Negotiating with Tehran

Aaron Stein 0:09

Hello and welcome to the Arms Control Wong podcast, the leading podcast in arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. My name is Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wong blog, and I'm also an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. And I'm Jeffrey Lewis.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:25

I am a scholar at the soon-to-be Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and the founding publisher of ArmsControlWong.com.

Aaron 0:34

And today we're joined by Shashank Joshi, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, my colleague and a good friend. Welcome, Shashank.

Shashank Joshi 0:42

Thank you, Aaron. And hello, Jeffrey.

Aaron 0:44

Hi. So today we're talking about Iran, given the ongoing negotiations going on in Vienna at the moment. Just talking about the current state of the negotiations and how all things are going. So, Jeffrey, I'd like to just start with you here. What do you think about the current status? I mean, things seem to be ongoing, right?

Jeffrey 1:03

Yeah, I'm not sure I'd say they're going well. Obviously, none of us are inside the room, but I keep hearing rumors that there's going to be yet another extension. A year ago, the United States and its European partners and the Russians and the Chinese Reached a deal with the Iranians that expires on, what is it, November 24th?

Aaron 1:25

November 24th, yes.

Jeffrey 1:27

Yeah, it was a six-month deal. It got rolled over once. And we are yet again out of time. And it sounds like we're going to go into our second overtime.

Aaron 1:38

I mean, that's certainly what it looks like from my end. I mean, Shashank, you wrote a little bit about this today. Is that what you're seeing?

Shashank 1:44

Yes, it does. I mean, we saw the British foreign secretary say yesterday that he said the gaps are too big. We would probably need a deadline. So he slightly broke ranks with John Kerry, who was insisting we are not going to need a deadline. We are not discussing an extension. But I think some of this is to convey a sense of urgency and implicit in all of this is actually.

We are running out of time. Julian Borger's latest piece in The Guardian quotes a former State Department official recently involved in this as saying it's, quote, physically impossible to conclude an agreement in the remaining time. So the question we have now really is, is what happens on Monday? What kind of extension do we have rather than do we have one or not, I think?

Jeffrey 2:25

Hey, you were saying something earlier about the way that diplomacy is playing out. And so one of the questions I had is, since we're hearing slightly different voices from the E3, EU plus three, do you have a sense of whether that's going – Better than it did last time, where the French sort of famously, and I happen to think correctly on the merits, said, oh, hey, wait, wait, not so fast.

This isn't quite the deal we want. Do you get a sense that things are a little better coordinated?

Shashank 2:57

Well, that was a Geneva surprise last year. Fabius coming into the room like he sometimes does and blowing things up. I think we've learned our lesson. Certainly Kerry's learned his lesson. He pitched his tent up in London a couple of days ago. He's just been here. He may have left by now or he may be leaving tomorrow.

But the point is, he is coordinating with the Europeans extremely carefully. Not only that, I think he's also talking to the Omanis quite a lot. And I think he is being very, very careful on this occasion personally. To make sure that there are no nasty surprises with the French in particular, the French who have been, of course, particularly sensitive about the details of any deal.

So, yeah, I think they've learned their lesson on this occasion. They're going to be very careful that their negotiating position is really ironed out, which is particularly important because you have a trilateral on Friday between Baroness Ashton, John Kerry and Iran's foreign minister, Zarif.

Aaron 3:52

Yeah, I'd also add just – I mean during those meetings that he was having with the Brits in London, he was also coordinating with the Saudis as well, who I think one of the princes was in town for separate meetings with the British. So I mean I would agree with you, Shashank, that he's certainly doing a better job this time of trying to reassure allies and really tighten up message with the closest American partners on these negotiations.

Shashank 4:16

Yes, he would.

Aaron 4:16

And he's got to make sure that – Sorry, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 4:19

Oh, I was going to say I was going to make a joke. You're probably going to make a substantive point, but I was going to say he has to make sure Le Sect is on side.

