Is Biden Headed toward ‘Surrender’ on Iran Talks?

Not for the first time since the Biden administration opened indirect discussions with Tehran about reentering the 2015 nuclear deal, it seems as though negotiators might be approaching a breakthrough. Several days after Politico EU initially reported that the European compromise plan has gained traction among Western officials, the U.S. and Iran might be moving past a previous impasse.

What would that mean in practice? “No less than surrender,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told NR over email. He was referring to a recent report by Iran International, based on a list of “concessions” that the U.S. team purportedly offered to Iranian negotiators. The two sides are reportedly going back and forth on the specifics, but the list obtained by Iran International is the basis for any compromise solution that may materialize in the coming weeks.

According to the outlet, that document is circulating among “conservative circles close to the Raisi” administration, presumably to drum up support for an eventual deal. The concessions would effectively gut Trump-era “maximum pressure” sanctions that targeted broad swaths of the Iranian economy. It would permit the sale of 50 million barrels of oil, currently prohibited under current sanctions, in about three months — which would also be the time frame for implementing the deal — and require that the Biden administration rescind certain executive orders.

The oil concessions, according to Iran International, would allow Iran to raise $4 billion during that initial period, and the deal would also immediately release $7 billion in Iranian funds currently tied up in South Korean banks. The concessions document boasts that the U.S. would remove sanctions on 150 entities, without specifying exactly what those entities are.

Not to mention that the EU compromise language that might have broken the logjam would result in an easing of U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, though it wouldn’t result in the group’s removal from Washington’s foreign-terrorist organization list outright. Nevertheless, that language would make it significantly easier for non-American entities to fill IRGC coffers.

Of course, these reports have come at a delicate time. Federal prosecutors recently unsealed an indictment targeting an IRGC operative who allegedly hired someone to surveil and plot the murder of former national-security adviser John Bolton; other reports indicate that several other current and former U.S. officials remain at risk. Tehran also had a relative success this month when a 24-year-old super-fan of the Iranian regime allegedly stabbed and critically wounded the novelist Salman Rushdie at a cultural festival in upstate New York.

Taleblu said that ought to have made such a deal a nonstarter. “Any agreement that rewards the regime’s terrorism apparatus after multiple threats against U.S. citizens, as in the aftermath of the attempted killing of Salman Rushdie, is not only detrimental to US national security, but also a fool’s errand, pure and simple,” he said.

All of this might well be teeing up an epic congressional clash ahead of the midterm elections. Republicans are in lockstep opposition to any potential agreement, with many crowing that a future GOP president would rip it to shreds on Day One; many hawkish Democrats, such as Representative Elaine Luria, have also expressed misgivings about the direction the talks are taking. While many of them specifically expressed horror at previous indications that the administration would remove the IRGC terror designation, it remains to be seen where they will land were the EU’s compromise workaround to take.

In a preview of what that will look like, Jim Risch, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s top Republican, tweeted last night that the Iranians are seeking guarantees that the Biden adminsitraiton would protect Western companies doing business in Iran and allow Tehran to “accelerate nuclear weapons work” as a penalty if the U.S. were to withdraw from a new agreement.

And, in turn, previewing a future White House rapid-response effort to counter the Iran hawks, the National Security Council’s account fired back: “Nothing here is true.” Then, it pivoted to bashing Donald Trump’s decision to exit the agreement in the first place.