How Biden’s Iran Policy Can Have a Chance to Succeed

The U.S.’s relationship with Iran will never be easy. Not even President-elect Joe Biden’s readiness to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, will be of much help. He has made it clear his goal is Iran’s compliance. But will anger over the killing of nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and the small window of opportunity before June’s presidential election rule out diplomacy in the near term? Probably not, because Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei knows that Iran needs sanctions relief, but he will press for the U.S. to relax sanctions before Iran does anything.

The Iranians can get back into compliance with the 2015 deal by respecting the limits imposed on the number of their centrifuges, the level to which they can enrich, the amount of low-enriched uranium they can accumulate, dismantling two cascades of installed advanced centrifuges, and so on. For the U.S.’s part, it can again suspend sanctions, providing desperately needed economic relief for Iranians. But it would still take four to six months for Iran to get back into compliance with the nuclear deal. Will the new administration provide sanctions relief even as Iran continues to violate the JCPOA’s limits? The Iranians are not only insisting on continuing to do so, but they are also demanding compensation for the cost of the sanctions that the Donald Trump administration imposed on them, claiming with some justification that they continued to respect their obligations under the terms of the JCPOA for a full year after Trump stopped respecting the U.S.’s.