Shashank 4:27

Well, I was just saying in Paris, he met Fabius, but he also met the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal. So, you know, I think that to some extent they realize they are going to have to keep allies much more closely in the loop, because if they don't, there's a risk of some nasty shocks coming later down the line.

Aaron 4:46

Well, I mean, even with all this close consultations, I mean, I think, Jeffrey, you were hinting at it earlier. We talked about it, is that everything you're reading is that an extension is coming down the road, that the time is running out. It doesn't look like the gaps that are between the two parties, essentially the P5 plus one and the Iranians, are going to be overcome before the 24 November deadline.

So, I mean, the question is, What do we make of this? What do we make of the possibility of an extension? What does it mean for the negotiations? And how should we approach this from an arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament standpoint?

Jeffrey 5:23

Right. Well, from my perspective, I guess the question is whether they roll over the JPOA a second time. And so we're on our third six month period or whether they announce a new interim agreement. And so one of the questions that I have is whether, you know, the JPOA, like any agreement, is not perfect. And the big Geneva surprise blow up was about making sure that the suspension that the Iranians agreed to was actually a real suspension, not just a sort of shifting around of resources so that they could continue doing work.

And so one of the questions that I have, and I'm not really sure how I feel, I think I'm probably mildly concerned, is that if we just roll over the JPOA program, There are really no constraints on the development of – the research and development of new centrifuges. And so we just had this big flap with the IR-5 that we can talk about.

But Iran has much better and more capable centrifuges planned to come online. And it's a little hard – To accept negotiating if, in fact, the Iranians are making that much progress on a new generation of centrifuges. At least that's my concern.

Shashank 6:38

I think there's a third possibility as well, Jeffrey. You talked about two possibilities, rolling over the JPOA or negotiating a new interim agreement. The third possibility is rolling it over or a new agreement, but with an additional element, which is a new sort of temporary framework agreement, which is to say you get down on paper everything that's been agreed.

In other words, you get it all in the bank, you codify it. On ARAC, on centrifuge numbers, perhaps on a number of other things. And then you fill in the details in the next interim period in the hope that by showing you've agreed something, you can somehow legitimate the extra time you need. You can show that you are not simply stringing things out pointlessly.

The danger of that, of course, and which the reason I think it probably won't happen is that this mantra in the JPOA was nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Because of course, all of the different elements are interlocking, they all affect each other. And so I don't think it'll happen, but we should be aware of that possibility, I think.

Jeffrey 7:45

Yeah, I would say, I think in some ways that would be a very that would be a very reasonable solution, which, which of course probably means that it's impossible, right? But you know, one of the, the way that I have been worrying or the thing that I, I've been worrying about is If we're going to go ahead and keep negotiating, I just don't want to get into a spot where where the Iranians you know, are making progress so that we're in a period of kind of perpetually rolling things over.

And so, yeah, that, that actually might solve that problem. I

Aaron 8:29

Actually, I found myself nodding along as you were speaking here. But one thing I was thinking about, Jeffrey, it was in your preamble to this about the IR5, is that how there's no limits on R&D. And I couldn't help but think, you know, this gets you down into the technical nitty gritty details about, you know, it links to a conversation we're gonna have a little bit later about breakout times.

And I think we actually should bring it up now. It's If you can't put any limits on more capable centrifuges and if the agreement doesn't address that and if we just roll over what we have now, are we not putting in place, as you say, some sort of – An inadvertent way for the Iranians to continue to make progress while also having legitimacy of ongoing negotiations.

So doesn't this new agreement, if we have to extend it, require some sort of more stringent limits being placed on the Iranians in excess of the JPOA? And what would they want from us in return?

Jeffrey 9:35

Yeah, when I think back about the – I love the phrase Geneva surprise. So a year ago when the original draft agreement didn't contain any restrictions on the IR-40 reactor, the concern then was if you are negotiating while allowing the Iranians to continue doing work, Then you're creating an incentive for them to drag out negotiations forever, and you're giving them a very, very strong hand, and you're likely to come home with a deal that won't be sustainable.

