Yonah Jeremy Bob/Jerusalem Post: Does the US want a nuclear deal sooner than Iran?/يونا جرمي بوب/جيرازولم بوست: هل أميركا مستعجلة لإبرام الإتفاق النووي أكثر من إيران

Does the US want a nuclear deal sooner than Iran? – analysis
Yonah Jeremy Bob/Jerusalem Post/May 07/2021
يونا جرمي بوب/جيرازولم بوست: هل أميركا مستعجلة لإبرام الإتفاق النووي أكثر من إيران

Does Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei want to see the outcome of June’s presidential election before agreeing to a new nuclear deal?

The signs had been unmistakable, but have only gotten more pronounced. There may be an interim US-Iran deal to move toward returning to the nuclear deal before the May 21 and June 18 deadlines, but if there is not, it will be because the Islamic Republic wants to move slower than America.

May 21 is when the temporary three-month deal between Tehran and the IAEA lapses which gave international inspectors most of the access they need to Iranian nuclear sites despite the ayatollahs’ anger that the Biden administration had not yet removed sanctions.

June 18 is Iranian elections, when many predict the hardliners will win the presidency away from the pragmatists.

Though substantively – and for Israeli purposes there might not be a huge difference between these two Iranian camps – for US and EU purposes the pragmatists are at least willing to talk and make deals.

So the conventional wisdom from four rounds of US-Iran-world power negotiations over recent months was that all sides were pushing hard for a deal before those deadlines.

This could help the pragmatists currently in power to maintain their hold on the presidency – something the US and the EU definitely prefer. But Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may have other plans.

After a recent round of talks, Russia and China sent out very positive messages, the US lukewarm positive and Iran President Hassan Rouhani said up to 70% of the issues were already agreed upon and that a new era of détente might be just over the horizon. But Rouhani is not the real decider in Tehran, Khamenei is.

In a briefing to reporters, a top US negotiator with Iran repeatedly said that all the issues have been fleshed out and that the only real question now is whether Iran actually wants a deal in the coming weeks.

What if Khamenei doesn’t? What if he wants a deal, but only after the election so that the hardliners he is closer to can claim victory instead of the pragmatists?

Maybe he wants to rob the pragmatists of a big victory point going into the June 18 election?

Of course, there are still two weeks before May 21, and since that was an artificial deadline, there are still five weeks to the real June 18 deadline.

So there still may be a deal before then and these weeks may be the Islamic Republic playing chicken until the last moment to make sure there is not more it can squeeze out of the US. That certainly was the pattern for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiations.

But may be Khamenei never wanted to cut a deal until after elections.

Maybe all of this was just to feel out Biden’s team so that after his favored hardliners win the presidency, he will know how and when to cut a deal with the US.

It is also possible that there may be no deal and that Khamenei was negotiating to change the narrative, weaken Western resistance to Iran’s violations and use the lack of a deal to blame more things on Rouhani and his pragmatists.

In any case, Washington has made it clear it is ready for a deal by May 21. The only question now is what Khamenei wants.