RPT: ANALYSIS - Difficult But Not Impossible for US to Rebuild Trust With Iran, Save Nuclear Deal
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th November, 2020) US President Donald Trump's reported intention to apply more economic sanctions on Iran is only a minuscule component of an utterly complicated legacy of bilateral relations that he could leave for Joe Biden if the latter takes the White House, experts told Sputnik.
On Sunday, US presidential envoy for Iran Elliott Abrams arrived in Israel. According to the Axios news portal, citing two Israeli sources, Abrams is going to discuss a new string of sanctions that Washington is going to apply against Tehran.
"I believe that President Trump's further sanctions on Iran are just a joke," Alam Saleh, a lecturer in Iranian studies at the Australian National University's Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, said, adding that "there are no more effective sanctions that can be imposed on Iran."
According to the expert, Trump's pursuit of sanctions against Iran is driven not by strategic or political calculations but rather by his personal complexities, as it was the case with all his previous policies toward Iran. Saleh believes that Trump pursued to defy whatever his predecessor, Barack Obama, had achieved in relations with Tehran, feeling "personal hostility and enmity" toward both, Iran and Obama.
The current splash of hostility, thus, was most likely motivated by Trump's under-performance in the presidential election than anything else, the expert argued.
Trump could be on his way out of the White House if he does not reverse the current state of the election result with vote recounts and court battles. The final result is yet to be announced, but US media declared Biden the winner.
BIDEN MAY INHERIT COMPLICATED LEGACY
"From now on, the new Biden Administration needs to know that they will fail [in bringing Iran to the negotiating table] if they want to continue President Trump's policy on Iran. They really need to reconsider and recognize the fact that they need to negotiate with Iran in a really respectful manner, unlike the previous administration in the past four years," Saleh said.
Iran, in turn, is equally responsible for normalizing the relations, especially with regard to the reputation and credibility of its government, the scholar believes.
"Of course, Iran also needs now to reconsider its regional and missile policies to reach a point that somehow can assure Europeans and Americans that they are not as destructive as they used to be in the region," Saleh said.
Between the two, there is Europe and it is Europe who has a "very important" role to play in facilitating the restoration of understanding between Washington and Tehran with consideration of obstinacy on both sides, the scholar argued.
"[Europeans] have learned the lesson that the United States cannot be trusted because of what they have witnessed with President Trump.
They also know now that Tehran is not ready to surrender � it is willing to resist and it really needs to reach a respectful and mutually trusted agreement rather than one-sided and imposed conditions against Iran," Saleh said.
The mistrust ultimately evolves around the sanctions and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), often referred to simply as the Iran nuclear deal.
The agreement was concluded in 2015 by Iran, the United States, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union. The US unilaterally withdrew in 2018 and re-imposed sanctions on Iran to which the latter responded by gradually abandoning its own commitments.
"It's hard to see that the US under Biden can snap back to the pre-Trump period and the JCPOA. There is a lot of distrust and water under the bridge since Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA and the steady increase in sanctions, whether related to the nuclear program or not," Guy Burton, a visiting fellow at the LSE middle East Centre and adjunct professor of international relations at the Vesalius College in Brussels, told Sputnik.
Although the US' foreign policy is normally the area where presidents have greater flexibility than in domestic policy, Democrat Biden's freedom of actions would be limited for as long as the Senate continues to be controlled by the Republican Party.
"Trump may be gone, but on Iran he had his party's support. And unless the Democrats take the two run-off elections in Georgia in January, the Republicans will continue to control the Senate. If that's the case then Biden may find it difficult to formalize any change, including making the JCPOA a more permanent treaty," Burton said.
According to the scholar, Biden has the option of easing some of the Trump-era restrictions on Iran and not forcing the agreement's complete collapse � instead of a wholesale commitment to the deal � but he also does not want to give the Republicans a reason to perceive him as "soft touch."
"And that's where the Iranian dimension comes in," Burton said, explaining that Biden had likely noticed the abundantly clear antipathy expressed by the Iranian government against Trump during the election campaign and at the same time expectations that the new president would pick up the US' international commitments again and remove the sanctions.
"At the same time, there has been a growing hard line tendency in Iran in recent years, which may be partly due to the confrontation that has taken place between it and the US. And this may well come out in the next presidential election [in Iran], which will take place next summer," Burton said.
If that is the case and Rouhani is not replaced by a more moderate president, the expert's forecast is that it might become even harder for Biden to achieve a betterment in relations with Tehran.