So I actually supported the French position, which was a new and interesting experience for me, arguing that, no, it has to hurt a little bit. The freeze on Iran while we negotiate has to be something that they're Eager to get done with and then get beyond to the qualities of a final field. And so the IR5 issue, which I guess I can summarize, I'll try to do it really quickly, is the Iranians have, the way that I interpret the JPOA, and I know David Albright interpreted it slightly differently, but the way I interpreted the JPOA was to say that the Iranians can continue to do all the research and development that they want, provided that when they enrich uranium In developmental centrifuges, they then simply take the product and mix it back in with the tails so that there's no accumulation of material.

The problem, of course, is if the Iranians are freezing the number and operation of the centrifuges at Natanz, but all the while making progress toward the one we're really worried about is the IR-8, which is just, in theory, going to be dramatically better, Then doesn't that put you back in the same situation where they're happy to negotiate basically forever until they get the you know, to the IRAs ready.

And so yeah, I think I think the, I think any interim agreement has to, you know, it has to be a little bit painful for both parties so that they have an incentive to actually get to a final deal. Yeah.

Shashank 11:51

I think from a nonproliferation standpoint, that makes eminent sense. From a political and diplomatic standpoint, it looks to me like it's going to be exceptionally difficult to persuade Iran to undertake new obligations in this period. When I look at the domestic situation and the pressure the negotiating teams are under, the sensitivity to nuclear rights, I struggle to see what kind of compensation or compromise could be possible that would see Iran actually rolling back some of that R&D activity.

I mean, if it was part of a broader package, and this is where the framework agreement comes in, perhaps it's more feasible. But otherwise, I think that they're going to demand certainly more than the modest release of cash that we saw last year.

Jeffrey 12:47

Well, and that's really what worries me. I mean I have to say I agree with that analysis completely, and that causes me a little bit of distress. Aaron, I jumped over you because I did want to say one thing. Go for it. Which is when the issue of the IR-5 came up, which is the Iranians have the centrifuge that they had not previously fed uranium hexafluoride into, and then they began doing that, and there was some question about whether that violated the agreement.

I mean my understanding is the State Department raised it with the Iranians and said, well, whether or not this violates the agreement, Could you have picked a worse time to try to torpedo the agreement? And the Iranians basically said, oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. We're going to knock that off for the time being. So it does seem to me that there is – I don't want to make the Iranians out to – I don't think it was a violation.

I think it was a poor decision on their part.

Shashank 13:31

Can I just add one point to that, Jeffrey? Yeah. Well, just to say that the JPO expires on Monday. What is expiring is the commitments that each side has made to the other. Neither side is obligated to start doing what it was doing before the JPOA. I don't think mutual voluntary reciprocal restraint is a sustainable solution, but the expiration does not compel Iran to go do everything it can do, nor for us to slap on every sanction we've been storing up.

Aaron 14:00

But I have a slightly different take on this, to be honest with you. I don't think that their feeding of hex into the IR-5 was accidental. I think that they've put us in a position to where we actually have to negotiate, if you ask me. And then the threat of better centrifuges coming online with no sort of overarching limit to them, which is what this deal is putting – what the – What we're moving towards with a final agreement, you are then presented with this upper, the P5 plus one is presented with almost like a fait accompli where you have to come to some agreement and quickly.

And so I think it actually strengthens the hand of the Iranians. I am not convinced that our hand is stronger in this than the Iranians are. In fact, I'm pretty heavy on the fact that the Iranians' hand is stronger in this because they've resisted most of our sanctions up until this point. The idea of military action seems far-fetched, let's put it that way.

