Irán suspende programa nuclear por acuerdo internacional histórico

Publicado: 22 nov 2013 | 18:03 GMT Última actualización: 22 nov 2013 | 19:03 GMT

El Sexteto (Rusia, EE.UU., China, Francia, Reino Unido y Alemania) ha reconocido el derecho de Irán a enriquecer uranio, según informan medios iraníes citando fuentes diplomáticas.

"El Sexteto e Irán han finalizado la negociación sobre la cuestión del enriquecimiento de uranio, con un documento final que reconoce este derecho de Irán", informa la agencia IRNA citando a un diplomático occidental que habló bajo la condición de anonimato.  

Según el diplomático, en estos momentos las partes discuten la cuestión del funcionamiento del reactor de agua pesada en la ciudad de Arak.

En estos momentos el canciller iraní, Javad Zarif, mantiene una reunión con su homólogo ruso, Serguéi Lavrov.

Según una fuente iraní cercana a las negociaciones citada por la agencia rusa Interfax, el acuerdo entre Irán y el Sexteto está listo en un 90 por ciento, aunque las discrepancias siguen siendo muy profundas.

"El ministro de Exteriores Javad Zarif dijo que el 90 por ciento del acuerdo está preparado pero señaló que quedan cuatro puntos, sobre los cuales las partes mantienen discrepancias", señaló la fuente.  

Irán suspende programa nuclear por acuerdo internacional histórico

Agencias Noviembre 23, 2013 9:36 pm

Seis potencias mundiales dan el paso a la desnuclearización del país medioriental


Un histórico acuerdo que paralizará durante seis meses -mientras se negocia un acuerdo global y definitivo- el programa nuclear irán ha quedado sellado en una ceremonia en la que han participado los jefes de las diplomacia de Irán y seis potencias.

El pacto preliminar incluye que Irán suspenda el avance de su programa nuclear, inclusive un reactor de plutonio en su planta en Arak. El acuerdo también hizo un llamamiento a Irán para que neutralice sus reservas de uranio enriquecido al 20%.

Bajo los términos del acuerdo, Teherán también ha accedido a inspecciones atómicas, agregó el funcionario, quien insistió en no ser identificado porque no estaba autorizado a hablar de los términos del pacto.

En Ginebra, el ministro de relaciones exteriores iraní, Mohamad Javad Zarif, dijo: “Sí, tenemos un acuerdo”, mientras se dirigía a los periodistas que abarrotaban el vestíbulo del hotel donde se han realizado negociaciones maratónicas durante los últimos cinco días.

Cuando le preguntaron si había un acuerdo, el ministro de relaciones exteriores francés, Laurent Fabius dijo “sí” e hizo la seña del pulgar hacia arriba.

El objetivo ha sido un acuerdo que congele el programa nuclear de Irán durante seis meses a cambio de ofrecer a los iraníes un alivio limitado de las sanciones económicas. Si el acuerdo provisional se mantiene, las partes negociarán acuerdos de una etapa final para asegurar que Irán no construya armas atómicas. (AP y EFE)

Irán logra acuerdo nuclear con seis potencias; si no cumple, “enfrentará las consecuencias”: Obama

Por: Redacción / Sinembargo - noviembre 23 de 2013 - 21:52


Ciudad de México, 23 de noviembre (SinEmbargo) .- Tras darse a conocer que las potencias mundiales del G5+1 y el gobierno de Irán alcanzaron un acuerdo sobre el programa nuclear iraní, el Presidente de Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, afirmó que las negociaciones continuarán.

En rueda de prensa, Obama afirmó que se trata del “paso más importante que hemos tenido respecto a las relaciones con Irán”.

Obama confirmó que el acuerdo alcanzado congelará durante los próximos seis meses el programa nuclear de Irán con el objetivo de que éste sea “completa y exclusivamente para objetivos pacíficos”.

Agregó que, en caso de que no cumpla, “Irán deberá enfrentar las consecuencias”.

De acuerdo con Obama, Irán ha prometido detener el enriquecimiento de uranio.

En similares términos se expresó su secretario de Estado, John Kerry, quien la víspera había viajado de urgencia a Ginebra para ultimar el acuerdo. Este “primer paso hace que el mundo sea más seguro. Ahora queda más trabajo”, tuiteó desde la ciudad suiza.

El acuerdo se da luego de intensas negociaciones y fue dado a conocer por la jefa de la diplomacia europea, Catherine Ashton.

Los cancilleres y diplomáticos de Alemania, China, Estados Unidos, Francia, Reino Unido y Rusia dialogaron con la delegación de Irán durante el sábado y madrugada de domingo hasta llegar al acuerdo.

“Hemos logrado un acuerdo entre el G5+1 e Irán”, escribió el vocero de Ashton en Twitter, mientras los ministros Laurent Fabius de Francia, William Hague de Reino Unido y Guido Westerwelle de Alemania lo confirmaron al salir de las negociaciones.

Israel rechaza el acuerdo nuclear de Irán

REDACCION Noviembre 24, 2013 9:19 am


Benjamin Netanyahu, el primer ministro israelí señaló que Irán sólo consiguió un alivio de las sanciones en su contra
El primer ministro israelí, Benjamin Netanyahu, rechazó hoy el acuerdo alcanzado por las potencias del G5+1 y el gobierno de Irán para limitar el programa nuclear de ese país, luego de casi una década de estancamiento.

Netanyahu indicó este domingo que Irán consiguió lo que pedía, “un alivio significativo de las sanciones en su contra y la preservación de partes significativas de su programa nuclear”.

En tanto, el canciller, Avigdor Lieberman, dijo que Israel debe actuar con independencia en relación al acuerdo alcanzado por las potencias internacionales con Irán, y agregó que todas las opciones están sobre la mesa.

“Tenemos que asumir la responsabilidad de nuestro destino”, dijo a Radio Israel. “Como siempre, todas las opciones están sobre la mesa.”

Lieberman calificó el acuerdo como una victoria para los líderes religiosos de Irán, destacó el diario Haaretz.

El borrador del acuerdo alcanzado en Ginebra tendrá una vigencia de seis meses, el cual propone que Irán suspenda el enriquecimiento de uranio de alto grado.

El país islámico se ha comprometido a detener el procesamiento de uranio enriquecido hasta el 20 por ciento y sólo podrá hacerlo por debajo del 5.0 por ciento, lo que resulta suficiente para su uso civil.

A cambio, las potencias permitirán la liberación de alrededor de cuatro mil 200 millones de dólares de fondos iraníes congelados en cuentas de bancos extranjeros.

Además, se autorizará la reanudación del comercio de metales preciosos, algunos petroquímicos y partes de aeronaves.

Teherán no seguirá expandiendo las plantas nucleares de Fordo y Natanz, ni la planta de agua pesada de Arak, que está en construcción y donde se podría producir plutonio necesario para una bomba atómica.

Las negociaciones cerraron al filo de las 03:00 horas locales (02:00 GMT) después de cuatro días complejos e intensos entre Irán y el G5+1, integrado por Estados Unidos, Reino Unido, Francia, Rusia y China, más Alemania.

Los siete cancilleres de los países mencionados, más la jefa de la diplomacia europea Catherine Ashton, firmaron el acuerdo en una ceremonia en el Palacio de las Naciones, sede de la Organización de Naciones Unidas (ONU) en Ginebra, Suiza.

Caen precios del crudo tras acuerdo nuclear con Irán

Notimex Noviembre 25, 2013 11:31 am

El Brent del Mar del Norte cayó hoy a su nivel más bajo en tres semanas


El barril de crudo Brent del Mar del Norte cayó hoy a su nivel más bajo en tres semanas al perder hasta tres dólares y cotizarse en 108.05 dólares, tras el acuerdo alcanzado entre las potencias mundiales e Irán para limitar el programa nuclear iraní.

Luego de alcanzar su nivel más bajo, el barril de petróleo tipo Brent del Mar del Norte para entregas en enero moderó la caída y se cotizaba en 108.54 dólares en el mercado electrónico Intercontinental Petroleum Exchange (ICE).

En tanto, el crudo estadunidense West Texas Intermediate (WTI) para entregas en enero cayó 1.33 por ciento a 93.58 dólares por barril, aunque más tarde se cotizaba en 93.80 dólares el barril.

Los precios del petróleo han caído después que Irán aceptó un acuerdo para frenar algunas de sus actividades nucleares a cambio de un alivio de las sanciones internacionales.

Irán posee la cuarta mayor de la reserva de petróleo del mundo, pero sus exportaciones se han visto afectados por las duras sanciones que enfrenta debido a su polémico programa nuclear.

Aunque Irán no se le permitirá incrementar sus ventas de petróleo durante seis meses, el acuerdo ha aliviado las tensiones en Medio Oriente, un área clave de producción de petróleo.

El acuerdo alcanzado la víspera en Ginebra entre Estados Unidos e Irán ha presionado fuertemente a la baja sobre el precio del oro negro, al reducir sustancialmente las posibilidades de un conflicto bélico en Medio Medio.

En virtud de ese acuerdo inicial para los seis próximos meses, Irán se ha comprometido a detener el enriquecimiento de uranio por encima del cinco por ciento y la construcción de plantas de enriquecimiento.

Asimismo, Teherán se comprometió a detener cualquier tipo de actividad en el reactor de agua pesada en Arak y dar acceso a los inspectores de la Agencia Internacional de Energía Atómica (AIEA).

A cambio, Estados Unidos prometió liberar entre cinco y siete mil millones de dólares en bienes iraníes que actualmente están congelados por las sanciones económicas impuestas por el gobierno del presidente Barack Obama.

Kuwait y Qatar recibieron este lunes con beneplácito el acuerdo alcanzado entre Irán y el Grupo 5+1 (los cinco países permanentes del Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas más Alemania) en materia nuclear

El Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de Qatar consideró que el acuerdo es un “paso importante hacia la protección de la paz y la estabilidad de la región”.

La cancillería kuwaití expresó su deseo “para que este acuerdo sea un buen inicio de un pacto permanente para eliminar la tensión y preservar la seguridad y la estabilidad en la región”.

Iran cuts enriched uranium stockpile: report
Diplomats tell news agency that UN report will say Iran has diluted half of material it held that could be used in bomb.
Last updated: 15 Apr 2014 22:10
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The UN nuclear agency, the IAEA, is due to release a report on Iran's activities [AP]

Diplomats say the UN will certify later this week that Iran's ability to make a nuclear bomb has been reduced because it has neutralised half of its material that can be turned quickly into weapons-grade uranium.

Two diplomats told the Associated Press news agency on Wednesday that a report by the IAEA, the UN nuclear agency, will say that Iran has diluted half of its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium, which could have been quickly further enriched to create fissile material for a bomb.

The move is part of Iran's commitments under a deal that mandates nuclear concessions by Tehran in exchange for a partial lifting of sanctions crippling its economy.

Meanwhile, Iran has formally protested against Washington's refusal to grant a visa to its new UN ambassador, saying the move damages international diplomacy and sets a "dangerous" precedent.

The US has said that Iran's selection of Hamid Aboutalebi to be its UN envoy is not acceptable.

Aboutalebi was involved in the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran which led to the US hostage crisis of 1979.

Aboutalebi has insisted his involvement in the group was limited to translation and negotiation.

Iran's UN Mission sent a delegation to meet the UN office of legal affairs on Tuesday about the issue, the UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

Iran's letter said the US was breaching its obligations under the US-UN host country agreement, which is a treaty and US law that generally requires the host country to allow access to diplomats and UN guest speakers.

"The agreement has unambiguously stated that its provisions shall be 'applicable irrespective of the relations existing between the governments of the persons referred to in that section and the government of the United States'," the letter said.

"This decision of the US government has indeed negative implications for multilateral diplomacy and will create a dangerous precedence."
Source:
AP

Demonising nuclear Iran
How did a false Iran nuclear narrative come to dominate global politics?
Last updated: 17 May 2014 20:23

Some misconceptions about Iran's nuclear programme are based on false evidence, argues Porter [AP]

As the crucial phase of the nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran began in Vienna recently, the fate of the agreement hangs by a thread. A wide chasm separates the declared positions of the two sides in regard to the enrichment capabilities that Iran would be permitted to keep, as has been widely reported.

