The nuclear agreement signed in 2015 between Iran and the G-5+1 countries (United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom + Germany) to limit the Iranian atomic program to peaceful uses, in exchange for a lifting of sanctions weighing against the economy of this country, it was a good deal. Driven by the then president of the United States, Barak Obama, he got Iran to commit to keeping its uranium enrichment program below the thresholds necessary to manufacture an atomic bomb. The decision of the Trump Administration to withdraw unilaterally from the agreement, in 2018, was bad news. According to observers from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran faithfully kept this commitment until this withdrawal, when it decided to resume previous nuclear activities adding new reasons for tension between the countries of the region.
In this context, in which issues related to nuclear security and others typical of the conflictive relationship between Iran and its most powerful neighbors (Israel and Saudi Arabia) intervene, President Joe Biden’s decision to reopen negotiations to return to the 2015 agreement it was an initiative welcomed by Iran and the countries of the European Union. Especially when, to justify his decision, Trump had alluded to the existence of secret Iranian plans to manufacture the atomic bomb, an assertion on which he never provided conclusive evidence, which was only supported by Israel and which was not shared by the other signatories of the agreement. These continued to be part of it, pending the reincorporation of Washington. With a singular involvement of the EU, the negotiations advanced, to the point that the agreement was taken for granted a couple of weeks ago.
However, in recent days various obstacles have come together to prevent this return of the United States to the 2015 agreement. Firstly, the criminal stabbing of the writer Salman Rushdie by an American of Shiite confession has given wings to those who continue to believe that Iran is part of that “axis of evil” to which George Bush alluded, shortly after the attack on the Twin Towers. This idea, deeply rooted in American society and in its own Congress, is an obstacle to Biden’s attempts to return to the negotiating table. Although the Iranian regime has not justified the stabbing of Rushdie, the truth is that having argued that the deadly fatwa of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, against the British writer cannot be reviewed, because he is already dead, does not help to create a favorable weather. Rushdie’s assassination attempt, the arrest in the US of an Iranian agent allegedly involved in preparing an attack against a citizen of the same origin, as well as the more gruesome story according to which Iran would have planned to kidnap John Bolton, known conservative diplomat and staunch critic of Tehran, have given new impetus to the group of congressmen from both parties opposed to a return to the 2015 agreement. In this difficult context, it does not seem reasonable that Iran now intends to include in the new text clauses that prevent future withdrawals like Trump’s. The EU, recipient of Tehran’s latest proposal, will have to convince the government of Ebrahim Raisi that an agreement of this nature is not based on its legal effectiveness but rather on mutual trust between its signatories.