And their progress continues to the point where they're making large incremental changes. Advances, not in the way that they were, let's say, between 2003 and 2009. So in a way, I want to put this question to both you guys. Are we in a position now to where we have to come to an agreement? Do we have to reach an agreement now, or do we come back two years later with an even worse set of circumstances, albeit with them operating better centrifuges?

Shashank, you're the guest. You get to go first.

Shashank 15:34

Sure. I think that any extension only works if it's for a short period. Ultimately, the politics doesn't permit anything longer. And I think that's what it boils down to, that you're not going to be able on either side to resist the domestic pressure if you have an extension that is too long. Whereas only if you can show that you are imminently close to an agreement, You just need a little bit more time and you can credibly demonstrate that.

Are you going to sustain this? Otherwise, I think those people on our side who think that the passage of time favors us and that ultimately the reimposition of sanctions will have simply bring Iran back to its knees, that that crowd is going to win out, I think, and that's going to present problems. But that isn't a nonproliferation debate now.

This is a function of a much bigger debate over the limits of coercive diplomacy and ultimately military action.

Jeffrey 16:28

Yeah, I have to say, I generally agree with that. I would add that I can imagine a theoretical point at which any deal we reach could be bad enough that it would be worth walking away from and trying to try again in two years. But having said that, I think our hand will be weaker in two years, and I think the political situation will be less favorable.

And so it's Pretty hard for me to imagine that the negotiators would do such a bad job that they would come back with something that was so unacceptable. At least for me, my criteria is, do I think they come back with an agreement that's sustainable? And maybe that's a little bit because I'm burned by the experience of North Korea and the 1994 agreed framework, which I actually thought was at some level a fundamentally good deal, but which just had too many moving parts to work.

My only qualification to the idea that this is our last best chance of getting a deal is I think we're so focused on the parameters of a deal and what a deal should look like that we don't necessarily talk too much about implementation. And any agreement that gets reached is going to come under enormous political attack, certainly in the United States.

And there are going to be plenty of leaks that suggest the Iranians aren't upholding their obligations even when they are. Some of those leaks will be false. Some of them will be differences of opinion. And there will be genuine disagreements because agreements are hard to interpret. My – the only qualification, which is at least for me an important one, is that we do have to be focused on whatever deal we get is going to at least survive its difficult early years when it's an incredibly unpopular thing.

Aaron 18:25

Well, then let's just stay there. What else – what do you think we should do? If we're put up against it, we have to extend – What do you think the agreement – the extension agreement or something much more broader should look like?

Jeffrey 18:37

So I mean what a final agreement has to look like? Well, this gets to the question of breakout versus sneakout, right? I am of the mind that the Iranians are incredibly unlikely to try to – Break out of an agreement, which is to say, take a declared facility and just sort of announce to the world, hey, we're building nuclear weapons and have a giant political crisis.

We think we can get one or two or three significant quantities of fissile material before you can do anything about it. And then that will cause you to back down. I think it's far more likely that Iranian confidence in the agreement will wane than And there might be a decision to try to stick some centrifuges under a mountain somewhere that we don't detect so that by the time we figure that they've snuck out, we are presented with a genuine fait accompli, which is they may have many nuclear weapons and we don't know where they are.

So from my perspective, the whole discussion about how many centrifuges they can have or what the capacity of those should be is far less important than having the ability to look inside their program and be confident that they're Isn't a third underground facility somewhere that we don't know about.

Shashank 19:43

Well, my only issue with this is that I can see circumstances where a diplomatic crisis or a crisis that's unrelated to the nuclear issue could result in the expulsion of inspectors or the hindrance of their work and the overt declared nuclear infrastructure still remaining quite relevant. I don't think it's necessarily likely, but I can see it's not something to be written off.

However, the numbers that we are now talking about and the highest US offer to Iran I've seen is 6,000 centrifuges. The lowest Iranian suggestion I've seen is something like 7,000 centrifuges. These are all within the parameters of what is a completely respectable breakout time. A period in which you would have ample time not just for detection, but for a diplomatic response and ultimately a more coercive response.

