At UN General Assembly, ISIL may overshadow Iran nuclear talks

Nuclear talks between Iran and world powers resumed in New York, Thursday, with little optimism that a deal would be clinched on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Tehran and Washington both appear to be hanging tough on the key questions of the size of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, and the duration of any agreed restrictions on that program – even as the nuclear question looks likely to be eclipsed over the next 10 days by the crisis over confronting Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group in Syria and Iraq.

Addressing the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday evening, Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif devoted as much or more time to the question of ISIL than to the nuclear negotiations in which he has been intimately involved over the past year. While Iran and the U.S. are ostensibly on the same side in opposing the extremist group’s advances in Iraq and Syria, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appears to have ruled out overt collaboration with Washington – and has publicly ridiculed the Obama Administration for soliciting such cooperation.

Speaking as the U.S. House of Representatives approved funding for training and equipping as-yet unnamed “moderate” rebels in Syria, Zarif asserted that the U.S. “cannot fight [ISIL] and the government in Damascus together.”

A nuclear deal could potentially facilitate more open U.S.-Iran consultations on Iraq and even Syria, but failure to reach agreement could further imperil the prospects for collaboration on shared security concerns in the region. Comments in recent days by U.S. and Iranian officials suggest that the nuclear negotiations will continue until the current deadline of Nov. 24, and that both sides will use the General Assembly and related summitry to try to court international support for their divergent positions.

Among the differences still impeding a long-term nuclear agreement:

• Number of centrifuges: Iran has proposed limiting its uranium-enrichment program for a prescribed period of time to the roughly 10,000 rudimentary centrifuges it currently operates, or a smaller number of more advanced machines that would give it about the same enrichment capacity. The U.S. is demanding that Iran cut that total by several thousand centrifuges, to extend the so-called breakout period – the time needed for Iran to produce enough fissile material for a single nuclear bomb if its leaders decided to build nuclear weapons – from the current estimate of two months to between six months and one year. (Fewer centrifuges would give the international community more time to respond to an Iranian “breakout” from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which forbids signatories that do not possess nuclear weapons from making them.)

• Duration of the accord: U.S. officials have talked about limits on Iran’s enrichment capacity lasting 15 to 20 years; Zarif suggested on Wednesday that Iran is only prepared to accept restrictions on its enrichment program for five years – although strict monitoring of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would continue indefinitely.

• Previous possible military research: Under the interim nuclear agreement reached last year and extended in July, Iran is required to cooperate with an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) probe of allegations that Iran conducted research on building nuclear weapons in the late 1990s, until 2003. While Tehran has provided some answers to the IAEA, the organization’s latest report complains that Iranian cooperation has been partial, at best, and that Iran has missed key deadlines for responding to the agency’s requests for information.

Zarif stressed Wednesday that Iran “is committed” to resolving the nuclear issue, and said “we are ready to continue negotiations in good faith.” But he warned his U.S. audience that Iranians are distrustful of US intentions and need to be convinced that Washington will abide by its commitments to lift sanctions in return for Iranian concessions.

“Don’t ask us to put all our faith in promises while you’re not prepared to accept our promises,” he said.

Underlining the gaps and anticipating Tehran’s arguments, Wendy Sherman, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs who has been the chief U.S. negotiator in talks with Iran, told a Washington audience a day earlier:

“I fully expect in the days ahead that Iran will try to convince the world that on this pivotal matter, the status quo – or its equivalent – should be acceptable. It is not… The world will agree to suspend and then lift sanctions only if Iran takes convincing and verifiable steps to show that its nuclear program is and will remain entirely peaceful.”

Some Iran analysts are already talking about a need to extend last year’s interim agreement a second time, if not indefinitely. Ray Takeyh, a former State Department adviser now at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Al-Jazeera, “It is wrong to set deadlines”. Contrary to Sherman’s argument, Takeyh said “everyone would be happy to prolong the status quo,” which prevents Iran from enriching uranium beyond a very low grade, far below the level needed for weaponization, in return for incremental access to Iranian oil revenues that have been frozen in foreign bank accounts because of U.S.-led sanctions.

Gary Samore, a former Obama administration official now at Harvard’s Belfer Center, suggested recently that Israel – which has kept up a steady stream of hawkish pressure on the Administration over Iran – was “coming around to the view that the status quo is acceptable” when compared to Iran resuming enrichment to 20 percent U-235, uncomfortably close to weapons grade. (Iran suspended 20 percent enrichment as part of the deal agreed last fall, under which the current talks are being held.)

The status quo, in fact, seems to be less comfortable for Tehran. Iranian negotiators have expressed reluctance to prolong the talks, and could opt to end them and instead seek to break the sanctions regime in other ways if no long-term agreement is reached. Tehran is banking on finding sympathy in the developing world and from U.N. Security Council members Russia and China, which are already major trading partners and have grievances of their own with the United States.

Projecting an image of reasoned responsibility in a region fraught by extremism and brutality, Iran hopes that the Obama administration will conclude that it is more important to seal a nuclear agreement with Iran than to quibble over a few thousand centrifuges.

Under President Barack Obama and Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, U.S.-Iran relations have come a long way in the past year with a series of high-level contacts, but they have much further to go.

Both Obama and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may be considering their legacy. Khamenei, 75, recently underwent prostate surgery, while Obama has only two and a quarter years left in his presidency and no other obvious prospect of a big foreign policy achievement.

A nuclear deal that opened the way to broader regional cooperation and stabilization would be signal a profound change in U.S.-Iranian relations. But it remains unclear whether that’s a leap either is willing to make.