What has gone unnoticed, however, is that the US negotiating demand for a deep cut in Iran's enrichment capabilities has been shaped by Obama administration's firm belief that Iran has been deceiving the world by hiding its firm determination to obtain nuclear weapons. That view of Iranian nuclear policy has come to dominate the international politics of the Iran nuclear issue over the past decade. But it has not emerged as a result of straightforward evidence.

As documented in my book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, the narrative of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme is the net result of a combination of strong political predisposition in US administrations and the intelligence community to believe it and a falsified intelligence dossier that has been foisted on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - and on world opinion.

The wrong kind of missile

The false Iran nuclear narrative began when the CIA set up a new centre for WMD proliferation in 1991 staffed by specialists on the subject who were pointed toward Iran as a target state threatening to proliferate. Not surprisingly that centre responded by judging repeatedly over the next decade that Iran's efforts to obtain uranium enrichment technology beginning in the latter half of the 1980s was aimed at creating a "nuclear weapons capability".

Listening Post - Iran: A new nuclear narrative

What the CIA's weapons and proliferation experts never mentioned, however, was that Iran had responding to a crude political intervention by the Reagan administration beginning in 1983 to pressure the governments of France and Germany to refuse to cooperate with Iran's nuclear programme. The effect of that intervention, which was not justified by any claim of evidence that Iran was trying to obtain nuclear weapons, was to prevent Iran from relying on a French-based company to provide the enriched uranium fuel for Iran's Bushehr reactor. Not surprisingly, when confronted with the choice of abandoning its nuclear programme entirely or obtaining an independent enrichment capability Iran chose the latter.

By 2004, the news media and political atmosphere were already thoroughly saturated by the false Iran nuclear narrative. At that point a major political manoeuvre quietly unfolded that would ensure that the accusation of a secret Iranian nuclear programme would dominate the international politics of the issue for the next decade.

In August 2004, a set of intelligence documents said to have come from the laptop computer of a participant in a purported Iranian nuclear weapons research project fell into the hands of Western intelligence. The documents included drawings of apparent efforts to redesign the reentry vehicle of Iran's Shahab-3 missile to accommodate a nuclear warhead, which the Bush administration portrayed as "smoking gun" evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei and other senior officials of the agency had serious doubts about their authenticity. But Safeguards Department chief Olli Heinonen collaborated with Washington in 2008-09 and pushed the position in IAEA reports in 2008-09 that the documents were "credible" and that Iran was refusing to cooperate with the IAEA "investigation" of the documents. That position made it virtually impossible to question the authenticity of the documents.

It is now clear that ElBaradei's skepticism about the documents was justified. The former coordinator of US-German relations in the German foreign office, Karsten Voigt, revealed in an interview with this writer last year that senior officials of Germany's intelligence agency, the BND, had told him in November 2004 that those documents had been provided by a sometime BND source who was a member of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), the Iranian exile group allied first with Saddam and later with Israel that was listed as terrorist organisation by the US. The BND officials told Voigt that the MEK source was considered "doubtful".

They were unhappy, because Secretary of State Colin Powell had just commented publicly on information - obviously from the same documents - about alleged Iranian work on mating their Shahab-3 missile with a nuclear weapon. They could hardly have forgotten that in early 2003, the Bush administration had relied on information from another BND source named "Curveball" to justify the US invasion of Iraq, despite having been warned by BND Chief August Hanning not to rely on the source.

There were other reasons to doubt the authenticity of the documents. As was confirmed to this writer by former IAEA Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen, the missile shown in the drawings of efforts to redesign a missile reentry vehicle to accommodate a nuclear weapon was the Shahab-3. But Iran's defence ministry had decided to replace with a much-improved missile and reentry vehicle as early as 2000, and the earliest drawings are dated mid-2002. Whoever ordered those drawings done was obviously unaware of the switch to the new missile design, which means that they were done by an outside intelligence agency - not by the Iranian military or defence ministry.

Influencing perceptions

Israel is the only country in the world that had actually created an office in its foreign intelligence agency responsible for influencing foreign perceptions of the Iranian nuclear programme, as revealed by the book The Nuclear Jihadist, by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins.

Empire - Iran and the US: Diplomatic enrichment

Furthermore, as ElBaradei observed in his own memoirs, Israel had openly provided the IAEA an entirely new series of intelligence reports and purported documents on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work while ElBaradei was still Director General. The dossier that the IAEA published in November 2011 was based entirely on those documents, although the source was never mentioned by the agency.

The story from the IAEA dossier that made news headlines around the world was that Iran had installed a cylinder at its Parchin military facility in 2000 for nuclear-related testing. But no real evidence was ever produced by the IAEA to support that claim - only a reference to a scholarly publication by a Ukrainian scientist who had helped Iran's work on nuclear weapons, according to the agency. And the publication actually described - and included a drawing of - a cylinder for nanodiamonds production the physical characteristics of which were quite different from those a weapons-related cylinder.

The IAEA has also expunged from the published record the fact - virtually unknown to the outside world - that Iran agreed not just once but twice in 1995 to allow the agency to inspect any five sites of its choice in one of the four quadrants of Parchin and to take environmental samples. It is inconceivable, of course, that a state would allow such freedom for international inspection at a military base where it was concealing an incriminating nuclear testing facility.

The Obama administration, blissfully ignorant of the real history of the Iranian nuclear programme, has accepted the false narrative of Iran's supposed determination to obtain nuclear weapons. Its negotiating position in the nuclear talks is based on the thesis that Iran must be prevented from having anything less than a six-month "breakout" period, on the spurious notion that Iran is poised to race for a bomb and must be shorn of the bulk of its enrichment capability.

Perhaps US diplomats will find a way to avoid letting the false logic that governs its posture sink the negotiations. If the talks fail, however, it will be the result of the toxic combination of wilful US self-deception and deliberate falsification of intelligence by the Israelis.

Dr Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian specialising in US national security policy.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source:
Al Jazeera
Dr Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian specialising in US national security policy.

Congress and Attempts to Kill the Iran Deal
Paul R. Pillar

May 29, 2014
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Those who want permanent pariahdom for Iran and thus oppose any agreement with the government in Tehran keep looking for ways to use the U.S. Congress to sabotage the deal that has been under negotiation in Vienna and would restrict Iran's nuclear program. A recent previous effort by the saboteurs was a bill that would have violated the preliminary agreement that was reached with Iran last November by imposing still more sanctions on Iran. That effort was beaten back, partly with an explicit veto threat by the president. Even more recently Senator Bob Corker, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, introduced an amendment that would have Congress holding a “vote of disapproval” within days after the negotiators reach agreement.

If something like Corker's proposal were adopted, the vote of disapproval would be exactly that, but based on the politics of the issue rather than on the merits of the agreement. Such a snap vote would allow little time for weighing the merits of the deal, or for alternatives to the agreement to be considered. It would allow no time for Iran to accumulate a track record of compliance with the full agreement. The political habits, among members from both parties, that would kick in when voting would be the ones that have been demonstrated time and time again with the parade of previous sanctions legislation. Bashing Iran is seen as good politics, and it is seen as “pro-Israel” (i.e., whatever the current government of Israel wants, as distinct from what is in the larger interests of the state of Israel). A vote against the agreement would be seen as bashing Iran, even though the agreement would restrict rather than expand what Iran could do with its nuclear program. As with any negotiated agreement, the deal will be a compromise and not perfect and it thus will always be easy to find specific provisions to be grounds for disapproval, without members being held accountable for considering the entire deal against the alternatives.

Congress is a co-equal policy-making branch, and it can and will be involved in resolution of this issue. But in shaping how the legislative branch will be involved one has to consider the political realities, not just procedural formalities. The saboteurs certainly have considered those realities, although they do not openly acknowledge them.

A recent op ed by Eric Edelman, Dennis Ross, and Ray Takeyh does not explicitly endorse the Corker proposal but argues more generally for more Congressional involvement, the earlier the better. They would have us believe that the issue at hand is no different from strategic arms control treaties with the USSR or earlier multilateral efforts to remake the international order after World War II. The writers' history is faulty and tendentious in several respects, but two items in particular stand out.

Edelman et al., in commenting on Richard Nixon's handling of strategic arms control, mention in passing that Nixon may be better known for the opening to China, as well as ending the Vietnam War. They do not mention that the opening to China, which truly was a historic and beneficial achievement, was one of the most closely held foreign policy initiatives ever, with not only Congress but even the State Department cut out of all the preparation. The political realities on that issue at that time dictated Nixon's secretive approach. The president was beginning a rapprochement with a despised and distrusted revolutionary regime, which had come to power more than two decades earlier and with which there had since been almost no interaction with the United States. In that regard the China opening is a far closer historical analogy to what is happening today between the United States and Iran than are strategic arms control treaties with the Soviet Union.

In the early 1970s Nixon was facing not only widespread distrust of the Chinese Communist regime but also narrower sources of resistance. Back then AIPAC had not yet hit its stride and become able to get seventy senators to sign a napkin, and the NRA had not yet experienced the change in leadership that would turn it into a lobby powerful enough to effectively rewrite the Second Amendment, but there was something called the China lobby. That lobby included diehard supporters of the Nationalist regime on Taiwan who resisted any dealing with the mainland regime and continued to resist full diplomatic recognition of Communist China even after Nixon's initiative. Lobbies wax and wane, but some of the sorts of challenges they pose to presidents undertaking important diplomatic initiatives have stayed pretty much the same.

The op ed writers also refer to the early Cold War years, when President Harry S. Truman “had to bring along a Republican Party skeptical of international engagement. He cultivated influential Republican lawmakers such as Sen. Arthur Vandenberg (Mich.) and paid close attention to their advice and suggestions.” This comment implies a grossly mistaken version of Vandenberg's political biography. He was indeed an isolationist in the interwar years, but Pearl Harbor changed all that. By the time Truman became president Vandenberg considered himself an energetic internationalist. The cooperation between the Truman administration and the Republican leader of the Foreign Relations Committee was fruitful not because the administration was reaching out to an isolationist but rather because Vandenberg's inclinations regarding such things as the creation of NATO were already going in the same direction as Truman's.

They don't make Arthur Vandenbergs any more. The Vandenberg of the 1940s, the one who cooperated with Truman, would not be welcome in today's Republican Party. Perhaps the closest thing to a modern-day counterpart is Richard Lugar—who isn't in Congress anymore, after losing a primary election to a Tea Party candidate a couple of years ago.

In the political reality on Capitol Hill today, any administration outreach regarding Iran immediately runs into two strong, obstinate, and uncooperative tendencies. One is the determination by the rightist government of Israel to do all it can to prevent agreement between the United States and Iran—with everything that determination implies regarding effects on U.S. politics. Some of AIPAC's napkins have become frayed over the last year or so, but the lobby is still formidable. The other is the tendency among many Republican members of Congress to oppose whatever Barack Obama proposes, and especially anything that would be considered a signature achievement for the president. If members vote more than three dozen times to repeal a health care law, some of the same members will similarly and reflexively oppose what would be a leading foreign policy achievement by Obama—next to getting out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but members cannot do anything to prevent the commander-in-chief from doing that, just as diehard proponents of the Vietnam War could not prevent Nixon from getting out of that conflict.

The terms of an Iranian nuclear agreement are still under negotiation, but probably the implementation of each side's obligations will be phased and gradual. It would be sensible, as well as politically realistic, for Congress's necessary involvement to be phased in gradually as well, and certainly not to take the form of quickie votes. Probably the initial phases of sanctions relief would rely on executive action. Only later, after implementation of the agreement has become a going concern and both sides have had a chance to demonstrate their seriousness about compliance with the agreement, will Congress have to play its role with legislation.

US to hold nuclear talks with Iran in Geneva
First bilateral talks in decades between both nations aim to secure a complete deal on Tehran's nuclear programme.
Last updated: 07 Jun 2014 17:26

US talks would be followed by separate discussions in Rome between Iranian and Russian officials [File - AFP]

The United States has announced that it is sending two top negotiators to Geneva for direct talks with Iranian officials over Tehran's nuclear programme.

