How Power Works: US/Iran - Endless conflict
The almost-unbelievable US/Iran MoU stores up all kinds of problems for the future
Each week I look at one major international event and try to explain the structures of power behind it — the actors, ideologies and assumptions shaping events.
It’s no wonder that the US delayed the release of the ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ that extends the ceasefire with Iran. The document comprises an astonishing American capitulation to Iranian demands. In return, Iran will open the Strait of Hormuz, and that’s about it. The new security status quo is far worse for the US and Israel than what preceded their feckless war.
What Iran gets:
the permanent cessation of attacks by the US
lifting of all multilateral and US sanctions (including UN sanctions which are not even in the gift of the US to terminate)
unfreezing of Iranian assets
a new $300bn (minimum) construction fund
confirmation of its right to administer the Strait of Hormuz (and the clear implication of a right to levy tolls in future)
cessation of Israeli attacks in Lebanon and the end of Israel’s occupation of Lebanese territory
What the US/Israel gets:
a vague and unspecific commitment that Iran will not pursue a nuclear program, a promise that Iran has made many times before.
Iran will make its ‘best efforts’ to re-open the Strait
Er, that’s it.
The document is also extremely poorly drafted - to the disadvantage of the Americans. Some expert negotiators prepared this text, and they weren’t Americans. One example:
The US agrees it ‘will’ lift its naval blockade
Iran agrees only to make its ‘best efforts’ to open the Strait (I don’t even know what this means, but you can see that it’s potentially a significant loophole)
The paragraph on the nuclear issue is an object lesson in diplomatic obfuscation, loophole-creation and dangerous imprecision. One sentence: “The US and Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon, in accordance with the schedule mentioned in paragraph seven with the minimum methodology to be down blending on site under the supervision of the IAEA.” I negotiated this stuff for a living for many years and I have no idea what this sentence means. It’s not even literate.
To say this is an epic diplomatic humiliation is understating it. Not least when you consider the following:
It is highly unlikely that the US and Iran will agree a credible agreement on the nuclear issue in 60 days. Why? Trump will be desperate to get a deal that is better than the peacefully-negotiated deal in 2015, the ‘JCPOA’, which Trump ferociously criticised and ultimately withdrew from, setting the stage for Iran to resume nuclear enrichment. The JCPOA required two years of detailed negotiation, preceded by several years of secret exchanges. My bet is that any new agreement - if there ever is one - will fail to reach the bar of the JCPOA.
Iran is highly incentivised to spin out the talks. As long they maintain uncertainty, the threat to the Strait will continue, and the greater their leverage. Meanwhile the last thing Trump wants is to be forced to fulfil his deranged threats to ‘bomb their heads’ if the Iranians ‘don’t behave’.
Instead, there is likely to be some kind of ‘rollover’ of the ceasefire with a commitment to really, really agree something on nuclear really, really soon.
We can also predict that there will be no fully-credible nuclear agreement now or in future, meaning that tension and conflict over the ‘nuclear issue’ will persist in the longer term. There is a geo-political reason, and there is a more obscure, but nonetheless crucial, technical reason.
The Geopolitical Reason
Underneath all of this are unresolved questions about who should have nuclear weapons and who shouldn’t, and ultimately about security in the Gulf region and beyond. Until those questions are resolved, the nuclear issue will not go away.
Iran began its nuclear program for the simple reason that Saddam’s Iraq, with whom Iran had fought a bloody decade-long war, was developing nuclear weapons, and progressing fast towards a usable bomb (which is why Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in 1991).
Today, Iran is happy for the perception to persist that it might be close to possessing a nuclear weapon, for the same deterrent reasons, but this time to deter the US and Israel, particularly now that it’s clear to everyone that these countries’ conventional air attack capability is insufficient to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites or eradicate the ballistic missiles that would be used to deliver any nuclear device.
Netanyahu, and when the war started, Trump himself, claimed that if the regime currently in power in Tehran were removed, the nuclear danger would somehow disappear. He will doubtless keep saying this, and Trump will probably resume saying it. These threats alone intensify Iran’s incentive to pursue nuclear or, more accurately, give the impression that it is pursuing nuclear.
Bellicose rhetoric aside, Iran’s regime must also consider that since the October 7th Hamas attacks, Israel’s aggression towards the Palestinians and its neighbours has known scant limits. As well as accelerating the illegal settlement of the West Bank and the continued devastation of Gaza, it also now occupies a chunk of southern Syria and 10% of Lebanon. Its ministers state without apology that Israel intends to maintain these ‘buffer zones’. And, of course, Israel has precipitated and participated in a months’ long air assault against Iran.
