Will the Iran Nuclear Deal Survive?

Presidential elections in the United States and Iran complicate the prospects of both the nuclear deal and a Boeing sale.
Presidential elections in the United States and Iran complicate the prospects of both the nuclear deal and a Boeing sale.PHOTOGRAPH BY RICK WILKING / AFP / GETTY

Last month, Boeing signed a landmark agreement with Iran to sell or lease a hundred and nine passenger jets. The mega-deal, worth at least twenty billion dollars, would be the largest sale of American goods to the Islamic Republic since the seizure of the U.S. Embassy, shortly after the 1979 Revolution. Iran Air badly needs new planes to modernize its fleet, which dates back to the Shah’s era. Iranians alternately joke and agonize about mechanical problems that plague the country’s aging aircraft, essential for travel in a country two and a half times the size of Texas.

The Boeing sale would mark the next phase in developing a pragmatic and profitable—if still unofficial—relationship with Iran, after the nuclear deal completed a year ago today. The fates of both initiatives, however, still face turbulent rides. The nuclear deal—formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (J.C.P.O.A.)—is fragile, at best. The diplomatic flirtation during two years of tortuous negotiations has also soured, despite nine meetings between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in the past year. The detention of more Iranian-Americans, who were formally indicted this week, hasn’t helped. Presidential elections in the United States and Iran complicate the prospects of both the nuclear deal and the Boeing sale.

In Iran, a new poll released on Wednesday finds growing disillusionment with the nuclear deal, the leaders who produced it, and the United States. President Hassan Rouhani, the charismatic centrist who initiated the diplomacy, is facing a backlash. He ran, in 2013, on the promise that nuclear diplomacy would lift sanctions and improve the economy. Almost three-quarters of Iranians polled now say they have felt no improvements from the deal—and have little or no confidence that Washington will fulfill its commitments, according to the University of Maryland and Iranpoll.com.

“Iran paid a huge price,” Kayhan, the hard-line newspaper, wrote this week to mark the anniversary. “The public is asking: What has the nuclear deal accomplished for people’s livelihood and for the dignity of Islamic Iran?”

Since international economic sanctions were lifted, in January, Iran has increased oil production by a million barrels a day and almost doubled oil exports. But unemployment remains high. Major foreign companies and banks have so far been reluctant to invest. The United States still sanctions Iran for its support for terrorism, missile tests, and human-rights abuses.

“The U.S. has effectively removed sanctions only on paper, and the European companies would fear any opening of trade with Iran lest the U.S. would punish them in the name of violating sanctions,” Zarif, the foreign minister, said at a news conference, in Oslo, last month. “The Iranian people wait to see the impact of removal of sanctions in practice.”

Among likely voters, the gap between Rouhani and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has closed to only eight points—down from twenty-seven points a year ago, the poll found. Ahmadinejad is a hard-liner whose eight years in office, between 2005 and 2013, coincided with the most rapid development in Iran’s nuclear program and the greatest hostility to the West. And he has yet to even formally declare his candidacy in the election, to be held next June.

“Iranians appear to have underestimated how much the remaining U.S. sanctions, coupled with uncertainty about future U.S. policies, would affect their ability to access frozen funds and engage economically with countries besides the United States,” Nancy Gallagher, the interim director of the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, reported. “If the Iranian public fails to see reductions in unemployment and other tangible benefits from the nuclear concessions Iran made, Rouhani’s re-election may be at risk.”

The Obama Administration had hoped that the deal would lead to greater coöperation with Iran on regional crises, especially in ending Syria’s civil war and fighting the Islamic State. ISIS fighters have come within twenty-five miles of Iran’s border. Iran joined the three rounds of Syrian peace talks earlier this year in Geneva, but Iranian public interest in collaborating with the United States on regional issues has declined. Ninety-eight per cent of Iranians polled have a “very unfavorable” view of ISIS, yet more than half now reject coöperation with the United States against the Islamic State.

Washington has its own share of critics of the deal. “The region perceives that its political effects have encouraged, even enabled Iran’s hegemonic quest,” James F. Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, who is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote. “The Obama Administration, bereft of diplomatic successes elsewhere, has become so indebted to Iran for the agreement that it has avoided challenging Iran and, worse, seems to view the agreement as a transformative moment with Tehran, a ‘Havana in the sand.’ ”

The House of Representatives voted last week to block the Boeing sale, despite the economic benefits and obligations under the nuclear deal. “To give these types of planes to the Iranian regime, which still is the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, is to give them a product that can be used for a military purpose,” the Illinois Republican Peter Roskam, who spearheaded the legislation, said. The House will still have to reconcile any legislation with the Senate, where it may be harder to pass.