A State Department official confirmed the meeting on Saturday, noting the US delegation would be led by Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Undersecretary Wendy Sherman, for talks set for Monday and Tuesday.
Iran nuclear talks hit crucial stage

The US decision to head to Geneva and meet with the Iranian delegation, which a senior US official said might be led by Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, appeared to reflect Washington's desire to try to break the deadlock.

It will be the first bilateral meeting of the nations in decades.

"In order to really seriously test whether we can reach a diplomatic solution with Iran on its nuclear programme, we believe we need to engage in very active and very aggressive diplomacy," the senior US official told Reuters news agency on Saturday.

"We've always said that we would engage bilaterally with the Iranians if it can help advance our efforts, in active coordination with the P5+1."
Breaking deadlock

An interim deal reached in November by Iran and six world powers - the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany - limited Iran's uranium enrichment programme.

In exchange, some penalties imposed against Iran were eased. But sanctions such as those targeting Iran's oil imports have remained in place.

Those nuclear talks are scheduled to resume June 16. There is an informal deadline of July 20 for a comprehensive deal.

RELATED: Demonising nuclear Iran

Iran's official IRNA news agency said the upcoming US talks would be followed by separate discussions in Rome between Iranian and Russian officials on Tuesday and Wednesday.

It quoted Araqchi as saying that the Islamic Republic planned to hold bilateral talks as well with the other world powers, but those meetings had yet to be set.

Iran insists its programme is for peaceful energy and medical research purposes. Much of the world fears Iran may be trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Source:
Agencies

US Iran Hawks Try to Sabotage Nuclear Deal

Iran hawks in Washington don’t want a nuclear agreement; they want Tehran to surrender its sovereignty and national rights.
Muhammad Sahimi

December 24, 2014
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As the prospects of a comprehensive nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1—the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany—brightens, Washington’s hawks seem to have gone into panic mode. They do not seem to want any agreement unless Iran says “uncle,” gives up its sovereignty and national rights within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and completely dismantles its nuclear infrastructure. They’re asking Iran to capitulate, not to negotiate. That’s an unrealistic goal—and in their dogged pursuit of it, they have overlooked serious steps Tehran’s taken that demonstrate a desire for compromise.

We see this unfortunate dynamic in an article this month by Mark Dubowitz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, published in the National Interest. Dubowitz’s main premise is that it was the economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies that brought Iran to the negotiation table, and only more economic sanctions will induce it to surrender. The premise is false. While the sanctions did play a role, they were not the most important reason, or even one of the primary ones. Iran is negotiating because that is what it has wanted—contrary to Dubowitz’s assertion that “Iran does not appear to be ready to compromise.”

President Hassan Rouhani, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and their diplomatic team have always been interested in a compromise. Between February 2003 and August 2005, Rouhani was Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator under former president Mohammad Khatami. Zarif was the senior diplomat taking part in the negotiations between Iran and three European Union powers, Britain, France and Germany (the EU3). At that time, Iran proposed to limit the number of its centrifuges to three thousand, put Iran’s nuclear program under strict inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and impose other limitations. In return, Iran asked only for security guarantees by the United States and the EU3. The proposal was rejected by the George W. Bush administration and the EU3.

Earlier, in May 2003, the Khatami administration had proposed a comprehensive plan for addressing all the major issues between Iran and the U.S., including strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program. But, that proposal too was rejected by the Bush-Cheney team that was still drunk on “mission accomplished” nonsense, and less than a year prior had been crowing that “real men go to Tehran.” The opportunity slipped away.

Since Rouhani and his team have long been interested in a compromise, it’s no surprise that they’re seeking one again. But the facts on the ground have changed since 2003. So have Iran’s conditions for a compromise. Whereas Iran did not have a single centrifuge operating in 2003-2005, it now has nearly ten thousand centrifuges spinning and producing low-enriched uranium, with another ten thousand centrifuges waiting to be started. The Rouhani administration will not go back to its 2003 proposal. In fact, even if President Rouhani did want the same deal, Tehran’s hardliners would immediately impeach him. But Iran has stated repeatedly that it could live with an agreement whereby Iran’s current operating centrifuges will continue to work, but no new centrifuges will be installed for the duration of the agreement. Iran’s desire for a deal is genuine.

Dubowitz also suggests that the U.S. has made all sorts of concessions to Iran, that even “the goalposts [of a final deal] appear to be moving,” while Iran has held fast. This is completely false. In fact, Iran has made five major concessions.

One is agreeing to limit the number of its centrifuges for the duration of the comprehensive agreement. By doing so, Iran has temporarily given up its rights under the NPT—that treaty imposes no limit on the number of centrifuges that a member state can have, so long as they are under IAEA inspections and for peaceful purposes.

The second concession is about Iran’s uranium enrichment facility built under a mountain in Fordow, near the holy city of Qom. It was a thorny issue for a long time. The United States had demanded that Iran dismantle the facility altogether. The facility is, however, suited neither for military purposes nor large-scale industrial use. It was built by Iran to preserve its indigenous enrichment technology in case the larger Natanz enrichment facility was destroyed by bombing—a threat that multiple states have made. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister and a principal nuclear negotiator, has emphasized repeatedly and emphatically, “Iran would not agree to close any of its nuclear facilities.” Iran has agreed to convert the site to a nuclear research facility, representing a major concession.

Iran’s third concession is about the IR-40 heavy water nuclear reactor, under construction in Arak. When completed, it will replace the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), a forty-seven-year-old reactor that produces medical isotopes for close to one million Iranian patients every year. The U.S. had demanded that Iran convert the IR-40 to a light-water reactor, due to the concerns that the reactor, when it comes online, will produce plutonium that can be used to make nuclear weapons. But Iran refused to go along. Why? Because, first and foremost, all the work on the reactor has been done by Iranian experts and thus the reactor is a source of national pride. Second, Iran has already spent billions of dollars to design and begin constructing the reactor, and the West is not willing to share the cost of the reactor conversion to a light-water one. On its own initiative, Iran has agreed to modify the design of the reactor so that it will produce much smaller amounts of plutonium. Iran has also agreed not to build any reprocessing facility for separating the plutonium from the rest of the nuclear waste.

The fourth concession is agreeing to stop enriching uranium to 19.75 percent (commonly referred to as 20 percent in the Western media, although the seemingly minor difference is actually quite important). In 2009, the IAEA, under pressure from the West, refused to supply Iran with fuel for the TRR, in violation of its obligations. Thus, Iran was forced to begin producing the 19.75 percent uranium that the TRR uses as its fuel. Tehran agreed to stop producing the fuel, however, and has done so.

Iran’s fifth major concession is related to the issue of inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the IAEA. Iran has almost completely lived up to its obligations under its original safeguards agreement with the Agency, signed in 1974. But IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano, whose politicized leadership has contributed to the complexities of reaching an agreement, has insisted that Iran allow many more inspections. The demanded visits include nonnuclear sites, which would be tantamount to implementing the provisions of the Additional Protocol (AP) of the safeguards agreement. Iran signed the AP in 2003 and, without its parliament ratifying it, implemented it voluntarily until February 2006. Then, Iran set aside the AP after the EU3 reneged on promises made to Iran in the Sa’dabad Declaration of October 2003 and the Paris Agreement of November 2004. But, Iran and the IAEA reached an agreement in November 2013 and another one last May, according to which Iran allows much more frequent and intrusive inspection of its nuclear facilities. Such visits are way beyond Iran’s legal obligations under its safeguards agreement. Since then, the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed that Iran has lived up to most of its obligations under the additional agreement.

Most importantly, Iran recently invited the IAEA to visit the Marivan site in the province of Kordestan in western Iran. In its November 2011 report, the IAEA had alleged that Iran might have carried out experiments with nonnuclear high explosives in Marivan that are used for triggering nuclear reactions. But, the IAEA turned down the invitation, presumably because it is unsure of its own information.

What has the United States given in return for these major concessions by Iran? Very little. It has released a small amount of Iran’s own money, frozen in foreign banks as the result of the illegal sanctions. The U.S. has also lifted its (also illegal!) ban on the export of petrochemical products and a few other minor items. As President Obama stated, 95 percent of all the sanctions are still in place.

In his article Dubowitz also claims that Ayatollah Khamenei “has made it clear that any deal Tehran signs must not cross ‘his red lines,’ which include increasing Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity to nineteen times what it is today.” This is a misrepresentation. What Khamenei was referring to was Iran’s eventual enrichment capacity in the relatively distant future. This capacity is to be achieved after the expiration of the comprehensive agreement when Iran’s nuclear program will be free of limitations.

Dubowitz also states a discredited story. Specifically, he refers to “cheating” by Iran after the November 2013 Geneva Accord was signed. What is the alleged cheating about? The IAEA had reported that Iran “had ‘intermittently’ been feeding natural uranium gas into a single so-called IR-5 centrifuge at a research facility.” IR-5 is a more advanced version of Iran’s currently operating centrifuges. David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, had interpreted it as “cheating” by Iran. The reality is that the Geneva Accord and its Joint Plan of Action permit Iran to continue its research on more advanced centrifuges. Iran’s obligation, which it has lived by, is not installing such centrifuges. After this was pointed out, Albright retreated, declaring that the test was in violation of the “spirit” of the Accord. Who is moving whose goalposts, again?

Washington’s hawks risk missing another chance at a sensible nuclear agreement or détente with Iran, one that would dramatically change the dynamics of the turbulent Middle East for the better. Instead, they seem to think they can drive a proud nation to surrender. They’ve been wrong before—and their latest salvo suggests they don’t realize they may be wrong again.

Muhammad Sahimi, Professor of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science and the NIOC Chair in Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California, is the editor and publisher of the website, Iran News and Middle East Reports, and has been analyzing Iran’s political developments and its nuclear program for two decades.

Image: State Department

How Iran Uses Dual Citizenship in the Caribbean to Skirt Sanctions

According to Georgia’s commercial registry, all St. Kitts and Nevis nationals who registered companies there were born in Iran.
Emanuele Ottolenghi

December 23, 2014
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St. Kitts and Nevis (SKN) is a miniscule Caribbean nation whose biggest employer is the state sugar corporation and whose currency features wading sea turtles and the visage of Queen Elizabeth II. It is also one of the most attractive destinations for Iranian businessmen seeking to exploit citizenship-for-investment programs to skirt international sanctions over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

Thirty years ago, in a bid to spur foreign investment, SKN became the world’s first country to allow foreign investors to obtain citizenship. Many other countries have since followed suit, and in recent years, many more countries have joined this club by offering citizenship or residency fast-track programs through investment. They include economic heavyweights such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and several other European countries, alongside the older programs in Caribbean islands like Antigua and Dominica. But SKN terms for citizenship remain among the most lax in the world: no residency is required and a passport is provided within three months in exchange for $250,000 or a qualifying investment in real estate.

Since sanctions against Iran began to bite, Iranian requests for citizenship have poured in, and in 2011 SKN barred Iranians living in the Islamic Republic from applying. Iranian expatriates, however, may still obtain SKN citizenship, and all evidence suggests that Iranians who live abroad continue doing so in droves.

After all, for Iranians hoping to establish companies and bank accounts in foreign jurisdictions, the biggest obstacle of all is an Islamic Republic passport. A change of residence and nationality is often all that is required for them to prevent banks’ scrutiny.

Facilitating Iranian business abroad through citizenship-by-investment programs is now a profitable endeavor. Capital Immigration, a Dubai-based company run by Iranian expatriates, is typical: its homepage, both in English and Farsi, offers a variety of citizenship, permanent residency and overseas company-formation options, and prominently advertises the prospect of a SKN passport.

Perhaps the most visible case in point involves Houshang Farsoudeh, Houshang Hosseinpour, and Pourya Nayebi, three Iranian nationals whom the U.S. Department of Treasury sanctioned in February 2014 for facilitating banking, money laundering activities and illicit procurement through a network of companies and a banking institution they briefly controlled in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in the South Caucasus. Georgia’s commercial registry documents show that all three – and at least one family member – traveled and conducted their business in the region as SKN nationals.

