The World Powers and Iran: Before, During and After the Nuclear Deal (Middle East Today) 3031092481, 9783031092480

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MIDDLE EAST TODAY

Before, During and A fter the Nuclear Deal

Banafsheh Keynoush

Middle East Today

Series Editors Fawaz A. Gerges, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics, London, UK Nader Hashemi, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, Center for Middle East Studies, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA

The Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq have dramatically altered the geopolitical landscape of the contemporary Middle East. The Arab Spring uprisings have complicated this picture. This series puts forward a critical body of first-rate scholarship that reflects the current political and social realities of the region, focusing on original research about contentious politics and social movements; political institutions; the role played by non-governmental organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Other themes of interest include Iran and Turkey as emerging pre-eminent powers in the region, the former an ‘Islamic Republic’ and the latter an emerging democracy currently governed by a party with Islamic roots; the Gulf monarchies, their petrol economies and regional ambitions; potential problems of nuclear proliferation in the region; and the challenges confronting the United States, Europe, and the United Nations in the greater Middle East. The focus of the series is on general topics such as social turmoil, war and revolution, international relations, occupation, radicalism, democracy, human rights, and Islam as a political force in the context of the modern Middle East.

Banafsheh Keynoush

The World Powers and Iran Before, During and After the Nuclear Deal

Banafsheh Keynoush San Francisco, CA, USA

ISSN 2945-7017 ISSN 2945-7025 (electronic) Middle East Today ISBN 978-3-031-09248-0 ISBN 978-3-031-09249-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09249-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Mikadun/shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my son, Kian And with deep love to all that he represents: my Reza Henri, Rostam & Yazdan

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a year’s plus hard work during the pandemic. It was a relief to work on this book, and one that came before it (Iran’s Interregional Dynamics in the Near East ), in this global crisis. It enabled me to focus despite hardships. I lost eight family members and friends while writing the present book (none to the pandemic but all in less than 3 months), and took care of a young and active family. While acknowledgments are often a celebration of people and institutions we collaborate with or who support us to write a book, and that of course gives our work more status and prestige, in my case, there was a conspicuous absence of such support. But by all means, in my mind, that only adds to the prestige and status of my accomplishment as a single woman and a single parent. My work means that we can all write and produce good books even without much support. That is why I am extremely proud of this book, because I did it alone with little support. My family, particularly my son, and my publisher were kind and supportive, and to them I owe my deepest gratitude. My son is wise and was always encouraging me to believe in my work, as he took on a fair deal of tasks including cooking so I could build time to write. It turned out, he is a much better cook than I am. My publisher was kind enough to call me, to ask for a new book. My previous book, Saudi Arabia and Iran: Friends or Foes? had done tremendously well in terms of sales. So, in a split second during our conversation, I offered to write about the world powers and the Iran nuclear deal, before, during and after the agreement,

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without having given the idea a moment’s thought before then. I am happy we had that talk. I am indebted to my US-based and international clients, who offered projects that enabled me to work while writing a book of this scale. Above all, this book draws on years of interactions with world leaders, politicians and clerics who played an indirect role informing me as I shaped my own views about the Iran nuclear deal. I have watched these actors engage, and at times been part of the communications with them as well as in dual-track settings aiming to advance a dialog between the world powers and Iran. Being an author is not an easy task, but for me, writing is a source of joy. I also love international politics and the work that went into this project. I watched plenty of great movies in the process, read several biographies, listened to great music, explored new hiking trails, watched birds and cried over the loss of loved ones, but never for a second did I question why I embarked on this journey to produce two books in the middle of a pandemic. San Francisco, CA May 2022

Banafsheh Keynoush

Praise for The World Powers and Iran

“Banafsheh Keynoush has written a rich account of Iranian relations with great powers over the last ten years. The book builds on conversations with former policymakers in the US and abroad, and provides a useful lens for understanding the challenges in reviving the nuclear deal.” —Alexandre Debs, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Political Science, Yale University, USA “Dr. Keynoush makes an important contribution to our understanding of Iranian foreign policy. Placing Tehran’s involvement in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) within a broader global context, there are highly informative chapters on Iran’s bilateral relations worldwide, especially those with China, India, and Russia that often do not get the attention they deserve. This excellent book deserves wide readership.” —Jerrold D. Green, President and Chief Executive Officer, Pacific Council on International Policy “Amid much noise and misunderstanding over Iran’s foreign relations and its nuclear program, Banafsheh Keynoush has produced a solid work of scholarship on these two related topics. Zeroing in on Iran’s relations with India, China, the US, the EU, and Russia, she examines the primary drivers of Iranians foreign policy with keen insight and in considerable depth. This excellent addition to the scholarship should be