Meanwhile, the trend line in Israeli politics is all too clear: ever more extremism. The hope that a government led by Naftali Bennett or someone other than Netanyahu might be less aggressive or expansionist than the current government, or repress Israel’s Arab population less, is utterly naive. Read the shocking opinion polls of ‘ordinary’ Israelis about their attitudes to the killing of Palestinians, their systematic abuse in Israeli prisons, or occupation of other people’s land.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has, more or less unremarked upon, acquired a de facto nuclear capability in its mutual defence pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan which, the Pakistanis have admitted, includes their nuclear deterrent. And to add to the mix, the US has become wildly unpredictable, currently led by a man who has publicly mused about using nuclear weapons, and who is more than ready, it seems, to launch needless wars on a whim (or after quiet word from Bibi).
In other words, the incentives for Iran to verifiably get rid of any nuclear program are less than at any moment for a very long time, maybe ever. On the contrary, its incentive to ‘keep ‘em guessing’ has significantly increased.
I used to argue that some kind of regional security arrangement including the Gulf states, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Israel was the long-term solution for stability in the Middle East, perhaps guaranteed by the US and other P5, as the JCPOA was. But we are so far off the minimum of trust required for such an agreement that it hardly seems worth mentioning. If things settle down after the current violence, Trump will presumably reactivate his attempts to get Arab countries to recognise Israel. But unless these ‘Abraham Accords’ include Iran, which of course they won’t, they’re not worth much. Israel’s recent conduct will hardly encourage Arab states to join the accords in any case.
The Technical Issue
There is moreover one issue that no amount of negotiation can resolve, an issue that, just as it did with Iraq before the 2003 invasion, may provide the trigger for future conflict, and an opportunity for the warmongers to launch one.
This issue is verification: how can you be sure that a country has in fact fully got rid of its weapons or means to build them?
The Iraq experience provides some instructive lessons. Iraq’s failure to allow the verification of its disarmament of WMD in the 1990’s and early 2000’s set the stage for the 2003 invasion by creating space for the Bush and Blair governments to claim that Iraq had obstructed such verification in the months before the invasion: a claim that was untrue because Iraq had in fact permitted inspections during that period, much to everyone’s surprise, and much to the disappointment of the UK and US who needed a causus belli that Iraq had blocked inspections.
The US/Iran MoU talks about ‘UN inspections’ that will be able to perform such verification. This is weak tea, at best. The Iranians are well aware that agreeing to ‘UN inspections’ does not amount to a hill of beans unless the conditions of those inspections are specific and agreed. And that those conditions specify that ‘nuclear inspectors’ should be given access to any possible nuclear sites at any time. Neither provision appears in the MoU.
The truth is that Iran will never agree to conditions for inspections that can guarantee that it is not producing nuclear weapons. It never has in the past, and it never will in the future. Because it is the very ambiguity and uncertainty created by inspections that are not fully credible that they rely upon.
This is a complicated and easily misunderstood issue. But it is central to the challenge of stopping Iran getting the bomb.
Back to the Iraq WMD experience: after the so-called ‘Gulf War’ in 1990, the UN Security Council determined that Iraq was required to verifiably disarm itself of its WMD (in this case, a term which also included ballistic missiles, which are not typically designated as WMD). An inspection body, UNSCOM1, was established to verify that disarmament. UNSCOM was given extraordinary powers - the right to inspect any location in Iraq, at any time and without warning. The drafters of the relevant resolution, UNSCR 687, believed that only such intrusive powers would guarantee that Iraq would be fully and verifiably disarmed of its WMD.
There is not a cat in hell’s chance that Iran will agree to such intrusive inspections over its nuclear program, not least because they agreed less intrusive measures as part of the JCPOA - the highest bar that any new agreement will reach, and probably not even that. These provisions were at the time, with the usual diplomatic bombast, described as the ‘most intrusive nuclear inspections ever’. They weren’t. Those imposed on Iraq in 1991 were far more intrusive. Under the JCPOA inspection regime, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was granted continuous monitoring rights, not periodic inspections. This included:
24/7 surveillance via cameras and electronic seals at declared nuclear facilities
Daily access to Natanz and Fordow enrichment sites
Managed access to undeclared or suspected sites under the Additional Protocol (of the Non-Proliferation Treaty), which Iran was required to implement and ratify
This sounds like very intrusive and comprehensive monitoring, particularly the 24/7 surveillance element. But you don’t have to be a nuclear expert to realise that once such cameras are in place, there is no chance that Iran would conduct weapons development under their sight. All such ‘permanent’ monitoring amounts to is a kind of displacement effect.
