Can US-Iran nuclear diplomacy still work after strikes?

Arab News

5 hours ago

LONDON: Speaking at the NATO summit in The Hague on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump indicated that the door is open to diplomacy with Iran, just days after he ordered B-2 bombers to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
Trump once more hailed what he calls the 'massive, precision strike' on three of Iran's nuclear sites, Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, on June 22, adding that 'no other military on Earth could have done it.'
His comments followed claims in a leaked assessment by the US Defense Intelligence Agency suggesting the US strikes had failed to destroy Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium or its centrifuges — succeeding only in setting back the program mere months.
In response to the leaked report, Trump doubled down on earlier statements that Tehran's nuclear program had been 'obliterated.' He went on to say 'we're going to talk' with Iran next week, adding they may sign an agreement.
Asked if Washington is planning to lift sanctions on Iran, Trump said the Iranians 'just had a war' and they 'fought it bravely,' adding that China can buy oil from Iran if it wants, as the country will 'need money to get back into shape.'
Whether Trump's comments are a sign that the US intends to draft a new nuclear deal with Iran remains to be seen. What such a deal might look like in the wake of the past fortnight's events is also anyone's guess. One thing that is clear is that diplomacy seems the only viable option.
It was almost 10 years ago, on July 14, 2015, that representatives of the US, China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, EU and Iran gathered in Vienna to finalize the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known simply as the Iran nuclear deal.
In exchange for sanctions relief, among other things, Iran agreed to limit enrichment of a reduced stockpile of 300 kg of uranium to 3.7 percent — insufficient to produce a bomb but aligned with its claims that its nuclear program was designed solely for generating electricity.
The architect of the deal, which was several years in the making, was US President Barack Obama, who said 'principled diplomacy and … America's willingness to engage directly with Iran opened the door to talks.'
Within three years, the deal was in ruins, undone by Obama's successor, Donald Trump.
According to inspectors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, Iran had been sticking to its side of the bargain. But on May 8, 2018, during his first term as president, Trump unilaterally terminated America's participation in the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions.
Iran, he said, had 'negotiated the JCPOA in bad faith, and the deal gave the Iranian regime too much in exchange for too little.'
This week, in the wake of Israel's surprise attack targeting the heart of Iran's nuclear program — and Trump's equally surprise decision to join in — the prospect of reviving any kind of deal with Tehran might seem distant, at best.
But some analysts believe that a new nuclear rapprochement between the US and Iran could be closer than ever — and not only despite the clashes of the past two weeks, but perhaps because of them.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi, associate professor in the Department of History at California State University San Marcos, said there was no doubt that 'among the Iranian public, previously ambivalent about the nuclear issue, the optics of being bombed for programs still under IAEA inspection may rally new domestic support for pursuing a deterrent.'
Furthermore, the attacks by Israel and the US have also 'degraded the credibility of international institutions such as the IAEA.
'When countries that comply with inspections and international law are attacked anyway, it undermines the incentive structure that sustains the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons regime, NPT, which Iran ratified in 1970, and the Islamic Republic of Iran endorsed in 1996.
'Why sign treaties or allow inspectors in if they do not shield you from military coercion? This is a dangerous message.'
But, he added, 'diplomatic alternatives were, and still are, available' and, for all its flaws, the JCPOA model is not a bad one to consider.
'The 2015 deal, although imperfect, successfully rolled back large portions of Iran's nuclear program and subjected it to the most intrusive inspection regime in the world,' he said.
'Its collapse was not inevitable; it was a political choice, dismantled by unilateral US withdrawal. Efforts to revive the deal have sputtered, and with the bombs falling the path back to diplomacy looked more distant than ever.
'But it is the only path that has worked before — and the only one likely to work again.'
But only with key adjustments.
As Saudi Arabia and other members of the GCC argued at the time, the JCPOA — put together in great secrecy and without consulting the Gulf states — was insufficiently tough and always doomed to fail.
Now experts argue that a return to diplomacy is not only vital for the stability of the region but that any new nuclear deal must be framed with the direct input of those states most exposed to the consequences of diplomatic failure: the Arab Gulf states.
'All that is true,' said Sir John Jenkins, former UK ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria.