Within the last year, at least five SKN citizens – all of them Iranians – have established companies in Turkey, trading in petroleum products, medical equipment, and wholesale import-export. Moreover, internal documents of Georgia’s Poti Industrial Free Zone show that SKN nationals have the second-highest incorporation rate, after Iranians themselves. According to Georgia’s commercial registry, all of the SKN nationals who registered companies there were born in Iran (Treasury eventually sanctioned two of them).

Though once hidden from view, Iranian exploitation of citizenship-for-investment schemes is becoming something of an open secret. In May 2014 the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (or FINCEN) issued an advisory “to alert financial institutions that certain foreign individuals are abusing the Citizenship-by-Investment program sponsored by the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis (SKN) to obtain SKN passports for the purpose of engaging in illicit financial activity.”

The growing network of companies for second citizenship and incorporating companies overseas suggests that citizenship-for-investment programs remains a lucrative business, and not just in SKN. Time will tell whether St. Kitts and Nevis, alongside other countries offering fast track programs to citizenship, recognize how these programs are being subverted for nefarious purposes. Meanwhile, Iran has found a loophole to visa and banking restrictions that enables its own middlemen to continue their nefarious activities under a new and more respectable identity.

Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies where he focuses on illicit financial and procurement networks at its Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance.

Iran's Economic Nightmare

Declining oil prices have strained Iran's budget for the upcoming year. Can Rouhani deal with the political fallout?
Nader Habibi

December 22, 2014
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On November 24, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany (the P5+1) and Iran agreed to extend the negotiations regarding the latter’s nuclear program for another seven months. If the performances of Iran’s stock market and (informal) currency market since November 24 are any indications of public sentiment, they point to a general disappointment with the outcome of the nuclear talks. In the past few weeks Tehran’s stock market index (Tipex) has declined by more than 8 percent (and 20 percent in 2014) while the exchange rate of rial against the dollar has suffered a 10 percent decline.

Iran’s private sector was anticipating a nuclear agreement that would have gradually removed the devastating economic sanctions and put an end to current uncertainties. What they received instead was a continuation of the uncertainty surrounding the negotiations. Over the past two years, this uncertainty has sharply increased the risk of business investments in Iran for both domestic and international investors.

After suffering a sharp economic downturns in 2012 and the first half of 2013, the interim accord in November 2013 gave Iran some relief from sanctions in the form of a portion of its blocked oil revenues and allowing it to continue selling one million barrels of oil per day (bpd)– a significantly smaller amount than the average daily level of 2.3 million bpd that it exported before Western sanctions against its oil and financial sectors. This limited relief, in combination with better economic management by the new cabinet of President Hassan Rouhani and growing optimism about the negotiations, had a positive effect on economic conditions. The economic growth rate, which had been negative in 2013, rose to an annualized rate of 4.6 percent in the second quarter of 2014 (first quarter of Persian calendar). The inflation rate also declined significantly, from near 40 percent in 2013 to under 25 percent in 2014.

Despite these marginal improvements, however, Iran’s economy remains under considerable stress. Industrial activity, in particular, is operating below capacity and unemployment remains high. Under such conditions the extension of the negotiations – instead of the hoped for final agreement – will impact the industrial sector more than other sectors. In anticipation of a nuclear deal, industrialists and investors have spent recent months signing a large number of trade agreements and joint investment contracts with international partners, and must now place these deals on hold for at least another seven months. This interim period will prove extremely difficult for many industrial units, and their representatives have repeatedly warned of the high risk of bankruptcies in the industrial sector.

All of this will be exacerbated by the simultaneous decline in oil prices. The price of oil has declined by over 40 percent since June and there are no indications that this drop will end anytime soon. The combination of the oil sanctions against Iran and the steep decline in the price of oil could, within months, lead to fiscal distress and a budget deficit. This will force the Rouhani government to make some difficult choices in next year’s fiscal budget. Specifically, in order to keep the budget deficit under control it will have to choose between cutting capital expenditures and expenditures on wages and various types of subsidies.

In anticipation of the lower oil prices, the government has reduced the projected price of oil in next fiscal year’s fiscal budget bill to $70 per barrel, down from $100 per barrel in the current year’s budget. The budget bill that was submitted to Majlis (Iran’s parliament) earlier this month shows an 11 percent increase in fiscal spending which, after adjusting for inflation, is actually a reduction in real government expenditures.

This implies that the government will not be able to rely on fiscal policy to stimulate the economy. Alternatively, it is also possible that under political pressure, the government might not be able to cut the budget adequately in response to declining revenues and will be forced to increase borrowing from the central bank. However, excessive government borrowing will lead to an increase in liquidity, which would be at odds with Rouhani’s pledge to make reducing inflation his top economic priority in the coming year.

Next year's budget bill, which Rouhani unveiled earlier this month, projects the budget for development projects to grow more than current expenditures (on goods, services and salaries of government employees). This goal, however, might also be hard to achieve. The former Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration expanded the public sector employment significantly without regard for the long-term cost of government wages and salaries. Now the Rouhani government is faced with a bloated government bureaucracy that absorbs nearly 80 percent of current fiscal expenditures in wages and benefits. Since it is very difficult to cut these wages or layoff the excess civil servants, it is more likely that the government will have to stretch out capital expenditures over a longer period of time and put some major projects on hold.

Foreign Trade

During the agreed seven month extension of the nuclear talks, Iran will likely try to expand its economic relations with China, Russia and Turkey. China is already the second largest origin of Iran’s merchandise imports after the UAE (based on 2013 trade data). Similarly, last year China was Iran’s largest oil customer, importing an average of 420,000 bpd compared to the 199,000 bpd that India, Iran’s second largest oil consumer, purchased in 2013. Overall, then, China is already Iran’s largest trading partner.

The relationship continues to expand. Only a few days after the announcement of the extended negotiations China and Iran announced a deal that provides $370 million in Chinese financing for a petrochemical project in Iran. As a result of financial sanctions, an estimated $30 billion of Iran’s oil export revenues are trapped in Chinese banks. China has offered to finance investment projects inside Iran until the sanctions are lifted and these funds can be released.

Iran has also made some progress in economic negotiations with Russia, which is itself a target of Western sanctions. Already this year, several investment and trade deals were negotiated between Moscow and Tehran in 2014. In the next few months we are likely to witness progress in implementing these agreements. Iran will receive nuclear and other energy related technology as well as wheat, in return for oil (to be delivered by Russia to third parties as if it did not originate in Iran) and light manufacturing goods.

Iran is also aggressively trying to boost its economic relations with Turkey. The volume of bilateral trade between two neighbors is currently around $20 billion and Iran is a major supplier of natural gas to Turkey. In a visit to Turkey earlier this month, Iran’s economic minister proposed that the local currencies be used for bilateral trade instead of the dollar in order to bypass the restrictions on financial transactions with Iran. Despite its profound and enduring dispute with Iran over Syria, Turkey would benefit from an expansion of bilateral trade. Still, it is likely to move cautiously on any steps that might anger the United States. The U.S. still enjoys some leverage in Turkey and President Erdogan is unlikely to openly defy the U.S. sanctions on Iran and Russia.

Even if Iran’s efforts to expand economic ties with these countries prove successful, the overall volume of Iran’s foreign trade is likely to shrink during the seven-month extension due to lower oil revenues. While under the terms of the extension no additional sanctions will be introduced against Iran, the sharply lower price of oil will take a toll on Iran’s hard currency reserves. Not surprisingly, Iranian officials and its media are already accusing Saudi Arabia of deliberately weakening the price of oil to harm Iran and President Putin of Russia has also made similar remarks.

Nader Habibi is the Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies.

El equipo negociador nuclear iraní parte a Ginebra en su primer viaje de 2015

lainformacion.com

miércoles, 14/01/15 - 07:10
[ ]

Teherán, 14 ene (EFE).- El equipo negociador iraní encabezado por el ministro de Asuntos Exteriores, Mohamad Yavad Zarif, partió hoy a Ginebra para empezar una nueva ronda de negociaciones nucleares, la primera del año 2015, con las grandes potencias mundiales.
El equipo negociador nuclear iraní parte a Ginebra en su primer viaje de 2015

Teherán, 14 ene (EFE).- El equipo negociador iraní encabezado por el ministro de Asuntos Exteriores, Mohamad Yavad Zarif, partió hoy a Ginebra para empezar una nueva ronda de negociaciones nucleares, la primera del año 2015, con las grandes potencias mundiales.

Hoy, y antes de esta ronda de diálogo que comienza el 18 de enero, Zarif y el secretario de Estado de EE.UU., John Kerry, mantendrán un encuentro bilateral para acercar sus ideas con respecto a las negociaciones, informó la agencia oficial iraní de noticias IRNA.

El volumen del enriquecimiento de uranio por parte de Irán y el modo y la fecha del levantamiento de las sanciones, aparte del tiempo de validez del acuerdo global, son algunos de los temas más importantes que han quedado sin solventar.

El viaje de Zarif a Ginebra se ha llevado a cabo solo por su encuentro con Kerry, y de Suiza tiene previsto viajar a algunos países europeos.

"Mi presencia en Ginebra es solo por el encuentro con el secretario de Estado estadounidense", dijo Zarif el domingo en una rueda de prensa conjunta con su homólogo de Chipre.

El presidente iraní, Hasan Rohaní, en un discurso en la ciudad de Bushehr, en el sur de Irán, advirtió el martes a Occidente de que si no va por un camino razonable y no acelera las negociaciones "perderá".

"La era de amenazar y sancionar se ha acabado", agregó Rohaní.

Occidente teme que, bajo el paraguas de un programa nuclear civil, Irán quiera hacerse con un arsenal atómico, lo que Teherán siempre ha negado.

Irán y el Grupo 5+1 (China, Rusia, EE.UU., Francia y Reino Unido más Alemania) retomarán las negociaciones nucleares el 18 de enero en Ginebra, pero antes de esta ronda este miércoles Irán mantendrá reuniones bilaterales con la delegación estadounidense y luego con la rusa.

Irán y las grandes potencias tenían como fecha límite el 24 de noviembre para lograr un pacto que ponga fin a más de doce años de enfrentamientos y sanciones internacionales contra Irán, pero como no hubo éxito, se acordó una prórroga de siete meses, hasta el próximo 1 de julio.

The Top 5 Things to Know About the Iran Nukes Deal

By Elias Groll
April 2, 2015 - 6:49 pm
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The Top 5 Things to Know About the Iran Nukes Deal

After days of delays and watching U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry trooping sad-faced through the streets of Lausanne, Switzerland, one could have been forgiven for thinking that negotiations to strike an agreement governing Iran’s nuclear program were on the rocks.

But Kerry’s long face was apparently too pessimistic, and on Thursday, April 2, world powers unveiled an interim agreement — a joint comprehensive plan of action, to use its technical term — that paves the way for a final deal that would see Iran suspend enrichment and open itself to inspections in exchange for sanctions relief.

The terms of the interim agreement are bound to be picked over in coming days, but the information that has so far been released provides a surprisingly comprehensive picture of what we can expect from a final agreement.

Here, then, is a guide to the agreement struck in Switzerland, the outstanding issues to be resolved, and potential pitfalls in its implementation. (But first, a caveat: Iran and its interlocutors haven’t actually signed an agreement yet. The terms described below are based on how the deal has been described by officials involved in the negotiations. This agreement could very well be ripped up and tossed out. That appears unlikely, but don’t consider what emerged in Lausanne on Thursday as an agreement set in stone.)

Centrifuges

Arguably the most difficult step in building a nuclear bomb is amassing the fissile material — uranium or plutonium — that gives such a device its explosive power. In Iran’s case, the enrichment of uranium is the key component to any agreement over its nuclear program. Building a bomb using uranium requires the extraction of the uranium-235 isotope, which makes up 0.7 percent of the uranium that exists in nature. To make weapons-grade uranium, the material must be enriched to 90 percent uranium-235.

The agreement unveiled on Thursday allows Iran to continue some of its enrichment activities but imposes strong limits on those efforts. Iran will be required to reduce its number of installed centrifuges by two-thirds to about 6,000. Of those, 5,060 will be allowed to operate during the next 10 years.

