Responding to his electoral victory, Iran called on US President-elect Joe Biden to return the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). “Now, an opportunity has come up for the next US administration to compensate for past mistakes and return to the path of complying with international agreements through respect of international norms,'' Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said, adding that Tehran “considers constructive engagement with the world as a strategy”. But this will not be easy, experts believe, highlighting a number of domestic and foreign challenges. Kanishkan Sathasivam, professor of international relations at Salem State University, said that Biden “has not explicitly said he will return to the JCPOA unconditionally”. The reason is that many factors related to the JCPOA and the overall political and security situation in the region have changed since 2016. “The most I see in this regard is Biden agreeing to a brief return to the JCPOA, to allow the Iranian side to save face and claim some sort of victory, but with a private guarantee that the Iranian side will subsequently open unconditional negotiations with the US on revisions to the agreement. And furthermore, these renegotiations will have to include addressing Iranian actions in the region unrelated to the nuclear issue, such as in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine,” Sathasivam pointed out. For Jason Brodsky, policy director for United Against Nuclear Iran, the question of who will control the US Senate is a major determinant of this equation's outcome. Brodsky expects that Biden will “be politically constrained as he balances multiple competing domestic priorities” in case the Republicans take control of the Senate. Iran and the so-called P5+1 (the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) reached the JCPOA in July 2015. The 159-page document stipulates that the United States and the European Union (EU) would terminate all nuclear-related sanctions on Iran in return for Iran's approval of increased monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and severe restrictions on nuclear research, production of enriched uranium, operations of centrifuges and accumulation of heavy water. This deal was negotiated and finalised when Barack Obama was serving as US president. Biden served as his vice president, a key factor behind the Iranians having high hopes for the resumption of diplomatic endeavours during the next four years. Nevertheless, Pierre Pahlavi, professor at the Canadian Forces College and Royal Military College of Canada, said “it would be naive to think that a Democratic mandate would automatically translate into an improvement in Iranian-American relations.” On the one hand, Pahlavi said, the last few years have been accompanied by a major strengthening of hardliners in Iran who, already given as winners in the next Iranian elections, are more reluctant than ever to make further concessions to Washington. On the other hand, a close reading of Trump's discourse reveals that disagreements with Trump doctrine on Iran “lie more in form than in substance”. “Biden specifies that there is a smart way to be tough on Iran, and there is Trump's way. While he advocates reconsidering the means used over the past four years, he remains extremely conventional, even conservative, with regard to the objectives pursued,” said Pahlavi. “Not only is it a matter of preventing Iran from acquiring atomic weapons, but also of bringing its leaders back to the negotiating table to obtain an agreement more inclusive and more binding than the JCPOA signed in 2015 — an agreement expanded to end the Revolutionary Guards' ‘destabilising activities' in the region and to suspend Iran's ambitious ballistic missile programme,” he added. In his presidential campaign, Biden vowed a return to the JCPOA if Iran agreed to negotiate a new deal and stopped developing its nuclear capabilities. “If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations. With our allies, we will work to strengthen and extend the nuclear deal's provisions, while also addressing other issues of concern,” Biden wrote in a piece for CNN that was published in September. Despite a deal in place, Iran's nuclear programme has become a serious issue in global affairs once again because of Trump. Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, imposed new sanctions on Iran and pressed his European allies to follow suit. This came at a time in which Iran had just begun to rebuild its economy after decades-long sanctions and negotiate trade agreements with many world states. Trump described the JCPOA as a “horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made”. “It didn't bring calm, it didn't bring peace, and it never will,” Trump claimed. Trump's move was then described by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who perceives Iran's growing military capabilities as a threat to his country — as “historic”, praising the US president for his “courageous leadership”. Iran blamed the Trump administration for the collapse of the nuclear deal and stressed it was willing to maintain it. But the following years saw a return to nuclear work by the Islamic republic. For example, the IAEA announced in September that Iran enriched 2,105kg of uranium, which is more than 10 times the amount it was permitted to stockpile under the 2015 agreement. But Iran allowed for inspection to continue and insisted that its nuclear programme will serve civilian purposes. In parallel with nuclear tensions, the United States and Iran also had military skirmishes in the Middle East, including the killing of Iran's Qassem Suleimani — head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — through a US airstrike in Iraq, and US accusations that Iran attacked oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, as well as the shooting down of a US drone in the Gulf by Iranian forces. Such tough times raised expectations of all out confrontation. In June 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo replied “of course” when asked whether military action against Iran was being discussed. Such escalatory responses were reflected in official US statements, which frequently described Iran as the “world's leading state sponsor of terrorism”. These incidents show how complex the situation is. Cornelius Adebahr, non-resident fellow at Carnegie Europe, told Al-Ahram Weekly that Biden as US president could strengthen ties with America's European allies as well as with Russia and China, the deal's other co-signatories that have been dismayed by Washington walking back on its commitments. But Adebahr noted that the “crux obviously is with regional states that have opposed the deal since its inception”. “They, however, suffered from an erratic and unreliable US administration that was bent on withdrawing its presence in the name of ‘America First'. Here, Biden will have to work with Israel and its newfound Arab allies to balance the re-establishment of the nuclear accord with increased US support for regional security,” Adebahr said. *A version of this article appears in print in the 12 November, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