So I think in some ways what's interesting about the status of talks now is that the issue that bothered us most for the past two years, breakout time, has actually converged quite a bit. And we are now debating other points that we thought were perhaps more fungible and more negotiable, like sanctions relief sequencing.

Aaron 20:58

I tend to come closer to Jeffrey's point of view and the fact that we should be focusing more heavily on sneak out only because in the history of the Iranian program, which I've spent quite a deal – quite amount of time on, is that was the way that they pursued it in the past. I mean they didn't declare most of their facilities, but the specific weapons program that we're worried about, that is basically at the heart of this crisis, was run in parallel to the overt program that you're seeing now at Natanz.

I wouldn't put it past the idea that this program – I mean we know this program at least put out by the IAA documents. The skeletal bones are still there. And I haven't seen anything that those things will be actually addressed or taken care of in any sort of framework agreement that will just deal with centrifuge numbers and sanctions relief.

So I would – Focus much more heavily on sneak out, because if the remnants of that nuclear program are still there, I think we better watch them more carefully, which gets me to a broader point that I just keep coming back to, and it's what I referenced earlier. We're going to have to watch for sneak out regardless.

Shashank 22:03

Why are they alternatives? Why are they why are we first of all, why are you portraying them as sort of why can we only focus on one thing at a time? I'm not sure we need to only pick one. And the second point is in the 2007 national intelligence estimate, which quite quite I think it said we judge with moderate confidence that Iran would not use its declared facilities.

That was at a time, of course, when its declared facilities were far more modest than they are now. And that's another difference, I think.

Aaron 22:30

That's a good point. I'll just finish. We're going to have to watch for sneak out regardless, so we might as well put limits on the overt program to the best of our ability. I think I agree with you, Shashank, when you say that the breakout times, whether they're at 6,000 or 8,000, are in this area of something like 8 to 10 months to where I think we can live with, we being the United States and the U.K., I don't know.

But other regional allies have different Points of view about the times of breakouts. I don't know, Jeffrey, what do you think about all this?

Jeffrey 23:06

Well, I do think that the 2007 NIE, in making that assessment, it's necessarily somewhat dated. But it's not clear to me that it's solely that that judgment, the judgment that they would use covert facilities is solely about the capabilities at Natanz or now Fordow. But it seems to me instead that At the end of the day, when a world leader decides that they're going to try to acquire nuclear weapons, they're going to make a broad political decision about what that means in foreign policy, and they're going to make a broad decision about whether they want to endure a crisis.

I think my concern with the breakout scenario is it feels very Western to me in its conception.

Aaron 23:53

It doesn't

Jeffrey 23:55

My experience with policymakers in general, but especially policymakers when you get outside of Washington, is that the kind of back-of-the-envelope calculations that we do in order to make sense of a problem don't necessarily map to the kinds of considerations that other leaders have. So I'm not against breakout as a way of thinking about the problem, but I worry that in some cases we get so used to doing that calculation that we start to act as though that might be how the supreme leader thinks about the problem.

And I just don't think there's – it's hard for me to conclude that there's much evidence that he does. A last thought, why can't we do them both? Of course we can do them both. But one of the concerns I have is when we get to a situation like we have now where we're negotiating over numbers, We're going to have concessions that we make in order to get the number we want.

And my observation is I would rather spend that concession on better access to centrifuge workshops than closing the gap between the two. Sure.

Aaron 24:57

I completely agree with Jeffrey, who for listeners out there who has just had to leave us because something's come up on his end, but Shashank and I will continue so you can listen to us. But I completely agree with Jeffrey. But About making some trade-off, if it comes down to making some trade-off between numbers and greater access to inspections.

I think you would agree, Shashank. I don't think we're actually arguing across purposes.