These centrifuges will only be Iran’s most basic model, the IR-1. Iran will not be allowed to enrich uranium using its more advanced models — which produce the stuff faster — for at least 10 years.

Breakout time

The question of the quantity of centrifuges is intimately connected with what diplomats call Iran’s possible “breakout time.” That is, if Iran decides to break out of an agreement governing its nuclear program, how long would it take Tehran to accumulate a sufficient amount of bomb-grade uranium — uranium that has been enriched to 90 percent — to make one nuclear weapon.

Estimating breakout time can sometimes be more art than science, but the terms of the deal appear to put the breakout time at about a year.

One way to speed up the production of bomb-grade uranium is to feed gas centrifuges with uranium that has already been modestly enriched. Under the terms of the agreement, Iran will be required to massively reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium from about 10,000 kg to a mere 300 kg. Moreover, the deal requires Iran to not enrich uranium beyond 3.67 percent for the next 15 years.

In 15 years, however, that calculation will change, when many of the restrictions on Iran’s enrichment activities will expire, according to the agreement.

Still, when discussing Iran’s possible breakout time, it’s important to emphasize that there are three main component to the production of nuclear weapons — enrichment of fissile material, the development of a bomb, and the creation of a delivery system. The breakout time refers only to the accumulation of fissile material, and it is not currently believed that Iran has developed the technology bomb nor for an appropriate delivery mechanism.

Nonetheless, discussion of Iran’s breakout time under the terms of this deal is sure to be a point of contention in coming weeks as diplomats try to sell the agreement to skeptical publics at home. Hardliners such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have demanded that Iran’s enrichment infrastructure be entirely dismantled, which this agreement does not do. In coming days and weeks, expect him and his allies to argue that Iran will be allowed to quickly accumulate nuclear material for a bomb.

Fordow, Natanz, and Arak

If Iran ever decides to clandestinely pursue a nuclear weapon, its facility at Fordow will be key. Buried underneath a mountain to protect it from air strikes, Fordow is currently home to thousands of centrifuges. But per the terms of the Lausanne agreement, Iran has agreed not to carry out any enrichment activities at the site for 15 years. It will instead repurpose it as a nuclear, physics, and technology research center. During that time period, the site will not be home to any fissile material.

For Iran’s interlocutors — the so-called P5+1: the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and Germany — the changes at Fordow represent a significant victory, one that hampers Iran’s path to a bomb.

At the same time, however, Iran will be allowed to keep some centrifuges at Fordow, though they will not enrich uranium. Speaking to reporters in Lausanne, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif highlighted this fact as a victory his delegation was able to secure at the negotiating table.

The information that has so far been released about the agreement does not include a great deal of specificity about the centrifuges at Fordow, and this caused Scott Kemp, a nuclear expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to question estimates about Iran’s possible breakout time under the agreement.

“Although the U.S. fact-sheet indicates that no uranium is allowed at Fordow, centrifuges are allowed and those centrifuges must be included in the calculation of breakout times,” Kemp wrote in an email to Foreign Policy. “The U.S.-released text suggests a maximum of about 1,000 centrifuges will be allowed at Fordow, and does not specify restrictions on the centrifuge models installed there. Assuming Iran’s current best technology is used, Fordow centrifuges could reduce breakout time to about three months.”

Iran’s other key site for enriching uranium lies at Natanz, and with Fordow no longer working with fissile material, Iran’s enrichment activities will only take place at Natanz. Five thousand centrifuges will be allowed to run, a restriction that will be place for ten years. At Natanz, Iran will only be allowed to use its most basic centrifuge model, though it can engage in “limited research and development with its advanced centrifuges,” according to a State Department fact sheet.

While Iran’s nuclear program has focused on uranium enrichment, some observers fear that it could use its heavy water reactor being built at Arak to produce plutonium, another possible bomb fuel. Under the terms of the agreement, Arak will be redesigned so that it can no longer produce weapons grade plutonium. The reactor’s current core will either be destroyed or sent out of the country. Spent fuel from the reactor, which could be used to make nuclear weapons, will be shipped out of the country as long as the reactor is running.

Iran has pledged to build no new enrichment facilities or reactors.

Inspections

All of these restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program would be meaningless if the international community lacks the ability to monitor its compliance. With that in mind, the agreement sets up an aggressive inspections regime. The agreement provides the International Atomic Energy Agency access to all of Iran’s nuclear sites, including the supply chain and any sites deemed suspicious. The agency will be able to carry out surveillance at Iran’s uranium mines and mills for 25 years, at its centrifuge production sites for 20 years. Iran has agreed to sign the IAEA’s additional protocols, which provide the agency with additional inspection authorities.

But when it comes the ability of inspectors to detect covert activity, there’s also reason for caution. As Olli Heinonen, a former IAEA official, wrote last week: “History shows surprises.”

“The Russian centrifuge program went for years without detection despite tremendous intelligence efforts,” Heinonen wrote. “The Iraqi and Libyan programs were not immediately detected, and South Africa, which manufactured nuclear weapons, ended up destroying its program before the IAEA saw it. The Syrian reactor in al-Kibar also came a bit out of the blue, as did North Korea’s advanced centrifuge plant.”

“There is always the element of the unknown or the uncertain that adds to the risk equation.”

For their part, the American intelligence community claims it is confident in its ability to detect a covert effort by Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Even as Iran has agreed to wide-ranging limits on its nuclear program, many questions remain about its past work on developing nuclear weapons. According to a vaguely worded section of the State Department fact sheet, Iran will “implement an agreed set of measures to address the IAEA’s concerns” about the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program.”

That phrasing leaves it unclear whether Iran will come clean on such work, but it certainly indicates that it’s a possibility. American spies believe that Iran abandoned its ambitions to build a nuclear bomb in 2003.

The pace of sanctions relief

If Iran complies the terms of this agreement, it will experience wide-ranging sanctions relief. The United States and the European Union will suspend such measures upon verification by the IAEA that Iran has fulfilled its “key” nuclear-related obligations. What constitutes a “key” obligation has not been entirely specified, and is likely a point of contention.

Upon IAEA verification, the U.N. Security Council will pass a fresh resolution lifting all past resolutions on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. That new resolution will likely include restrictions on conventional arms and ballistic missiles, asset freezes, cargo inspections, and other provisions to encourage transparency in Iran’s nuclear activities.

The United States will keep in place sanctions on Iran related to its human rights record, support of terrorist groups, and missile development.

Dispatch
Iran Deal Threatens to Upend a Delicate Balance of Power in the Middle East

From Riyadh to Jerusalem, leaders are watching warily for signs of Tehran’s ascendance.

By David Kenner

April 2, 2015
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Iran Deal Threatens to Upend a Delicate Balance of Power in the Middle East

BEIRUT — As negotiators in Lausanne, Switzerland, agreed on a tentative deal to constrain Iran’s nuclear program and waive sanctions pending verification of the eventual terms of the agreement, countries across the Middle East have already begun to adapt to the new regional political landscape.

While both the United States and Iran insist that negotiations pertain solely to Tehran’s nuclear program, leaders across the Arab world see the agreement through the prism of the Middle East’s delicate balance of power and the many conflicts racking the region. It’s not a crazy idea: In a sign of how the agreement could affect broader ties between Tehran and Washington, Iranian television, for the first time ever, aired live U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech in the Rose Garden on Thursday, April 2. Depending on which side of the conflict the regional leaders stand on, they either hope or fear that Iran will be enriched by the lifting of economic sanctions and empowered by its integration as a respected member of the international order.

In a bid to assuage the fears of his anti-Iran allies in the Persian Gulf, Obama announced on Thursday that he would invite the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council to Camp David this spring to “further strengthen our security cooperation.” He also said that he had already called King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Iran’s main regional antagonist, to explain the agreement — moving even quicker to speak to the king than to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to whom Obama said he would speak later in the day.

But Obama will face a challenge in winning over the Gulf states, whose interests are arrayed against Iran across the Middle East, notably in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. In a letter to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in October, Obama seemed to confirm Gulf states’ fears that a nuclear deal would lead to a broader regional rapprochement between the United States and Iran, perhaps including a hint of support for Tehran’s proxies in Syria: According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama linked cooperation against the Islamic State with an agreement and “sought to assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.”

Some analysts believe efforts by Saudi Arabia to contain the regional repercussions of the deal have already begun. In Yemen, a Saudi-led coalition has launched airstrikes against Iranian-backed Shiite rebels, while in Syria, Saudi-backed rebels have recently made gains against the Assad regime.

“The timing of the Yemeni operation was basically to send a clear message to the Iranians, and to the United States, that the region is going to stand against Iran’s expansionist policy,” said Mustafa Alani, director of the national security and terrorism studies department at the Gulf Research Center.

The intervention in Yemen is only one example of how Saudi Arabia has played a more aggressive role in the Middle East. Islamist rebels backed by Saudi Arabia recently captured the northern Syrian provincial capital of Idlib from the Assad regime — even as Washington moves slowly on its plan to train and arm a Syrian rebel force.

“We see the beginning of a new policy, where [Saudi] interest is basically more important than U.S. objections or with Security Council resolutions,” said Alani. “Basically, we are adopting the Iranian style and the Israeli style: When it comes to your national interest, you go ahead and do it.”

Israel, like Saudi Arabia and its allies, has also raised a red flag about Iranian expansionism across the Middle East. Having recently fought wars against Iranian-backed organizations Hezbollah and Hamas — while bombing Assad-allied forces in Syria — its leaders have been hostile to an agreement that they say will only embolden Tehran. Netanyahu famously spoke in front of the U.S. Congress in March to lay out his objections to the deal, and as the agreement neared on Thursday, he tweeted an image showing Iran’s interventions across the Arab world and called for an agreement that “stop[s] its terrorism and aggression.”

Tehran’s allies in the Middle East — from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah to its many allies in Baghdad — hope that Iran would be strengthened by the lifting of sanctions and its integration into the international system. As far back as 2013, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said, “Our side will be stronger locally, regionally, and internationally” in the event of a nuclear deal.

“Obviously, [Hezbollah leaders] are rooting for a lifting of the sanctions against Iran,” said Kamal Wazne, a Lebanese political analyst close to the party. “They felt in the first place that these sanctions were unjust, and the lifting of the sanctions will allow Iran to engage the international community and give it a better position at the international arena.”

Among Saudi Arabia’s allies elsewhere in the Arab world, there are fears that a bad deal would also spur a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Egypt, for instance, has long made the case that the region should be a nuclear-free zone — a policy meant to pressure Israel into giving up its nuclear weapons, but which has also constrained the development of nuclear weapons programs elsewhere in the Arab world. If Arab leaders believe that the current outlines of the deal leave Iran a path to construct a nuclear weapon, “the thinking will be, ‘why don’t we have the same status?’” said Abdel Moneim Said Aly, the director of Cairo’s al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “That will mean developing all the capabilities for uranium enrichment that Iran got.”

Saudi Arabia has long been interested in nuclear power and plans to build 16 nuclear reactors over the next two decades. More concerning to anti-proliferation experts are reports that Riyadh itself is interested in producing fuel for nuclear reactors. If the kingdom mastered the fuel cycle, that would give it an indigenous source of enriched uranium that could also be repurposed for a bomb. Asked in late March whether Riyadh would rule out building or acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, said the issue was “not something we would discuss publicly.”

All this has led to the perception, in certain corners, that power in the Middle East is up for grabs in a way that it has never been before. “I am 67 years old — I lived through the 1956 and 1967 wars, the Arab-Israeli peace, the revolutions and coup d’états,” said Said Aly. “Despite all that, I never had the same uncertainty that I have now about the region. Everything is possible.”

Burying the Hatchet With Iran

For over three decades, Washington and Tehran have been mortal rivals. Can they use the nuclear deal to mend ties and build a new order in the Middle East?​

By David Crist
March 25, 2015
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Burying the Hatchet With Iran

With the deadline to strike a deal over Iran’s nuclear program roughly a week away, the odds continue to favor an agreement between the international powers and the Islamic Republic. This is because, for the first time in 35 years, both the United States and Iran see it in their interest to reach an accommodation. But the larger question remains: Will an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program translate into a wider rapprochement — one that might lead to cooperation against common threats such as the Islamic State, and capable of overcoming other significant disputes, such as the war in Syria and Iran’s support of terrorism?