There is a further huge loophole, namely the rights to inspect locations where weapons development activity is suspected, the so-called ‘undeclared’ sites. In the JCPOA, these are rather less than UNSCOM’s ‘anytime, anywhere’ powers (this was one of the reasons the right, including Trump, criticised the agreement). The Additional Protocol (to the NPT) mentioned in the JCPOA is not ‘anytime, anywhere’. The US sought ‘anytime, anywhere’ powers during the negotiation of the JCPOA, but Iran refused to accept them and there is absolutely zero chance that they will this time around.
Why? Because ‘anytime, anywhere’ rights give the US, who we can be sure will have planted CIA or, equally likely, Mossad agents among the ‘UN inspectors’ (as it, and the UK, did with UNSCOM2), the freedom to visit and root around in literally any location in Iran - any airbase, naval port, missile store, chemical plant or indeed the Supreme Leader’s own bathroom. Only a totally defeated country like Iraq in 1991 would possibly accept such intrusion, and Iran is far from totally defeated. At most, Iran will agree to the provisions of the JCPOA.
Why does this matter?
The JCPOA arrangements, which Trump will claim are watertight, will not because they cannot give 100% confidence that Iran is NOT developing nuclear weapons. Only ‘anytime, anywhere’ access can approach such confidence and even then there are all sorts of ways that the picture gets confused. When weapons inspections took place in Iraq, American U-2 aircraft flying overhead (supposedly on behalf of the UN!), spotted convoys of trucks literally driving out of the back gates of the site as inspectors entered the front.
In other ways, the Iraq experience is instructive. As we all know, it turned out that there were in fact zero WMD in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Instead, it was revealed that Saddam Hussein had wanted to project the possibility that he might possess WMD as a deterrent to his enemies, and that this was why he blocked inspections before 2003 (but not immediately before 2003). Iran has exactly the same incentive with its nuclear program. In other words, whatever ‘UN inspectors’ do in Iran, no one will be able to say with 100% confidence that Iran is not developing the bomb. Just as Iraq’s conduct created space for the warmongers of the Bush and Blair governments to claim that Iraq did in fact possess WMD, the uncertainty in Iran will leave space for Israelis like Netanyahu (of whose ghastly ilk we can sadly expect more) or Americans like Trump to claim that Iran is in fact close to having a bomb.
So, whatever Iran and the US eventually agree on the ‘nuclear issue’, it will not decisively resolve it. Instead, it will leave all kinds of possibilities for future conflict.
Conclusion
It’s hard not to be pessimistic in the current circumstance. The safest bet is of course more tension and more conflict, probably more sporadic than full scale war, but enough to maintain constant anxiety about the possibility of conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
With extremists in charge in Tehran and Jerusalem, and a maniac in the White House, never has imaginative, energetic diplomacy been more necessary to cajole the parties into some kind of stabilising understandings if not actual formal agreements. The professional mediators like Qatar or Oman do not have the diplomatic heft. ‘The Arabs’ ie Egypt, Saudis, Arab League etc, are unwilling and the ‘Europeans’ ie the big EU players (France, Germany, Italy) plus the UK seem utterly indifferent too. All remain in thrall to the Americans. One hope is that Trump’s alienation of erstwhile allies may ignite a hitherto-dormant diplomatic energy among the ‘Europeans’ in particular. Perhaps a new Prime Minister in the UK (which seems today imminent) may summon the nerve. But this requires courage and leadership, both qualities that seem rather lacking in today’s political ‘elites’.
I’m left with the very faint hope that one day there may be more enlightened, less violent leadership in the countries concerned, whether the US, Israel or Iran. But my more sober expectation is, I’m afraid, yet more war and the very real possibility, one day, of a nuclear detonation, whether above Tehran or Tel Aviv - or both.
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The UN Special Commission. Its successor body was UNMOVIC, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, a name invented by me!
A CIA man was the deputy head of UNSCOM. I used to talk with him on a regular basis. After the 2003 invasion, the US tasked him with finding the elusive WMD in now-occupied Iraq. We know the result.
Hi Carne, Thank you so much for this...always appreciate your wise no-nonsense insight and clear thinking and writing! Take care, dear one! xxGail
I really like these short analytical pieces focused on a single event. They are a very helpful shortcut to understanding, this one particularly so. Thank you Carne!