The office of House Speaker Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican, warned in an e-mail today, “The president’s nuclear deal has only served to bolster Tehran’s terror proxies, ballistic missile program, and oppressive rule over its people. House Republicans are taking action this week to block additional concessions to the mullahs and impose fresh sanctions on the regime for its illicit behavior. The administration should mark this anniversary by reversing course on its dangerous game of appeasing our enemies, but we’re not holding our breath.”

The White House has vowed to veto any legislation blocking the Boeing sale. But congressional opponents of any dealing with Iran have proposed an array of legislation this year to make it more difficult for the United States to meet its obligations. They have also tried to block a second deal Iran made in January, with Europe’s Airbus, for a hundred and eighteen jets, worth twenty-seven billion dollars, on the grounds that the planes have American parts. Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former Treasury specialist on Iran sanctions, called the congressional efforts “a political stunt. It’s a way for certain critics to take a stand on the one-year anniversary. It’s also to mark a line in the sand for critics who seek to influence the next Administration on Iran broadly and this deal particularly.” Rosenberg is now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington.

The dangers of the deal unravelling, however, are real. “The potential for Iranian and American critics to undermine the J.C.P.O.A.—together with the complex compliance issues likely to arise and the uncertainties surrounding leadership transitions in the United States and Iran—raise questions about the long-term sustainability of the deal, questions that will be on the minds of leaders of Middle East countries as they consider how best to ensure their security in the years ahead,” Robert Einhorn and Richard Nephew warned, in a recent report for the Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. Both are former members of the U.S.-Iran negotiating team.

Technically, the deal has accomplished the goal of restricting Iran’s nuclear capability. “So far, the Iran deal is a tremendous nonproliferation success,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, told me. “It would now take Iran more than a year to amass enough fissile material for just one weapon, and any effort to do so would be detected and disrupted long before that. Without the deal, Iran could have been just days away from this threshold, and a war over its nuclear program far more likely.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency—the U.N. nuclear watchdog body that monitors the deal—reported this spring that Tehran had taken “transparency measures which go beyond Iran’s obligations.” The former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and the former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy said, in separate appearances last month, that the nuclear deal insured that Iran does not constitute an existential threat to Israel—for now.

In its final months, the Obama Administration is still engaged in a hard sell. The President today praised “principled diplomacy” for halting the spread of nuclear weapons. “We still have serious differences with Iran, but the United States, our partners, and the world are more secure because of the J.C.P.O.A.,” he said in a statement. From Paris, Secretary Kerry also heralded the anniversary of the deal, saying, “One year later, a program that so many people said will not work, a program that people said is absolutely doomed to see cheating and be broken and will make the world more dangerous, has, in fact, made the world safer, lived up to its expectations, and thus far produced an ability to be able to create a peaceful nuclear program with Iran living up to its part of this bargain.”

The pressure is on, however, to block further congressional resistance and get the terms of the Boeing deal formally approved during Obama’s final months in office. Both major-party Presidential candidates have been more hawkish on Iran. Addressing a policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in March, Hillary Clinton said, “Iranian provocations, like the recent ballistic missile tests, are . . . unacceptable and should be answered firmly and quickly, including with more sanctions.” She went on, “The United States must also continue to enforce existing sanctions and impose additional sanctions as needed on Iran and the Revolutionary Guard for their sponsorship of terrorism, illegal arms transfers, human-rights violations, and other illicit behaviors, like cyber attacks.”

Donald Trump, who also spoke at AIPAC, went further. “My No. 1 priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran,” he said. “I have been in business a long time. I know deal-making, and, let me tell you, this deal is catastrophic—for America, for Israel, and for the whole Middle East. The problem here is fundamental. We have rewarded the world's leading state sponsor of terror with one hundred and fifty billion dollars, and we received absolutely nothing in return. I've studied this issue in greater detail than almost anybody.” (The deal actually released just a bit more than fifty billion dollars—Iran’s oil revenues frozen in foreign banks by sanctions.)

To mark the anniversary in Tehran, President Rouhani pledged on state television Wednesday that Iran would keep its commitments. He added, however, that his government was “fully prepared and able” to resume its nuclear program—and capabilities—on very short notice, should the Western powers fail to meet their commitments. Zarif posted on Twitter today, "The #IranDeal was a triumph of diplomacy over coercion. Same stark choice for US today." The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the final authority on all Iranian policies, has been much blunter. Last month, he warned, “If the threats of tearing up the J.C.P.O.A. made by the U.S. Presidential candidates are carried out, the Islamic Republic will set the deal ablaze.”