'The core point is that the JCPOA bought us between 10 and 15 years, depending on the issue and the associated sunset clause. That was designed to provide time for a new regime to be put in place to contain and deter Iran after the JCPOA expired — which would now only be five years away.
'But the Obama administration, followed by the E3 (the security coalition of the UK, Germany and France), seemed to think that once it had been signed it was such a wonderful achievement that they could turn to other things entirely. That was a mistake.
'This time it needs to be different. And there is an opportunity to start constructing a new security order in the region which involves regional states from the moment of creation rather than as some afterthought.'
Jim Walsh, senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program, is adamant that when Trump pulled the plug in 2018, 'the JCPOA was already working.
'Every intelligence agency said that Iran was in compliance with the agreement and I defy you to find one serious entity that was charging that Iran was in violation of the JCPOA in the three years from 2015 to 2018.
'They even hung on to their end of the bargain after Trump pulled out, for a solid year, until it was politically untenable.'
The IAEA had large teams of inspectors on the ground, Iran had agreed to requirements that no country had ever agreed to before, 'and this was consistent with what people in my trade would call a capability or latency decision.'
This meant 'you have the option so that you can move in that direction if you need to, but you do not cross the line because the costs of crossing it are higher than the benefits.'
And, he says, despite all that has happened since, especially in the past fortnight, Iran is fundamentally in the same place today — ready to deal.
'What is Iran's leverage here in negotiations with the IAEA or with the Europeans or with the Americans? It's that they can turn the dial up on enrichment and turn it down, and they can install advanced centrifuges and then take them apart.
'This is part of a political game, because they don't have a lot of ways to put leverage on their opponents.'
He believes that if Iran really wanted an actual bomb, rather than the threat of one as a bargaining chip, it would have had one by now.
'Producing highly enriched uranium is the technically hardest part of the project, and moving to weaponization is more of an engineering problem.' The fact that Iran has not done so is the real clue to the way ahead.
'I've worked for 20 years to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but it would be hard to argue that they don't have some justification. Let's be super clear: the country that's attacking them, Israel, is a nuclear state.
'But if they wanted to build a bomb, they've had 18 years to do so, so someone has to explain to me why that hasn't happened.
'As far back as 2007 the director of US national intelligence said Iran had the technical wherewithal to build a weapon, and the only remaining obstacle was the political will to do so.'
And, despite Trump's claim that the US attacks had 'obliterated' the Iranian nuclear program, political will may still be all that is preventing Iran becoming a nuclear state.
Dan Sagir, an Israeli researcher and lecturer on the topic of Israel's own nuclear deterrence and its impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East, says that if the US and Iran do return to the talks that were already underway when Israel launched 'Operation Rising Lion' on June 12, 'any deal that emerges is not going to be as solid as the previous one.'
'So Trump bombed Fordow,' said Sagir. 'But where is the 400 kg of highly enriched uranium? The Iranians, who are very talented in this field, will say, 'You bombed it. You buried it.' But do we know that's correct? We'll never know.
'If they still have it, they can get the bomb within a year. If they don't have it, it's two-and-a-half years. In any case, the game is not over.'
In fact, said Walsh of MIT, there is 'every indication' that the uranium, which the IAEA says has been enriched to a near-weapons-grade 60 percent — a claim dismissed by Iran as based on 'forged documents provided by the Zionist regime' — is not buried within the Fordow complex.
'In May, Iran's foreign minister warned the IAEA that they would take precautions. On June 13, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization also said they were going to take action, and on that day, according to satellite imagery, a convoy of trucks was outside Fordow, and the next day they were gone.
'So I would guess that they still have a lot of nuclear material somewhere that they could very quickly upgrade to weapons-grade material (which requires 90 percent enrichment).'
Whether or not the current fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran lasts, details emerging of America's attack on Fordow and the other Iranian nuclear facilities appear only to reinforce the conclusion that a new nuclear deal with Iran is the only way forward.
'You cannot bomb the knowledge of how to build a centrifuge out of the heads of the Iranians,' said Walsh. 'You can't bomb away 18 years of experience.
'This is a big, mature program and dropping a few bombs isn't going to change that. You can blow up equipment, and kill scientists, but we're not talking about Robert Oppenheimer (the US physicist who led the team that made the first atomic bomb) in 1945.
'They've been at this for 18 years and now we're at the management phase, not at the invention stage. They're going to be able to reconstitute that program if they want to. There is no military solution to this problem.'