Shashank 25:20

I do agree, and I would re-emphasize that the numbers that have been publicly reported that we are discussing, they're actually reasonable numbers. I heard the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu say that Iran was going to be left on the nuclear threshold after this deal. Which is language we have heard for a while. It used to be the zone of immunity.

If you remember under Ehud Barak, that was his phrase. The nuclear threshold seems to be the new phrase. Now, we know that U.S. officials and particularly Kerry repeatedly locked in this idea that the breakout time has to be a year. But if you have something like 6,000 centrifuges or in that realm, And you're talking about negligible amounts of low enriched uranium left inside Iran because it's been exported to Russia, as some of the more recent reports suggest.

You are talking about a response time of any Iranian breakout that I think is more than ample. It's less than a year, but it's more than ample for a diplomatic and military response. And so under those circumstances, yes, I would much rather we had extensive response Inspections and verification regimes that were tackling a much broader range of pathways to a nuclear weapons capability.

Aaron 26:39

Yeah, and in this respect, and we'll start to wrap up here, is the way in which Kerry actually handled his diplomacy, which we talked about earlier, particularly his meeting with the Omanis, really caught my eye because one of the issues that come up is this issue of breakout time for the Gulfies. They'd like it to be over a year.

Same with the Israelis. It seems like there's some massaging going on to get slightly less –

Shashank 27:08

I heard your podcast a few weeks ago with Dina on Gulf perceptions of this deal. And I think she made a very good point, which is that I don't think they see it in a technical sense. I mean, I think the Israelis might do, but I'm not sure the Gulf states do. And so even if we had a breakout time that was a year, I am absolutely certain that we would see significant disquiet in the Gulf over the fact that we had allowed thousands of Iranian centrifuges to remain in And that a year was nothing.

I heard an Arab diplomat say this directly only yesterday, actually. And so under those circumstances, you know, for me, six thousand, eight thousand breakout time of eight months versus 12 months. I think that we are in the ballpark here. What's interesting is we would have found this very difficult to get to if we were talking about this last year.

And now it seems that those gaps have actually narrowed. And the real gaps are over areas that we thought would be more easily settled, sanctions relief and so on. Yeah, no.

Aaron 28:10

So I think – I mean – In true arms control Wong fashion, we always like to end on a happy note. So I think there actually is a silver lining here, is that even if we have to Extend this deal if we don't come to something? It seems as if the differences are narrowing. I mean, would you agree with that assessment?

Shashank 28:28

Absolutely. I think we had the first evidence they were narrowing last month when we saw Wendy Sherman's statements. Then we've had significant leaks since then. But look, I looked at a piece, I think it was from Reuters back in July that I found today that had an unnamed Iranian official saying, we will never go below 50,000 centrifuges.

That's our right. And that kind of bellicose, hyperbolic rhetoric was Completely pervasive only a few months ago back in the summer. And now everyone is considerably more sober. Everyone is more sensible. The gaps are obviously narrowing. It naturally gets more difficult and tense as you get to the very final stages because everyone's positions harden. But that isn't a sign of doom and gloom.

We shouldn't be fatalistic about this. I still think that we're not in a terrible place.

Aaron 29:17

No, actually I have to agree. I've been pleasantly surprised about the way the negotiations have unfolded. I've been genuinely encouraged by the terms of the deal. And I actually think we're moving in the right direction. So I think this is a win for diplomacy, although we still have a long way to go. So last question, do you think they'll have to extend it?

Or do you think they'll come to a last minute agreement in Vienna?

Shashank 29:44

Well, my heart says a deal, but my head says extension. So I have to go with extension.

Aaron 29:50

I have to think that there's extension going on. Although if I was in Vegas and I could put a little bit of money on the long shot, I would feel comfortable extending. Investing a little cash in saying they'll strike an 11th hour deal on Sunday or maybe the early morning of the 24th. Well, Shashank, this has been great.

I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I know Jeffrey thanks you too, but he had to run. So thanks everybody for listening and have a good night.