This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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Secretary of State John Kerry arrived here early Sunday in an attempt to rescue negotiations with Iran that have stalled on the question of how large a nuclear infrastructure that nation will be permitted to have over the next decade or two. But he quickly confronted the fact that the problem might be less at the negotiating table here than with mullahs in Tehran and members of Congress in Washington.
During 11 days of intensive negotiations in a palace just steps from where Beethoven and Mozart once lived and worked, a team of sophisticated, westernized negotiators from Iran’s government have given a bit of ground on how some of the country’s facilities will be used and how others will be inspected, according to officials who have been in the rooms where the wording was being discussed.
But the Iranians appeared taken a bit by surprise when their supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave a speech in Tehran last week that went into extraordinary detail about how much nuclear enrichment capacity Iran would need — statements that seemed to circumscribe their ability to come up with face-saving ways to dismantle a good portion of Iran’s facilities while still portraying their program as moving forward.
The Americans face their own constraints at home: A letter from key members of the Senate to President Obama describes what a deal to prevent Iran from producing a weapon should look like, and suggests that anything short of that would not lead to the lifting of sanctions, the only incentive the American team can dangle in front of the Iranians.
It was a reminder for Mr. Kerry that there is not one negotiation underway to strike this deal, but three. Mr. Kerry and his counterparts from five other nations are struggling to reach an accommodation with Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s American-educated foreign minister, who has been camped out for the past 11 days in the Coburg Palace, which has become a luxury dormitory for the American, Western European, Russian and Chinese negotiators who are living and working just doors away from one another.
But Mr. Zarif has a parallel negotiation underway with Ayatollah Khamenei and the generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which runs the military side of the nuclear program and barely trusts its foreign minister. Mr. Obama, meanwhile, has been in a constant behind-the-scenes struggle with members of Congress who argue for more sanctions and more pressure. Mr. Obama has threatened to veto such efforts for fear they will undermine chances for a deal that he believes would be a more lasting solution than permanent sanctions or military action against Iran’s nuclear sites.
“It may be the most complex negotiation I’ve ever seen,” said an American official who has been advising the White House, declining to speak on the record about sensitive negotiations. “Everyone is using the constraints they face back home as a reason to avoid compromise. And the fact of the matter is that there are many generals in Iran and many members of Congress in Washington who would like to see this whole effort collapse.”
Mr. Kerry said he was evaluating the process to determine whether to recommend to Mr. Obama that the talks be extended beyond the July 20 deadline.
“Obviously, we have some very significant gaps still,” he said. “It is vital to make certain that Iran is not going to develop a nuclear weapon, that their program is peaceful.” Though Mr. Kerry is not talking about extending the talks — which is permitted under an interim agreement reached in November — that now seems inevitable.
“We are trying to find solutions to narrow the difference,” Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said to a state-run Iranian news service in an interview here. “Given this context, it’s possible that negotiations will be extended by a few days or weeks.”
American officials will not talk about an extension, for fear it will derail their chances of making progress by the deadline next Sunday. But for Mr. Obama, the downside of an extension is small. The lifting of a relatively modest number of sanctions since November, under the preliminary deal, has not resulted in the wide-scale dismemberment of the sanctions regime predicted by Israeli officials. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency say the Iranians have scrupulously observed their part of the temporary deal, blending down the fuel that the United States feared was closest to conversion to bomb grade.
But the steps the Iranians have taken so far are easily reversible. And the American negotiators, led by Wendy R. Sherman, the under secretary of state for political affairs, are haunted by memories of how quickly North Korea reversed a dismantlement program that it negotiated seven years ago.
When it comes to stopping a country from getting a weapons capability, there are only educated assessments about how much warning time can be created by limiting a country’s access to certain technologies, reducing the amounts of fuel that can be quickly converted to bomb-grade fuel and exposing the history of weapons-making efforts. Those bets failed in North Korea and Pakistan; they succeeded in South Africa and South Korea, where leaders decided a weapon was not worth the cost.
It is far from clear that Iran’s leaders — divided between those who want a long-term accord with the West and those who seek a restoration of Iranian influence in the Middle East — have made a decision. Mr. Zarif represents the faction that seems “genuinely convinced,” in the words of one American negotiator, “that a weapons capability doesn’t buy them much.”
Mr. Zarif said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “I will commit to everything and anything that would provide credible assurances for the international community that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons, because we are not. We don’t see any benefit in Iran developing a nuclear weapon.”
But Ayatollah Khamenei, in describing Iran’s long-range needs, talked of a tenfold increase in enrichment capacity — so large that it would give Iran a “breakout time” of just weeks to produce weapons-grade fuel. He was vague about when Iran intended to create that capacity. A senior American official briefing reporters on Saturday said that Iran would have to accept sharp limits on its number of working centrifuges — meaning fewer than the 10,000 it has today — for a decade or more.
That is at the core of the problem. Robert Einhorn, who was a central player in developing the American strategy until he left the administration last year, noted recently that “rather than prepare the political ground for some concessions, the Iranian leadership has locked itself into a narrative that they need an industrial capability to produce all their own nuclear power fuel.”
Mr. Obama is also getting tied down. If a deal is struck, he will need Congress to revoke sanctions. But that is a hard vote for Democrats as well as Republicans, and a letter to Mr. Obama now being circulated in the Senate by Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who heads the Foreign Relations Committee, and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, lays out a series of protections they say they will insist upon if Congress is to relax sanctions as part of any deal.
Among them are a robust inspection arrangement that “lasts at least 20 years” and “access to any and all facilities, persons or documentation” sought by the International Atomic Energy Agency for suspected past work on weapons.
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Obama is in bed with the terrorists.