Since the founding of the Islamic Republic, there have been roughly seven efforts to improve relations between the United States and Iran, with the majority of these efforts actually initiated by Tehran. All failed for more or less the same reason: Neither side viewed engagement to be in its interest. When one side extended an open hand, the other viewed it as weakness or as an opportunity to exploit. Both the United States and Iran bear responsibility for these earlier failures, which have kept them suspended for decades between peace and war.

This current dialogue has been the most significant interaction between Iranian and American diplomats since the days of the Shah. It came about because a number of factors altered Iranian security calculations. First, the United States significantly increased its military force in the Persian Gulf under then U.S. Central Command commander Gen. James Mattis. International sanctions also increased both popular discontent and a national sense of isolation, while leading to economic stagnation and limited opportunities for Iran’s young and well-educated population. Popular displeasure has not abated: In 2014, there was a significant increase in demonstrations on Iranian university campuses, and though the protesters did not direct their anger at the government, this continued unrest alarmed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Finally, the recent decline in oil prices placed additional pressure on the regime. Current prices are roughly half of what Iran’s budget depended on, forcing Iran’s Central Bank to increase the money supply, which only exacerbated the economic stress.

Tehran has also learned that there are real costs to a failure to reach an agreement. When the negotiations failed to lead to a deal last November, resulting instead in an extension of the deadline to the end of this month, the Iranian stock market dropped 5 percent and the Iranian rial lost 6 percent of its value in just one week.

But the most significant factor influencing Iranian leaders is the growing Sunni-Shiite conflict, which threatens to consume the Middle East. A key component of Iran’s foreign policy is a focus on defending Shiites across the Arab world against the Sunni majority. The most significant threat to Iran now stems not from the United States, but from Sunni radicals like the Islamic State. In this regional conflict, a nuclear weapon offers little security compared with the advantages of increased financial resources provided by sanctions relief.

Supporting its proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen has strained Iranian resources. Economic growth and increased oil exports would allow Iran to contend with the deep pockets of Saudi Arabia in what Tehran sees as a long war for dominance of the Middle East.

The United States also needs a nuclear agreement, simply because there are no other good alternatives. Sanctions helped bring Iran to the table — but increased sanctions will be viewed by Iran as an act of war, and Tehran will respond accordingly. International consensus made the sanctions effective, but there is no guarantee that the sanctions regime will hold together, especially if the United States is viewed as the culprit in a failed nuclear deal. European businesses are already lining up to tap into a market of 80 million Iranians who yearn for Western goods. If the talks fail, Washington could find itself in the worst of all worlds — with sanctions unraveling and no inspection mechanism over Iran’s nuclear program.

A military option to set back Iran’s nuclear program is doable, but would create more long-term challenges than it resolves. The ensuing war would create even more volatility in the region and expose U.S. service members in Iraq to Shiite militia attacks. It would halt the unstated cooperation to counter the Islamic State and curtail even the remote possibility of reaching a mutual agreement on Syria. It would end international oversight of Iran’s nuclear program and guarantee an Iranian Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon. An Iranian drive for a nuclear bomb could only be checked by a massive, long-term military campaign — an “Operation Iranian Watch” that would dwarf the air campaign conducted for 10 years over the skies of Iraq.

Make no mistake: 35 years of U.S.-Iranian enmity will not dissolve immediately following the signing of a nuclear agreement. Dogmatic hard-liners on both sides are determined to undermine any détente. The recent open letter to the Iranian leadership signed by 47 Republican senators, who have always been opposed to accommodation with the Islamic Republic, is one such salvo from Washington. In Iran, Khamenei has publicly rebuked senior military leaders opposed to any dialogue with the United States, which could result in a deal that undermines their profitable black market businesses.

Iranians still obsess over past American indignities, both real and perceived. The 1979 Iranian revolution enshrined anti-Americanism as a key pillar of Iranian foreign policy. The young men who shouted death to the Shah and overthrew an unpopular U.S.-supported dictator may have gray in their beards, but many of their attitudes remain unchanged. And Khamenei, the most important figure within this circle, remains wary of the ramifications of engagement, especially the corrupting influence of Western culture.

It’s not only this long history of animosity that must be overcome, but Tehran’s and Washington’s dueling visions for the Middle East. Iran has different strategic goals in the region than the United States and is motivated by competition — not cooperation. While both sides reject the Islamic State, Iran harbors suspicions that the United States and its partner, Saudi Arabia, secretly formed the Sunni extremist group as a means of striking back at the Shiites. While the pragmatic commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, acquiesced to the U.S.-led air campaign in Iraq, he remains committed to minimizing American influence there. The development of the popular mobilization forces — Shiite volunteers who joined the fight against the Islamic State last summer, following a fatwa from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani — serve as his counterbalance to any increase in U.S. influence achieved through the rebuilding of the Iraqi security forces.

In Syria, too, the United States and Iran find themselves in a temporary alliance to defeat the Islamic State. However, as the American training and equipping effort for the armed opposition grows and the threat of the Islamic State recedes, Soleimani will correctly view U.S. support of the opposition as shifting to the removal of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Tehran rejects the current status quo of American preeminence in the region — and that is not going to change, whether or not it agrees to a deal over its nuclear program. It chafes at the size of the U.S. military presence in the region and views the U.S. 5th Fleet in the Persian Gulf and the U.S. military bases surrounding its country as all aimed at Tehran. Most Iranian officials see America’s ultimate goal as overthrowing their revolution — which, listening to current rhetoric in the U.S. Congress and past administrations, seems to have merit. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld succinctly stated in an Aug. 19, 2002, memo to President George W. Bush, “the long-term goal should be regime change and not accommodation.”

Washington is equally hostile to Iranian attempts to expand its influence across the Middle East. Tehran’s support for Hezbollah, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen is viewed as a threat to Israel and Saudi Arabia, and one designed to undermine the U.S. strategic position in the region. U.S. officials are also well aware that Iranian leaders have American blood on their hands: At the behest of Tehran, Iranian proxies struck the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon in the 1980s, killing hundreds of U.S. servicemen. In Washington, the specter of the Marine barracks exploding — causing the highest loss of life for the U.S. Marines Corps in a single day since the battle for Iwo Jima — remains fresh.

Overcoming this historical baggage will not be achieved quickly; improved relations will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. There will be no “Obama goes to Tehran” moment — true rapprochement will fall to the next generation’s leaders, who were not colored by their countries’ experiences in 1979. But if the United States and Iran achieve a nuclear agreement, it will represent a major step forward on that journey. At a minimum, it will help ensure that the two sides maintain high-level diplomatic engagement in order to relay each side’s red lines and to rapidly deescalate the frequently tense interactions between their military forces in the Persian Gulf.

The old order in the Middle East, forged after World War I, is breaking down. But the old lesson that the United States learned from the fall of the Shah still applies: Don’t place all your eggs in one basket. Saudi Arabia remains a key ally in countering Iranian expansionism, but it has also fueled the sectarian conflict. President Barack Obama’s persistent effort to improve relations with Iran has been aimed not for the short-term crises, but at long-term security goals. The hope is that an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program could begin to thaw a relationship frozen for three decades and over the course of time lead to a broader rapprochement.

Iran’s wealth of resources and its industrious population make it destined to be a major force in the Middle East. If Tehran could be reincorporated into the regional security architecture as a responsible actor — despite its differences with the United States — it would serve as an effective counterbalance to the next version of al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

This article represents David Crist’s views alone and does not represent those of the U.S. government or the Department of Defense.

ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

Voice
I’m a Republican and I Support the Iran Nuclear Deal

There's plenty of cause for skepticism. But there are at least 5 reasons to support this tentative agreement.

By Kori Schake
April 2, 2015
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I’m a Republican and I Support the Iran Nuclear Deal

The deal reached between the P5, Germany, and Iran is only provisional and important items like the timing of sanctions relief are still to be fully ironed out. The president is already making outlandish claims — “over-egging the pudding” as Francois Heisbourg put it. It is not true, for example, that “Iran has met all of its obligations,” as President Obama claimed in announcing the deal. Iran has not satisfied the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) concerns about militarization of its program, for one. And I dread the forthcoming effusion of praise from Ben Rhodes for the president’s compelling genius driving every technical detail under consideration.

But there are five good reasons to tune out the administration’s grandstanding and support this deal. Even a frequent critic of this White House can admit them. And you should, too.

1. The inspection provisions are solid. According to the details of the agreement that have been released so far, the deal provides for continuous inspection of all of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities. It also challenges inspections of any suspect facilities, and calls on Iran to sign up for the IAEA Additional Protocol, which increases short-notice inspections and IAEA access to establish greater confidence in an absence of cheating. If these are all carried out, they would amount to a robust verification regime. The inspection provisions would dramatically increase the United States’ ability to know what is happening in Iran’s nuclear programs, to judge the extent of their militarization efforts, and to anticipate “breakout” toward a nuclear weapons.

2. They’ve connected it to regional concerns. Practically every country in the Middle East (except Oman) is worried about Iran’s nuclear program. The worst outcome of this deal could end up being a cascade of regional nuclear proliferation unless, at a minimum, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt can be brought to support the deal. (Or bought, as renewed military aid to Egypt might suggest.) Obama can argue that a division of labor between the United States and its allies is emerging, with America preventing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and providing intelligence and weapons to countries in the region for them to fight Iran’s regional destabilization. It was smart of the president to invite the Gulf Cooperation Council countries — Iran’s biggest regional foes — to Camp David to hear them out and, presumably, develop policies to address their concerns.

3. The sanctions regime was eroding, anyway. Irrespective of Congressional action, we’re about at the end of the line on sanctions. Russia was never going to give the West the satisfaction of sanctions on Iran now that Western sanctions are biting Russia’s economy. And if not Russia, then also not China. Europeans have been stalwart — it’s been the E.U.’s curtailing of oil purchases that has twisted Tehran’s arm the hardest — but sanctions fatigue is setting in. We were at risk of a repeating the experience of Iraq circa 2002.

4. They released the terms of the deal. Secretary of State John Kerry’s extensive accounting will allow the detailed debate on the merits of the agreement that will be necessary to build support for it. Congress should give full volume to all the reasons to dislike and distrust the government of Iran. They should press the president to be more vocal and more active in pushing back on Iran’s dangerous non-nuclear behavior, such as supporting the Syrian regime and backing the Houthis in Yemen. They should debate the administration’s lack of strategy for the Middle East and offer improvements. But they should also support this deal. (Bonus points to the president for praising Congress as a “key partner” today.)

5. It closes the most dangerous gap. Previously, President Obama’s stated policy has been that the only alternative to a negotiated deal with Iran is war. But at the same time he’s been overtly unwilling to carry out his threats. President Obama’s skating back from his own “red line” in Syria in September 2013 was hugely damaging to U.S. credibility with both its allies and its enemies. A repeat of the Syria debacle with Iran would have shattered other countries’ faith in Washington’s security guarantees.

An agreement based on the principles outlined today significantly slows Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon and dramatically increases the probability that the United States will be able to detect a breakout toward one. It doesn’t mean other countries can be persuaded to reinstate sanctions if Iran cheats. (Russia will probably prevent any United Nations Security Council action.) But it’s a reasonable deal, and if implemented in conjunction with pushing back on Iran’s support for terrorism and its efforts to destabilize its neighbors, it could begin to put American strategy in the Middle East back on track.

A Skeptic’s Guide to the Iran Nuclear Deal

The mostly good, the slightly bad, and where it could all fall apart.

By Jeffrey Lewis
April 2, 2015
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A Skeptic’s Guide to the Iran Nuclear Deal

OK, I admit it. I thought this framework was going to suck. Actually, it’s not bad.

My main concern all along was that the P5+1 countries (technically the E3/EU+3; congratulations if you know the difference) were too focused on “breakout time” — imposing arbitrary limits on Iran’s centrifuge program to ensure that if Iran used its known nuclear infrastructure, it would take at least a year to build a bomb. The bigger worry about Iran’s nuke program, I always thought, was unknown nuclear infrastructure, such as any hidden centrifuge sites.

