Politics

The eventuality of US-Iran negotiations

No matter who sits in the White House in 2025, Washington and Tehran will have to sit down and talk at some point

Ewan White

The eventuality of US-Iran negotiations

Arash Azizi

last update on 06 Nov 2024

The year 2024 was dubbed the 'Year of Elections' due to hundreds of millions of people voting in polls around the globe—from Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan to the UK and Iran. But there is no doubt which elections matter the most: the presidential polls in the United States. One could even argue that the American elections are even more important to many countries than their own elections.

This has long been clear in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the fear of a potential return of Donald Trump to office has animated many a political decision. Iran’s own presidential elections in the summer featured more references to Trump than to the sitting president, Joe Biden. The fact that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei allowed a political comeback for the reformists, who ended up winning the presidency, had at least something to do with Trump’s potential return.

Khamenei’s thinking probably went along these lines: If Trump were to come back and bring back his policy of maximum pressure on Iran, Tehran would need a moderate president who could better deal with him. On the campaign trail, hardliners accused their rivals of spreading “Trumpophobia” (Trump-harasi), precisely because they knew fears about Trump’s return would cost them politically. The same motivation probably explains why Iran’s cyber efforts have been trying to hurt Trump’s electoral chances, although these efforts are still too amateurish to make an actual difference.

But Iran’s hope that President Masud Pezeshkian would be able to oversee a calmer international atmosphere so as to focus on economic development has been quickly dashed. There is inherent instability in Tehran’s policy of support for the so-called Axis of Resistance—a coalition of anti-Western and anti-Israeli militias that wreak havoc in the region. In order to allay fears that the Axis was being abandoned, Pezeshkian has gone out of his way to affirm his support to groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

For its part, Israel has chosen this moment to hit them harder than ever—perhaps also to make things more difficult for the centrist president who could reduce Iran’s isolation by offering a different face of the country to the world. On 31 July, Israel killed Hamas’s leader, Ismayil Haniyah, while he was a guest at Pezeshkian’s inauguration in Tehran.

ATTA KENARE/AFP — Vehicles drive past a huge billboard depicting Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian (R) and slain Palestinian Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at Tehran's Valiasr Square on August 12, 2024.

After the assassination, it also killed his successor, Yahya Sinwar, and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. And when, on 1 October, Iran launched another missile salvo into Israel to avenge these killings, Israel hit back—albeit three weeks later. Pezeshkian now speaks of Iran facing an “imposed war” by Israel, utilising the term Iran usually reserves for the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88.

All eyes on Washington

As the Middle East burns in a war largely fuelled by Israel's risky and expanding war under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, all actors will be closely watching which candidate secures the White House before plotting their next move.

Despite Biden’s quiet opposition to some of Netanyahu's actions, he is widely seen as his enabler. Will anything change in 2025?

It’s not always easy to determine how different Trump and Kamala Harris will be on every issue. This is especially because the former Republican president is notoriously hard to predict. Despite his close ties to the Israeli premier and him being surrounded by pro-Netanyahu advisors, he also has a tendency of clashing with his allies.

For Iran, the Trump era of 2016-2020 is a bitter reminder of a harsh policy that severely limited the amount of oil Iran could sell. Yes, Biden has maintained the sanctions on Iran and even increased them, but on the crucial issue of oil sales, Biden has relaxed implementing the harshest strictures of the Trump era—partly because he wanted to revive the Obama-signed nuclear deal of 2015 with Iran, which Trump left in 2018, and partly because of broader considerations about energy supply and prices.

Biden’s talks with Tehran, aimed at reviving the 2015 deal, have failed, and many Republicans—Trump included—have attacked him for even the small deals he was able to make with Tehran, such as the prisoner exchange of September 2023 under which Iran was able to access six billion dollars of its own frozen assets in South Korea, exclusively for humanitarian purposes.

