Should the Biden administration play its trump card?

By Salem AlKetbi, UAE political analyst and former Federal National Council candidate

Reports, positions and reactions from the administration of President Joe Biden since he took office on January 20 give reason to believe that Iran’s mullahs’ regime has put the administration on the defensive. It has pushed it to take the back seat, only reacting to its positions and orientations.

Nevertheless, the main reason for the Biden administration’s weak hand in the Iranian nuclear crisis is the few options it considers. It sticks to diplomacy as the only approach to deal with Iran, robbing itself of effective strategic alternatives against a regime that most members of the administration are supposedly familiar with.

President Biden believes that negotiation is the only way to curb the Iranian regime’s ambitions. However, experience has shown that such a regime can only negotiate and accept concessions in exchange for gains if it feels it has its back to the wall. In other words, it must feel that its future in power hinges on showing flexibility in some issues and situations.

Moreover, principles of negotiation call into question the effectiveness of any negotiation conducted with either the stick or the carrot, not both. A balance must be struck between the two, based on the facts of the negotiating context and a good assessment of the other party’s situation.

There is a good opportunity for the Biden administration to reap the benefits of former President Trump’s strategy towards the Iranian regime. In reality, it is the mullahs, not the United States, who are in a desperate situation. So, they should take the initiative to make concessions, and not show intransigence and over-the-top demands as is currently the case.

For more than a week, Iran has turned down the US offer to sit down at the negotiating table with the other signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal to find an appropriate formula to return to the deal former President Donald Trump left in mid-2018.

The mullahs’ strategy has kept the international parties who signed the agreement under constant pressure, and this is worrying. The planned negotiations would then become nothing more than a way out to halt Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons capabilities.

The aim will simply become to reduce its uranium enrichment program and get back to the enrichment ceiling set in the deal (around 4%) instead of the current 20% according to IAEA reports and the 60% rate that Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei, threatens to hit easily.

The US administration claims that what is currently happening with the mullahs’ regime is a moment of building up negotiating tools. This is for the most part true.

However, we see that Washington is not engaged in building bargaining power; it is content with the impact of the sanctions imposed by former President Trump without further tightening these sanctions or even bringing them to the negotiating table to deter the mullahs from moving forward in this nail-biting game.

President Biden’s administration is in a bad place in terms of the Iran nuclear deal. The mullahs realize the magnitude of internal and external pressures surrounding this administration.

They are also aware of the administration’s urgent need to achieve a political win in an area of foreign policy so important to the strategic interests of the United States. As a result, they have become more intransigent.

They seek concessions and a humiliating political defeat for the United States if it agrees to go back to the nuclear deal and first lifts sanctions against Iran. This could put Biden very early in bad blood with Middle Eastern allies, mainly Israel and some Gulf countries.

In return, it will get little strategic return from Iran’s mullahs, who would leave the US administration in limbo for the next four years unless they get what they want.

But the dangerous part of this is that the mullahs have changed the rules of the game with the IAEA. They have long insisted on maintaining this relationship with the IAEA within a regular institutional framework to allay the doubts of part of the world community about their nuclear program. However, they are manipulating this relationship by suspending the Additional Protocol that gives IAEA inspectors the right to inspect their nuclear facilities.

There is also the threat of the mullahs’ withdrawal from the NPT. Yet another chapter in their challenge to the global community.

Without a firm and serious stance reflecting unity of ranks and determination in the face of the violation of international law, the current scenario may well set a dangerous precedent with detrimental effects not only on security in the Middle East, but also on world peace.