum pressure’ and by its nuclear expansion. And while nuclear policy is set collectively under supreme leader Ali Khamenei, the President Ebrahim Raisi, who took office in August 2021, is less inclined to compromise than Hassan Rouhani, president when the JCPOA was signed in 2015.
Biden officials expressed disappointment at Iran’s latest input into what has effectively become US-Iran bilateral ‘ping pong diplomacy’ since the European Union proposed August 8 its ‘final text’ for restoring the JCPOA. Showing clear disappointment, Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said Monday that without “convergence…the whole process is in danger.”
Deficiencies in the text?
JCPOA opponents in the US, as well as some observers, have highlighted what they see as shortfalls in the proposed text – with the slow pace of talks encouraging both speculation and leaks.
Laurence Norman, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, highlighted in a Monday tweet a claim that the draft agreement would give the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) only 60 days, between agreement being signed and ‘Reimplementation Day,’ to examine 18 months of data that the agency has not seen since Iran restricted IAEA access in February 2021.
The US-E3 position is that technical IAEA issues are separate from the ’political’ revival of the JCPOA. But Iranian leaders have publicly demanded an IAEA probe into unexplained uranium traces be dropped before the 2015 nuclear deal is restored, so the US and Iran have apparently struggled to find a suitable form of words to bridge the gap.
Menendez said at the press conference Monday he was unsure if a Congressional review of a revived JCPOA, which is required under the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, could lead to any agreement being blocked. Menendez said the foreign relations committee would have hearings, but whether a vote in the Senate and House of Representatives would meet “the threshold under the law to nullify that agreement is another question.”
A majority vote in both houses could be vetoed by the president. The balance of either house, given the current volatility in US politics, remains in doubt although recent polls show the Democrats, generally more sympathetic to the JCPOA, gaining some momentum.
In September 2021, Truss, just appointed foreign secretary, sat down quietly with her Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly. Truss reportedly assured Amir-Abdollahianthat London was serious about repaying the £400 million debt owed by Britain since the 1970s for undelivered weapons.
Truss had told senior civil servants on promotion to the foreign office days earlier, moved by Prime Minister Boris Johnson from international trade secretary, that her “number one priority” was securing the release of three Britons detained in Iran – Nazanin Zeghari-Ratcliffe, Anoosheh Ashoori and Morad Tahbaz.
Richard Ratcliffe, husband of Zeghari-Ratcliffe who was freed along with Ashoori March 2002, praised Truss in a July newspaper article. “Despite me camping angrily on her doorstep, and our sometime fractious relationship, she delivered on her promise to us to get Nazanin home,” Ratcliffe wrote. “After five foreign secretaries, that matters. She did the one thing everyone knew would work: she paid the UK’s debt.”
Not everyone was pleased. Mike Pompeo, who as secretary of state under President Donald Trump launched maximum pressure as the US left the 2015 Iran nuclear deal condemned the £400 million ($460 million) payment as “blood money.”
Truss has a long record of pragmatism. President of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats when a student, she was opposed the UK leaving the European Union (EU) during the 2016 referendum but later became a ‘Brexiteer.’
‘Not dealing with a perfect world’
Pressed in a House of Commons committee in June, Truss fielded a question on human rights in the Arab Gulf states. “We are not dealing with a perfect world,” she said. “We are dealing in a world where we have to make difficult decisions…”
As foreign secretary, Truss has worked along with the Biden administration in line with the British and European policy of reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Along with French and German counterparts, she has increasingly placed the onus to Iran to make compromises as the talks have become US-Iran contacts, mediated by the European Union, since Vienna multilateral meetings between Iran and six world powers paused in March.
Hopes for the talks have risen and fallen in recent weeks. In comments made Monday to reporters in Brussels, Josep Borrell, head of EU foreign policy, said he was “less confident today than 28 hours before on the convergence of the negotiation process,” and that without convergence, “the whole process is in danger.”
Borrell: Nuclear talks ‘in danger’
While France and Germany, and the European Union, may look to Truss to hold the UK’s current position, Monday’s news that Truss had been elected leader of the British Conservative Party and therefore prime minister designate, prompted celebrations among many conservative commentators.
“To leave the past few years of Chamberlain Conservatism and reclaim Churchill’s mantle, Truss must act boldly from day one to break the FCO’s [foreign office] hold on No 10 [the prime minister’s residence],” tweeted Richard Goldberg, senior advisor to the Federation for Defense of Democracies. In calling Johnson an ‘appeaser,’ Goldberg referred to Neville Chamberlain, British prime minister 1937-40, who explored options for stopping Nazi Germany short of war.
‘No need to tread on eggshells’
Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom at Heritage Foundation and frequent contributor to Fox News, wrote August 31 that Truss would challenge the Biden administration over aspects of US foreign policy, “such as its weakness on Iran.” Truss, wrote Gardiner, would “not be afraid to take on the liberal establishment at home and abroad.”
The Daily Telegraph ran a leader August 28 headlined ‘Truss must bloc Iran deal,’ which it said was “likely to offer at best nothing more than a trivial delay to the ayatollahs’ atomic ambitions, even as it unlocks cash likely to fund attacks against the very Western governments which sign up.” With Zeghari-Ratcliffe freed, the paper opined, “there is no need to tread on eggshells.”
Towards the end of the Conservative leadership election, United Against Nuclear Iran speculated in the US that her rival Rishi Sunak’s “domestic emphasis on Britain’s finances might sway him toward a pro-trade rationale and attendant support for the JCPOA…A Sunak government would suggest a continuation of his former boss’s [Boris Johnson] Iran policy: ongoing support for the JCPOA as a ‘least bad’ option to restrain and possibly moderate Iran in the long term.”
Among other JCPOA opponents, Israel Prime Minister Yair Lapid congratulated Truss as “my new friend, a true friend of Israeli.” The Jerusalem Post, highlighting Lapid and Truss overlapping as foreign ministers, cited “sources close” to the Israeli prime minister that Truss “has shown an understanding of the threat Tehran poses to the Jewish state and is closer to Israel’s view on Iran’s prevarications in the talks.”