Trump, the anti-internationalist

Trump’s tough-on-Iran approach is music to the ears of some opponents of the Iranian regime. They are hoping that a Trump presidency can somehow usher in a fall of the Islamic Republic. But these folks—some of whom have started an Iranians for Trump movement—have to ignore much of what Trump himself has said, both as president and as a contender: that he wasn’t seeking to change the regime in Iran and just wanted a new deal with the current rulers in Iran.

If he wins, Trump would be eager to get a new deal that stunts Iran's rapidly growing nuclear programme and calms the guns in the Middle East

The latest version of this was in an interview with the Iranian-American podcaster Patrick Bet-David, where Trump affirmed that the US couldn't "get totally involved in all of that" in response to a question about whether Iran would do better if it returned to its pre-1979 monarchical system. "We can't run it ourselves, Patrick," the former president said, revealing a major part of his approach to foreign relations. He is a transactionalist with little appetite for the internationalist ambition that would see the US involved in attempting to bring about a change in Tehran.

Therefore, Iran's panic over Trump's potential return to the White House was replaced with more measured reactions. In the run-up to the US vote, Iran's business daily, Donya-ye Eqtesad, coldly reminded its readers that Trump's shutting off of oil exports during his term also led to astronomic growth of the profit rate in the Tehran stock market. This happened due to a complex reaction chain with fewer oil exports, as well as lower global oil prices during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a budget deficit in Iran, which translated to lower interest rates and much capital being invested in the stocks since savers had no interest in leaving their money in the bank.

Despite this, the daily noted that Harris's election will lead to "calm in the capital markets due to reduction of systematic risk." Despite Trump's claim that it is Biden and Harris's incompetence that accounts for the current chaos in the Middle East, many analysts believe that Harris's more predictable policies and diplomatic approach will augur more stability compared to Trump's inevitable flip-flops.

For their part, some regime outlets downplayed the differences between the two candidates. "The experience of the last half a century shows that it doesn't matter which party is in power in the US," wrote an editorial in the newspaper Jomhoori-ye Eslami. "Whatever disagreements the two parties have with each other, they agree on two things: Supporting the regime occupying Jerusalem (Tehran's choice term for Israel) and opposition to Iran. At most, they differ in how they implement their policies."

This claim hardly accounts for the sharp differences in Iran policy under the last few American presidents. More than an accurate reading of US politics, it reflects the exhaustion of Iranians of all political persuasions, always eagerly awaiting the voting results in the US, giving rise to an anxious inertia.

Ewan White

Tough dealmaking

There is, however, at least a measure of truth to the 'they are both the same' claim. No matter who sits at the White House in 2025, they likely would have to talk to Iran. Even though Trump left the Iran Deal in 2018, the United Nations Security Council Resolution of 2231 that underlies it still stands. That resolution is set to expire a year from now, in October 2025, which motivates both sides to engage in negotiations.

If Harris wins, the Democratic policymakers who helped bring about the Iran Deal of 2015 and have incessantly defended it since will have another crack at making a deal with Iran—a far more difficult task now that the spectre of an all-out Iranian-Israeli war is hovering over the region.

But what if she loses?

Trump, the transactionalist, will be eager to talk to Iran if he can get a new deal that stunts the country's rapidly growing nuclear programme and calms the guns in the Middle East. For his part, Khamenei might want to use this opportunity to get a deal that could take some of the pressure off of his regime.

The devil, though, lies in the details. Harris's team will include folks like her national security advisor, Phill Gordon, and her Jewish community liaison, Ilan Goldenberg. These are precisely the men who have often advocated diplomatic deals in the region and have the careful and considerate experience and attitude to make it possible.

With Trump back in the White House, he is likely to be surrounded by pro-Netanyahu advisors who've long clamoured for action against Iran. The former president might very well try to stop them from getting the US into a war he doesn't desire. But will he have the patience to shepherd through a diplomatic deal with Iran? As with much else with a second Trump presidency, it's very hard to predict.

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