To my surprise, the deal — at least as it is described in the fact sheet released by the White House — manages to impose measures to guard against breakout, while also providing for a number of measures that help substantially with the problem of covert facilities. All in all, it’s a pretty comprehensive framework for managing the problem. It’s certainly worth lifting some sanctions, though a crucial detail is how quickly that will happen and whether sanctions can be reimposed if things go pear-shaped.

But there are still reasons to be cautious. First, all we have at the moment area White House-released fact sheet and a couple of ambiguous news conferences in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the White House Rose Garden. (Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister and lead negotiator, is already complaining about the White House’s fact sheet.) There is, after all, a reason one writes these things down. The parties will need a few more months to work out the details of the actual agreement in order to implement the “framework” that was announced Thursday, April 2. Those negotiations will be crucial because the kind of language in the statements and fact sheet — which probably seem pretty detailed to a casual observer — doesn’t provide the sort of clarity that a final agreement will need in order to work. (Ask me about long-range missiles of any kind sometime.)

Second, getting a deal on paper is only the first step. The parties have agreed to do all sorts of things. This may shock you, but sometimes parties have trouble delivering on such promises. Agreements aren’t self-implementing, so a major test will be how the parties deal with the inevitable challenges that human beings pose to implementing even a beautifully written final agreement. That’s not a reason to reject agreements, just a caution about being realistic.

Finally, please keep in mind that this deal makes it marginally less likely that Iran will build a nuclear weapon. That’s great. But it doesn’t solve the problem of Iran’s missile program or Tehran’s less-than-stabilizing role in the Middle East.

Expectations for any written agreement should be modest. I wouldn’t let myself get swept up in loose talk about a new relationship with Tehran. We’re agreeing to not kill each other, for the moment, over this one thing. In my business, that’s pretty good!

Still, the details are pretty interesting. The big-ticket item for the U.S. national security community will be the “breakout” timeline. I am not going to do a calculation, but the important parameters are about 5,000 centrifuges enriching to less than 3.7 percent and a reduction in the existing stockpile of low-enriched uranium to 300 kilograms. The fact sheet claims this extends the breakout timeline from two to three months to more than a year. I don’t see any reason to doubt the administration’s math, but I just don’t think the breakout timeline matters. So I will just step aside and let other people who are invested in this argument fight it out.

The provisions against covert sites — what my friend James Acton calls “sneak-out” and what I worry about most — look very strong. The fact sheet asserts that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will have continuous access to the facilities that produce Iran’s centrifuge rotors and bellows for 20 years. The agreement also provides access to Iran’s uranium mines and mills, as well as a dedicated procurement channel for any goods destined for Iran’s nuclear program. Iran will return to the Additional Protocol and modified Code 3.1 of the subsidiary arrangements — these are improvements to the safeguards agreement and subsidiary arrangements that Iran has with the IAEA. They are an important part of verifying any agreement. And it seems Iran has agreed to certain measures to address the so-called “possible military dimensions” of the nuclear program — all the intelligence, such as the infamous “laptop of death,” that suggests Iran had a covert bomb program until 2003.

Iran also agreed to limit enrichment to a single site at Natanz. Again, the details will matter here. The E3/EU+3 would be well advised to make sure the agreement includes a nice map of the Natanz facility — lest we find secret centrifuge halls in a Natanz “annex” down the road. The advantage of limiting work to a single site is that, should the U.S. intelligence community catch Iran building a centrifuge site elsewhere (again), Tehran won’t be able to make any tendentious legal excuses. Finally, there are reasonable limits on Tehran’s program to develop new generations of centrifuges.

These measures can’t guarantee that Iran doesn’t have a parallel, secret program. That’s still going to depend on the capabilities of the U.S. intelligence community. But they do force Iran to ensure that any parallel program is fully parallel, from uranium mines through centrifuge workshops to the proverbial underground mountain lair. That’s an imposition, and if secrecy breaks down at any point along that chain, the whole endeavor is compromised. The fact sheet really does assert what looks to be an impressive monitoring regime.

Last but not least, the agreement seems to deal adequately with Iran’s enrichment plant at Fordow and its heavy-water reactor at Arak.

Fordow — the covert enrichment site under a mountain and revealed in 2009 — will be converted into non-nuclear isotope separation. An earlier story indicated that a small number of centrifuges at Fordow would separate “stable” isotopes — “stable” here means non-radioactive. The nuclear fuel company Urenco has a side business that sells stable isotopes, so it’s not a crazy idea. It’s a little hard to tell from the fact sheet, but that seems to be what has happened. The IAEA will still have access to the site to make sure that it’s only used for non-nuclear purposes.

The heavy-water reactor at Arak, meanwhile, will apparently be redesigned so that it “will not produce weapons grade plutonium.” There are real benefits to redesigning the reactor to produce less plutonium, though the fact sheet isn’t clear about the nature of the redesign. Iran also committed to ship the spent fuel from the reactor out of the country and to refrain “indefinitely” from reprocessing or reprocessing-related research. The terms “reprocessing” and “reprocessing research” are not defined, but if the goal is to make Arak no scarier than, say, the light-water reactor at Bushehr, they’ve succeeded.

What Iran gets out of all this, of course, is sanctions relief. The fact sheet is vague about which U.S., EU, and U.N. sanctions will be removed by tying relief to certain “key” steps or the resolution of “key” concerns. The fact sheet also makes use of the term “snap back” to indicate that sanctions could be reimposed. Snap back? I’d like to know what sort of elastic we’re dealing with here.

This seems to still be an area of disagreement. Almost immediately, Zarif tweeted, “The solutions are good for all, as they stand. There is no need to spin using ‘fact sheets’ so early on.” Then Zarif followed with two more tweets indicating that sanctions relief would be immediate, even though the fact sheet says no such thing. This suggests to me that the two sides are still apart on the fundamental question of how quickly sanctions will get lifted. It seems there remains a devil — a Great Satan, even — in the details to be worked out. At the same time, Zarif expressed his commitment to start drafting the agreement.

The negotiators clearly still have a lot of work ahead of them. But the purpose of a “framework” agreement is to establish that both the P5+1 and the Iranians are close enough to spend the next months hammering out the details. They will spend the next few months trying to fashion the framework into a proper international agreement that can be printed on nice paper and signed by the negotiators. I suspect the conditions for sanctions relief will prove to be the most difficult aspect of these talks. Time will tell if they can succeed, but the initial descriptions are far more promising than I expected.

Report
Iran Deal Doesn’t Mean a Green Light for Business

The agreement reached between Iran and the P5+1 countries offers the sanctions relief that Tehran demanded. But that won't translate into a stampede of fresh investment or a gusher of Iranian oil exports anytime soon.

By Keith Johnson, Jamila Trindle
April 2, 2015
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Iran Deal Doesn’t Mean a Green Light for Business

The framework deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program, reached Thursday, April 2, opens the door to an eventual return of Iranian oil to the world market and offers a huge shot in the arm for the Islamic Republic’s beleaguered economy. But unwinding the web of overlapping financial and energy-related sanctions will take months after the deal’s full implementation — meaning it’s unlikely that a huge flood of extra Iranian oil will flow into the market this year.

The deal lays out a path to a phased removal of the most punishing economic and financial sanctions that hammered Iran’s economy and helped push the country to the negotiating table. But relief depends on a final deal being reached this summer and international inspectors confirming that Tehran is complying with all its commitments.

Plenty of hurdles remain for Iran. International banks and businesses, wary after years of limits on doing business in Iran, are still gun-shy about leaping back into what has essentially become an international pariah state. And the U.S. Congress could also throw a wrench in the deal by passing new legislative sanctions on Iran.

Crude oil prices slumped sharply Thursday on news of the interim deal, falling as much as 5 percent in London trading, after having inched lower all week on expectations that a breakthrough would add extra crude to an already glutted market. Western diplomats made clear that sanctions relief is contingent upon Iranian cooperation. U.S. President Barack Obama said that “sanctions can be snapped back into place” if Iran cheats on the terms of the deal.

While the agreement makes clear that Iran will be welcomed back into the international oil market and financial system if it complies with the agreed-upon nuclear restrictions, it’s unclear how long that rehabilitation will take.

Once changes to Iran’s nuclear program have been verified by international inspectors, the European Union will lift all financial sanctions, European Union foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini said Thursday. European sanctions put in place in 2012 blocked Iranian banks from using SWIFT, the messaging system banks use for cross-border transactions. The United States will also lift the secondary sanctions that currently threaten to blacklist any foreign bank that does business with Iran.

Current U.S. and European restrictions also limit Iran’s oil exports to about 1 million barrels per day, or less than half of what Iran previously exported.

The press statements in Lausanne, Switzerland, didn’t make clear exactly what time frame would be required for that compliance verification. Obama referenced the heavy lifting remaining until the final accord is signed in June, noting that “nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed.” The U.S. fact sheet listed the spate of Iranian commitments needed to secure sanctions relief, including the destruction of thousands of centrifuges, the reduction of uranium stockpiles, and the removal of spent nuclear fuel that could serve as raw material for a bomb.

American companies are expected to be last let back into Iran because they’ve been subject to restrictions on business with Iran for decades longer than other international companies. Even if nuclear-related sanctions are lifted, the United States won’t lift human rights and terrorism sanctions against Tehran that in many cases date from the 1990s. That holds true as well for U.S. sanctions that limit investment by U.S. and Western oil firms in Iran’s oil sector.

“Honestly, I don’t think there’s much breath-holding in relevant sectors of the U.S. business community,” Richard Sawaya, head of trade group USA*Engage, said in an email on April 1.

Sanctions relief is an interlocking puzzle that could delay Iran’s upside in the near term. Iran will need access to the financial system in order to reap the benefits of any other sector opening up. Without a broad rehabilitation of the banking sector, companies that want to do legal business with Iran may find it hard to find a bank willing to transfer their money. That has been the case under the interim agreement, which was signed in November 2013 and relaxed constraints on the trade of things like automobiles and airplane parts.

And that, in turn, could affect the speed and scope of Iran’s return to the global oil market. Since 2012, Iranian oil exports have been sharply curtailed by sanctions, a financial handcuff that has cut Tehran’s revenues and pushed it to negotiate. In pushing for sanctions relief, Iranian officials have insisted that they can quickly scale up crude production from 2.7 million barrels a day to 4 million barrels a day and thus channel more exports to customers in Asia. Indeed, potential buyers in China and India have expressed interest in gaining fresh access to discounted Iranian crude. In the meantime, Iran has about 30 million barrels of oil (about 10 days’ worth of production) stashed away on tankers waiting to be poured into the market.

But with the tricky fine print of the accord still waiting until the final deadline of June 30, the specter of a gusher of Iranian oil flooding into an already oversupplied market looks very unlikely. Oil-market analysts figure it will take months to unwind the oil sanctions, jump-start tired Iranian oil fields, and line up fresh contracts with buyers in Asia.

And at a time when the global oil market is still oversupplied — prices have fallen more than 50 percent since last summer — there’s not that much room for Iranian crude to elbow its way into the room. OPEC oil production is at its highest level since last fall; Saudi Arabia’s output is flirting with all-time records of 10 million barrels a day. Oil producers everywhere are still scrambling for market share at a time when demand for their product has yet to rebound.

Simply producing additional Iranian oil will already be a tall order for an industry that has been blocked from Western investment and technology for years and that needs billions of dollars and years to reach its full potential.

“Oil markets seem to believe that the crude glut would be quickly exacerbated with or without an Iran deal,” wrote Citigroup oil analyst Ed Morse on March 30. “Nothing could be further from reality, even if there is an agreement this week.”

Just meeting the terms of the deal and securing verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency will likely push Iran’s oil return to 2016, said Richard Mallinson, an analyst with Energy Aspects in London. Even then, hurdles remain in Iran’s investment-starved oil sector that won’t be solved anytime soon. That limits the amount of extra oil that Iran could pump and export to a few hundred thousand barrels a day over the medium term.

“It’s extra oil, but not a flood,” he said.

