Room for negotiation?

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday, June 24th, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up today: Iranians went to the polls last week to elect a new president. If you haven’t heard much about this election, that might be because Iran’s presidency is not the highest office in the land.

That position belongs to the unelected Supreme Leader.

BROWN: But the election does have some importance.

President Joe Biden is desperate to revive the Iran nuclear deal that the Trump administration withdrew from in 2018.

But if his administration isn’t able to move quickly enough, it may find itself dealing with a new Iranian president who is under U.S. sanctions.

EICHER: WORLD correspondent Jill Nelson reports now on what this election means and how it might influence efforts to revive the nuclear deal.

AUDIO: [CELEBRATIONS]

JILL NELSON, REPORTER: Supporters of Iran’s new hardline president gathered in Tehran last weekend to celebrate his victory. His name is Ebrahim Raisi, and he’s an ally of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameini.

Raisi is not an ayatollah, but he does have a low-ranking status among Shitte clergy. And he proudly dons the black turban worn by those who claim to be descendants of Muhammad.

Many Iranians are unhappy about his victory. They say the election was rigged by the Supreme Council, a group of 12 clerics who make many of Iran’s political decisions. They disqualified hundreds of presidential candidates, including many popular reformists. As a result, voter turnout was the lowest ever recorded for a presidential election in Iran.

But how much does Raisi’s rise to power matter in a political system where clerics pull the strings?

PIPES: Khameni dominates, but he can’t do everything. He needs an underling to undertake his wishes and those underlings have views of their own which they push for.

Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and an expert on Islam and the Middle East. He says Raisi will have some pull in Iran.

PIPES: Anyone who has staff working for them knows, you get influenced by your staff. Your staff says, “I really want to do this, I really want to do this. You say, “ Okay, give it a try.”

But Raisi has a dark past. The U.S. government sanctioned him in 2019 for human rights abuses.

He was part of a four-man death committee that ordered the executions of nearly three-thousand political prisoners in 1988. More recently, during his two-year role as chief justice, floggings and executions increased. Some say he’s on a path to become the next supreme leader.

Raisi’s record could put a wrench in the Biden’s administration’s plans for a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. It would be hard to celebrate a nuclear deal with an Iranian president sanctioned for crimes against humanity.

And the nuclear deal faces more problems now than it did in 2015.

GOLDBERG: But even if you believed it was a temporary fix on the nuclear program back in 2015, the deal came with all of these sunset provisions, expiration dates for key restrictions, that already started to expire in late 2020.

Richard Goldberg is a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. But two years ago, he worked as an advisor for the White House National Security Council, specializing in countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction.

He says we know more now than we did in 2015.

GOLDBERG: And so the idea that you would go back into a deal, particularly after everything we’ve learned about the Iranian nuclear program over the last several years, the discovery of the nuclear archive by the Israeli Mossad in 2018, reports now from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna that Iran may be concealing undeclared nuclear sites and material, alongside that fact that all the restrictions are expiring. If it was a bad deal in 2015, it’s a horrendous deal in 2021.

The Biden administration says it wants to make the nuclear deal “longer and stronger.”

But with Raisi replacing the more moderate Hassan Rouhani in August, Tehran will likely become more consolidated in its hardline stance. Already, Raisi has said Iran’s ballistic missile program will be non-negotiable. And he’s called on Biden to lift the crippling sanctions Trump imposed in 2018.

Israel’s newly-elected Prime Minister Naftali Bennett issued his own warning about Raisi:

BENNETT: Raisi’s selection is, I would say, the last chance for world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement and to understand who they’re doing business with. These guys are murderers, mass murderers.

Iran is enriching uranium at its highest level ever and could be months away from reaching weapons-grade material. Goldberg says Washington needs to signal to Tehran that the United States will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran.

GOLDBERG: The United States has to have a bottom line where we make clear to Iran’s leaders, number one, we will never allow you to make a nuclear weapon. If you try, if we detect you trying, there will be a military consequence for that. We don’t want war, we don’t want to have to use military options, but we have a bottom line to prevent you from developing a nuclear weapon.

And Daniel Pipes says our concerns about Iran go far beyond its quest for a nuclear weapon.

PIPES: There’s a general consensus that Iran under the mullahs, Islamic Republic of Iran, is a great disruptor in the Middle East and not just in the Middle East. Be it its ideology, its political parties, its subversion, its weapons, its potential nuclear weapons, it is the great disruptor.

Diplomats from Europe, China, and Russia will meet with their Iranian counterparts next week in Vienna for what they hope is a final round of negotiations on a renewed nuclear deal. The United States has not participated directly in any of the meetings, but has used other world powers to negotiate its terms.

President Biden says he wants a nuclear deal finalized before Raisi takes office in August.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jill Nelson.

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