Obama's Iranian Lifeline

Tehran threw President Barack Obama a badly needed "lifeline" for his Iran policy at last week's nuclear discussions in Geneva: It promised U.N. access to a recently declared nuclear site and committed "in principle" to ship low-enriched uranium, or LEU, abroad to make fuel rods for producing medical isotopes. If Geneva had been a "bust," Obama would have been committed to mustering international endorsement for what his secretary of state calls "crippling" sanctions against Iran -- even though no serious observer believes that Russia and China would support measures anywhere close to that.

By year's end, Obama's Iran policy would have been exposed as a strategic failure -- with no diplomatic option for resolving U.S.-Iranian differences, sanctions discredited and political forces in Washington and elsewhere pushing for "regime change" and military force.

Tehran has offered a way out of this dead end -- if Obama has the political will to take it. Obama's statement immediately following the Geneva meeting -- in which he threatened further sanctions and repeated demands for Tehran to prove a negative about its nuclear activities - was meant for domestic constituencies. However, it risks prompting an Iranian pullback. If Obama wants to seize the current opportunity, he must avoid two domestically expedient but strategically corrosive temptations.

The first is to indulge -- as administration officials are already doing "on background" with the press -- the notion that Iranian negotiators are duplicitous hagglers who play only for time and represent a government too internally divided to keep commitments. These are ethnically driven stereotypes promulgated by Americans with no experience negotiating with Iranians. From 2001 to 2003, one of us -- Hillary Mann Leverett -- was among a small number of U.S. officials authorized to negotiate with Iran over Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. She saw firsthand how Iranian diplomats can negotiate productively, deliver on specific commitments, make concessions and calculate trade-offs across a range of issues to enhance Iran's overall strategic position. If Iranian negotiators deal with Americans, it means that Iran's leadership has reached the consensus needed for those negotiators to work seriously.

But even with such consensus, Tehran is prepared to react against what it sees as American duplicity. In December 2001, Washington asked Tehran to keep Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a brutal, pro-Al Qaeda warlord who had crossed into Iran, from returning to Afghanistan to marshal jihadist resistance to American forces there. Tehran agreed to do so -- as long as the Bush administration did not condemn Iran for harboring terrorists. But a month later, President George W. Bush denounced Iran as part of the "axis of evil." While Iranian representatives continued to meet with us, Tehran let Hekmatyar return to Afghanistan shortly after Bush's speech.

The lesson is clear: Tehran will react to gratuitous "Iran bashing." It will also react against perceived American double dealing: e.g., if the U.N. Security Council were unable to modify existing sanctions resolutions to permit the export of LEU from Iran for further processing.

Second, Obama should resist the proposition that Washington extracted Iranian "concessions" in Geneva and can push for significantly more. Tehran did not offer anything in Geneva that it had not already proposed. Alongside the disclosure of a second enrichment facility in September, Iran said it would allow inspections there. Iran raised the possibility of international cooperation to refuel a Tehran reactor producing medical isotopes weeks ago; President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke publicly about it in New York last month.

These proposals were consistent with Iran's long-standing nuclear posture. We agree with a senior Russian diplomat, with expertise in nuclear matters and experience dealing with Tehran, who describes Iran's nuclear activities not as a weapons program but as a "dual-use" program meant to create perceptions that Iran is developing the core capabilities required to fabricate nuclear weapons, should Tehran decide to do so. Such a posture is allowed by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Mastery of uranium enrichment is essential for a dual-use program. Based on conversations with senior Iranian officials under the reformist Khatami and conservative Ahmadinejad administrations, we are convinced that no Iranian government with any popular legitimacy will agree to abandon enrichment inside Iran. Furthermore, no Iranian government will agree to "suspend," or otherwise seriously limit, enrichment activities as a confidence-building measure. The Khatami government did this from 2003 to 2005 and got nothing in return. In contrast, by continuing to develop Iran's enrichment capabilities, Ahmadinejad has created "cards" to play with the international community: e.g., proposing to send LEU abroad for value-adding additional processing.

There are many steps Iran could and would take, in the right strategic context, to minimize international concerns about the near-term proliferation risks associated with its nuclear activities. But if Washington pushes Iran to abandon enrichment and does not provide a road map for a genuine realignment in U.S. relations with the Islamic Republic as it is constituted, Tehran will resist those steps and continue actions (e.g., missile tests) the West considers unacceptably provocative.

Given these realities, the key questions for Obama are: What is the "grand bargain" he is prepared to propose for Iran, and does he have the political nerve to prepare the American public for what that entails?