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‘Still no Whiskey!’ The Jokes Circulating Among Iranians Celebrating the Nuclear Deal

By Elias Groll
April 3, 2015 - 2:54 pm
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‘Still no Whiskey!’ The Jokes Circulating Among Iranians Celebrating the Nuclear Deal

“I went to the store now and they still don’t have whiskey! What kind of a deal is this?”

With the news that international negotiators have reached an agreement governing Iran’s nuclear program, that joke has been circulating among the country’s citizens on text messaging services, such as WhatsApp and Viber. Given restrictions on freedom of speech and expression in Iran, such platforms have emerged as popular ways to share jokes and opinions that poke fun at the government.

And in the last 24 hours, talk and jokes about the nuclear agreement, which may ease decades of international isolation for Iran, have exploded on mobile messaging services. Users on these platforms have adopted an often sardonic tone, one that speaks to a segment of the population in Iran that has grown frustrated with their country’s antagonistic relationship with the West.

These jokes were provided to Foreign Policy by a source with contacts inside Iran and who requested to remain anonymous to preserve those relationships.

One joke that’s circulating wonders sarcastically whether the agreement will herald a broader change in Iranian foreign policy:

Today is Friday. What shall we do today?? Should we say “Down to America” in Friday prayers or not?

Then there’s the matter of the Swiss hotel bill:

Latest news from the hotel in Lausanne: A deal has been reached resolving all major points of contention–except that there is no agreement on the hotel bill. Zarif says they should split the bill, while Kerry says Iran should pay for it as the negotiations were for Iran.

And will the clerics get behind the agreement?

Today is Friday, I bet the negotiations will all be destroyed by the sermon at Friday prayers!

Update: Our source passes along another joke making the rounds:

A second wife is like nuclear energy. Even though it is your undeniable right they won’t let you get it.

Outside of cyberspace, the program has been greeted by widespread celebrations on the streets of Iran. The country’s citizens danced in the streets, and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif received a hero’s welcome outside the airport in Tehran.

Irán y potencias alcanzaron histórico acuerdo nuclear

Tras más de dos semanas de arduas negociaciones, Irán y el Grupo 5+1 alcanzaron finalmente un acuerdo sobre el polémico programa nuclear del país asiático. El documento fue firmado oficialmente en Viena.

La representante de política exterior de la Unión Europea, Federica Mogherini, confirmó este martes (14.07.2015) que se ha llegado a un acuerdo con Irán sobre su programa nuclear. Se trata de "un signo de esperanza para todo el mundo", anunció.

El documento final, de unas cien páginas, incluye la eliminación gradual de todas las sanciones internacionales que pesan sobre Irán, que también saldrá de las listas de países sancionados por las Naciones Unidas, según la agencia iraní ISNA.

Ministro iraní: hoy habrá "buenas noticias" nucleares
Acuerdo nuclear con Irán: domingo no, ¿lunes sí?

En cuanto al embargo de armas, uno de los temas más candentes en la negociaciones nucleares, éste será anulado y reemplazado con alguna restricción que caducará completamente en un período de cinco años.

El texto será enviado a las capitales de los países signatarios para una revisión final. Además, el documento será llevado ante el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas en las próximas semanas para que se apruebe una resolución que le dé validez y luego tendrá que ser revisado y aceptado por el Congreso de EE. UU. y el Parlamento de Irán.

Israel: acuerdo es "error histórico"

Por su parte, Israel condenó el acuerdo en términos durísimos. El primer ministro israelí, Benjamín Netanyahu, lo describió como un "error de proporciones históricas" y aseguró que hará todo lo que esté en sus manos para impedir que Irán tenga armas atómicas.

El objetivo del acuerdo duradero que busca la comunidad internacional es que Irán no pueda acceder a la bomba atómica, a cambio del levantamiento de sanciones y otros alivios.

Éxito diplomático

Los ministros de Exteriores y sus equipos negociadores de los siete países involucrados en la negociación buscaron a lo largo de los últimos 18 días de intensas conversaciones un consenso para poder cerrar este histórico acuerdo.

El acercamiento constituye un éxito diplomático de gran magnitud en un momento de numerosos conflictos en el mundo. Marca un nuevo comienzo en las relaciones entre Estados Unidos e Irán tras 36 años de enfrentamiento. El pacto también representa el fin del aislamiento de Teherán y refuerza al régimen de los ayatolás como potencia regional.

Middle East
Trump wants to push back against Iran, but Iran is now more powerful than ever

A long-range S-200 missile is fired in a military drill in the port city of Bushehr on the northern coast of Iran on Dec. 29, 2016. President Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, said the United States is "putting Iran on notice" after it test-fired a ballistic missile last week. (Amir Kholousi/AP)
By Liz Sly and Loveday Morris February 5 at 5:07 PM
BEIRUT — President Trump’s tough talk on Iran is winning him friends in the Arab world, but it also carries a significant risk of conflict with a U.S. rival that is now more powerful than at any point since the creation of the Islamic republic nearly 40 years ago.

With its warning last week that Iran is “on notice,” the Trump administration signaled a sharp departure from the policies of President Barack Obama, whose focus on pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran eclipsed historic U.S. concerns about Iranian expansionism and heralded a rare period of detente between Washington and Tehran.

Many in the region are now predicting a return to the tensions of the George W. Bush era, when U.S. and Iranian operatives fought a shadow war in Iraq, Sunni-Shiite tensions soared across the region and America’s ally Israel fought a brutal war with Iran’s ally Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Except that now the United States will be facing down a far stronger Iran, one that has taken advantage of the past six years of turmoil in the Arab world to steadily expand its reach and military capabilities.

“In order to confront Iran or push back more fiercely against it, you may find you’re in a conflict far more far-reaching and more destructive to the global economy than many of our allies or American public are willing to bear,” said Nicholas Heras of the Center for a New American Security.


Iran’s alleged quest to produce a nuclear weapon — which Tehran has always denied — has been curbed by the nuclear accord signed in 2015. But in the meantime it has developed missiles capable of hitting U.S. bases and allies across the Middle East and built a network of alliances that have turned it into the most powerful regional player.

Iran now stands at the apex of an arc of influence stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean, from the borders of NATO to the borders of Israel and along the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. It commands the loyalties of tens of thousands in allied militias and proxy armies that are fighting on the front lines in Syria, Iraq and Yemen with armored vehicles, tanks and heavy weapons. They have been joined by thousands of members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s most prestigious military wing, who have acquired meaningful battlefield experience in the process.

For the first time in its history, the Institute for the Study of War noted in a report last week, Iran has developed the capacity to project conventional military force for hundreds of miles beyond its borders. “This capability, which very few states in the world have, will fundamentally alter the strategic calculus and balance of power within the Middle East,” the institute said.

America’s Sunni Arab allies, who blame the Obama administration’s hesitancy for Iran’s expanded powers, are relishing the prospect of a more confrontational U.S. approach. Any misgivings they may have had about Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric have been dwarfed by their enthusiasm for an American president they believe will push back against Iran.

“We are so happy and excited about President Trump,” said Abdullah al-Shamri, a former Saudi Arabian diplomat, speaking from the Saudi capital of Riyadh. “We expect him to deal with the Iranians as the threat that they are, producing missiles and interfering in other countries.”

Exactly what the Trump administration intends to do about a state of affairs that has already become deeply entrenched is unclear, however. So pervasive is Iran’s presence across the region that it is hard to see how any U.S. administration could easily roll it back without destabilizing allies, endangering Americans, undermining the war against the Islamic State and upsetting the new regional balance that emerged during the Obama administration’s retreat, analysts say.

The Trump administration has given no indication that it intends to abrogate the nuclear accord. Rather, U.S. officials say, the goal is to contain activities that lie outside the scope of the accord, such as the ballistic missile program and what one official called the “destabilizing activities” of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies.

So far, U.S. action has been confined to retaliation for Iran’s test-launch of a ballistic missile last week and an attack by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on a Saudi Arabian navy ship in the Red Sea. The Treasury imposed sanctions Friday against people and companies alleged to be involved in the missile program and the Pentagon dispatched the destroyer USS Cole to the coast of Yemen, suggesting that Iran’s arming of the Houthis may be an early target.

Otherwise, the Trump administration has given little indication of what it has in mind, except to make clear that it intends to be different from Obama.

“Iran is playing with fire — they don’t appreciate how ‘kind’ President Obama was to them. Not me!” Trump wrote in a tweet Friday.

Iran has offered a relatively muted response to the challenge, with Iran’s foreign minister tweeting that Iran is “unmoved” by the threats emanating from Washington. “We’ll never initiate war,” he said.

Iran may well conclude that it is not in its interests to engage in confrontation with a new U.S. administration already earning a reputation for unpredictability, analysts say.

But those familiar with Iran’s behavior in the region have said that they do not believe it will readily surrender its gains.

“Any pushing back, the Iranians won’t take it lying down,” predicted Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite Iraqi parliamentarian who has, for many years, worked to bridge the divide between Iran and America in Iraq.

“Iraq, Iran and the United States are an extremely finely balanced equation, and Trump shouldn’t come and bash,” he said. “He should play this extremely delicately.”

It is in Iraq, where fighting the Islamic State has most conspicuously brought the United States into a tacit alliance with Iran, that a more hostile relationship between Tehran and Washington could prove most consequential.

Iranian-backed militias are deeply embedded in the overall Iraqi effort to wrest back territory from the militants, one that is also being aided by the United States. In the Mosul offensive, hundreds of U.S. advisers are working alongside Iraqi troops advancing from the east, among about 6,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq. Thousands of Iranian-backed militia fighters are meanwhile advancing on the city from the west, among a force of tens of thousands that answers mostly, though not exclusively, to Iran.

One of the Iranian-backed groups fighting around Mosul is Kitaeb Hezbollah, which also blew up American troops with roadside bombs and fired mortars into U.S. bases at the height of U.S.-Iranian tensions a decade ago. It will not hesitate to attack U.S. troops should the United States attempt to diminish Iran’s role in Iraq, said Jaffar al-Hussaini, Kitaeb Hezbollah’s spokesman.

[Trump cites warnings against Iran; Tehran shrugs off pressures from ‘inexperienced’ president]

“We look at America as our first enemy, the source of all evil on the Earth,” he said. “American interests in Iraq are within our sights and our fire range. If they act foolishly, their interests will be wiped out . . . and we can target their bases whenever we want.”

It is also hard to see how the United States could act to curtail the extensive influence acquired by Iran during the war in Syria. Iran and Russia together have fought to ensure the survival of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and they are now pursuing a peace settlement in alliance with Turkey that excludes a role for the United States. America has been left with few friends and little leverage, apart from the Kurds in the northeast of the country.

Russia controls the skies over Syria, and Turkey wields influence over the rebels, but Iran holds sway on the ground, through its extensive network of Shiite militias drawn from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They have provided the manpower for front lines from the northern countryside of Aleppo, near the Turkish border, to the Golan Heights bordering Israel in the south.

Trump’s promises to curb Iranian influence are at odds with his stated desire to pursue closer cooperation with Russia in Syria and also to support Assad, because Iran is allied with both Assad and Russia, said Mustafa Alani, a director at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.

“He will not be able to contain Iran if he is going to support Assad. He cannot have both at the same time,” he said. The solution, he said, is to topple Assad, because “Assad is the man who is underpinned by Iranian support. He was saved only by Iranian intervention.”

Alani sees no reason Trump should not easily be able to contain Iranian influence.

“It is a myth that Iran is strong. The only reason Iran is strong is because of U.S. weakness,” he said. “Iran is very thinly stretched. It will not take a lot to contain Iran.”

But even those celebrating the shift in American policy don’t seem so sure.

“Tehran today is challenged by a strict, driven, strong and decisive United States, which was not always the case with the lenient and hesitant Obama administration,” said a commentary Saturday in the Pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. “The region now faces turbulent winds of change. It will not be easy.”

Morris reported from Baghdad. Mustafa Salim in Baghdad also contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/trump-wants-to-push-back-against-iran-but-iran-is-now-more-powerful-than-ever/2017/02/05/9a7629ac-e960-11e6-903d-9b11ed7d8d2a_story.html?tid=sm_fb_wd