Extension Leaves Iran Nuclear Deal Vulnerable to Hard-Liners

The failure of Barack Obama’s administration to secure a deal to restrain Iran’s nuclear program by Monday’s self-imposed deadline hands a significant gift to hard-liners in both countries: a seven-month window to criticize, and potentially sabotage, a final deal between Iran and the West.

On Monday, Nov. 24, Secretary of State John Kerry said that Iran and six world powers are giving themselves another seven months to negotiate, with the interim goal of finalizing a framework by March. "In these last days in Vienna, we have made real and substantial progress," Kerry said. "That is why we are jointly … extending these talks."

However, many members of Congress who opposed the talks from the beginning want to implement a new round of economic sanctions against Tehran, which would expressly violate the terms of the interim agreement between Iran and Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States.

"We should work to pass tough sanctions now, and these sanctions should go into effect immediately," said Rep. Brad Sherman, a hawkish, pro-Israel Democrat from California. He was joined by a mélange of Republicans who claim that a new round of U.S. sanctions would pressure Iran into making a deal with the West — a claim the administration says is exactly backward and would cause Tehran to walk away from the talks.

"I hope [Congress] will come to see the wisdom of leaving us the equilibrium for a few months to be able to proceed without sending messages that might be misinterpreted and cause miscalculation," Kerry said on Monday.

But top Republicans are flirting with moving new sanctions legislation anyway. "One thing that could change Tehran’s resistance to agreeing to a meaningful and effective agreement to keep it from developing a nuclear weapon is more economic pressure," stated House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) on Monday.

After trouncing Democrats in the midterm elections this month, Republicans will dominate Congress through the talks’ final stages. Democrats with close ties to pro-Israel lobbying organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee are likely to rankle President Obama on the sanctions score through the waning days of his presidency. For instance, Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for another month, has long made his distaste for a prolonged diplomatic effort known.

"I do not support another extension of negotiations," he said at a committee hearing in July. "At that point, Iran will have exhausted its opportunities to put real concessions on the table and I will be prepared to move forward with additional sanctions."

For months, administration officials dismissed the idea of another extension, maintaining that their sole objective was a final deal that would impose sharp restrictions and inspections on Iran’s nuclear program while relieving tough economic sanctions on the country. Many nonproliferation experts also saw an extension as dangerous, given the oxygen it gives deal critics.

"An extension this long opens the path for hard-liners in Washington and Tehran to kill the deal by piling on impossible-to-meet demands," said Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a nonproliferation group. "Those who favor military strikes on Iran will now try to pave the way with killer sanctions."

Although many congressional Democrats have recently shown an unusual willingness to defy the White House, a handful of key liberal senators support the extension, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of California, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin of Michigan, Virginia’s Tim Kaine, and Connecticut’s Chris Murphy.

"I would really hope that we support the administration in their requests for extended negotiating time," Murphy told Foreign Policy on Monday. "It would be incredibly counterproductive to have the Congress passing legislation that undermines our negotiations."

Iran has its own hard-liner problem, but it’s not so much the country’s chorus of ultra-conservative clerics who pose a barrier as it is a single man: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"[Iranian President Hassan] Rouhani’s ability to negotiate a comprehensive agreement hasn’t been — and won’t be — impeded by influential hard-liners in the security and/or clerical establishments," said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution. "Rather, his ability to negotiate a deal is being constrained by the inflexibility of Iran’s ultimate decision-maker, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."

In the summer, for instance, Khamenei made extraordinarily maximalist demands related to the scale of Iran’s desired enrichment capacity.

"On the issue of enrichment capacity, [the West’s] aim is make Iran accept 10,000 SWU," Khamenei said, using an acronym for the highly technical term, "separative work units," that measures how much uranium individual centrifuges can enrich in a year. "Our officials say we need 190,000 SWU.… This is our absolute need, and we need to meet this need," he stated.

Observers say that request, widely derided as unrealistic, may have boxed in Iranian negotiators in Vienna, who’ve continued to hit a wall with their P5+1 counterparts, as the six countries negotiating with Iran are collectively referred to.

"Iran’s real hard-liner is its head of state," Brookings’s Maloney said.

Whether Khamenei will make concessions in the next seven months and Congress can be persuaded against issuing new sanctions is anyone’s guess, but the longer a deal twists in the wind, the longer opponents have to undermine and unravel it.