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required reading for all students, experts, and policymakers interested in understanding Iran’s relations with the world powers.” —Mehran Kamrava, Professor of Government, Georgetown University Qatar “Few thinkers are as qualified as Banafsheh Keynoush to offer a critical reflection of Iran’s place in the world. Her latest book offers a sweeping analysis of Iran’s nuclear programme in the context of Tehran’s engagement with global politics. This hugely ambitious tome offers a timely insight into Iran’s actions on the world stage and should be essential reading for all Western diplomats engaging with Iran about the nuclear question.” —Simon Mabon, Professor and Chair in International Relations, Director of the Richardson Institute, Lancaster University, UK “The volume is fresh in its tone, measured in its analysis, and clear-eyed in its conclusions, doubled by a simple, direct, and practical set of guidelines for dealing with Iran. The most valuable conclusion is that offensive realism can be practiced successfully even by second-tier powers.” —Sorin Adam Matei, Associate Dean of Research, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University, USA “This volume is a valuable and timely analysis of Iran’s perspective on the hot-button nuclear issue in its relations with the full range of major powers—the US, the EU, Russia, China, and even India—over the entire past decade. It has the added virtue of striving to place all of this factual material into appropriate theoretical frameworks, and the even greater virtue of acknowledging where and when such theories fall short. A prime case in point, the author shows, is the enduring hostility between Iran and the US, which reflects a complex and fluid mixtures of ideologies and interests that do not fit neatly into any preconceived categories.” —David Pollock, Senior Fellow and Director, Fikra Forum, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy “This book delivers an insightful examination of Iran’s foreign policy by focusing on its nuclear program and using the nuances of important bilateral relationships to understand Iran’s relationship with major powers. Through the lens of IR theories, Keynoush’s argument that Iran, as a

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middle power, was able to change the position of great powers is welcome to both IR theory and Middle East politics.” —Lawrence Rubin, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA “In this rigorously researched book, Keynoush deftly unpacks Iran’s nuclear calculations over the course of the last decade. As Keynoush tracks the competing policy argument in Tehran, she shows how Iran continues to wrestle with identifying and protecting what it considers to be its national interests on the regional and global stages. This informative book is a much welcome addition to the literature on Iranian national security policy-making.” —Alex Vatanka, Middle East Institute Director of Iran Program, and Senior Fellow, Frontier Europe Initiative

Contents

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1

Introduction: Reframing Iran’s Nuclear Program

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US-Iran Relations: The End-Game

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E3/EU3-Iran Relations: Engagement for Engagement’s Sake

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Russia-Iran Relations: Indispensable Neighbors

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China and Iran: An Auxiliary Partnership

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India and Iran: A Fractured Partnership

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Reframing Iran’s Nuclear Program

The Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historic Studies (IICHS) collects and catalogues historical documents in order to build narratives that reframe Iran’s history, including the country’s relations with the world powers. When Iran’s nuclear activities attracted alarming levels of attention worldwide almost a decade ago, the IICHS built narratives suggesting that Iran should not abandon its nuclear program if the world powers demanded it. The institute argued that the main reason Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (known as the Shah) was ousted from power in 1979 was because he was a puppet beholden to the world powers. The Islamic Republic of Iran which replaced him should therefore advance the country’s nuclear program, even if its actions bothered the world powers.1 As simple as this narrative was, it partly explained why Iran built its nuclear program despite world power demands that it should halt or slow down its nuclear activities. The advanced scope of Iran’s nuclear activities surfaced in 2002, after the world powers began paying more attention to the program’s secret dimensions post 9/11. By then, however, Iran had sufficient material power to advance its nuclear activities and the ideational power to mobilize elite support for a strong nuclear program. To deflect international criticism about the non-peaceful aspects of its nuclear activities, Iran engaged in talks with the world powers. The more opportunities Iran received to engage in negotiations, the better the country was able to convince world powers to recognize and protect © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Keynoush, The World Powers and Iran, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09249-7_1

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different components of its complex nuclear industry. Of significance to this research is the fact that Iran was able to advance its nuclear program while being watched by the world powers. Iran achieved the goal because the world powers did not believe that the country could ignore them or their calls to contain its nuclear program before, during and after the finalization of a nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015. The world powers agreed that Iran’s nuclear program presented a policy challenge, but they miscalculated Iranian resourcefulness. They believed they had final control over Iran by sanctioning it or attacking its nuclear facilities. As it turned out, these powers were unable to lead cohesive policies among themselves to fully contain the Iranian nuclear program. Before the finalization of the nuclear deal (2011–2012), Russia and China resisted western pressures to isolate Tehran. In the course of the finalization of the nuclear deal (2013–2015), the western powers drew back their economic investments in Iran despite Russian and Chinese efforts to reach Iranian markets. Post-JCPOA (2016–2021), the United States of America withdrew from the deal, forcing Iran to face tough USled sanctions that would prevent Russian, Chinese and European firms from investing in the country despite wanting to. Subsequent efforts to contain Iran weakened the international nuclear non-proliferation regime which aimed to cease the spread of atomic weapons, given that Iran continued to advance its nuclear program. It further delayed Iranian ability to seal a final nuclear deal with the world powers. But ironically, it bought Iran time to develop its nuclear program. Throughout the period examined in this book from 2011 to 2021, Iran expanded its nuclear enrichment capacity to levels that would enable the country to quickly assemble an atomic bomb or explosive device. This served to remind the world powers that Iran’s nuclear program could not be easily controlled or contained. Not surprisingly, Iran’s increased isolation on the world stage strengthened what is termed in proliferation literature as “a domestic coalition to stay in power” inside the country, by enhancing Iranian nuclear capabilities as part and parcel of Iran’s survival strategies. According to Etel Solingen, this inward-looking domestic coalition was more likely to seek nuclear weapons capability to justify a military-industrial complex and to invoke invincibility to boost regime appeal.2 Furthermore, it could be argued as Jacques E. C. Hymans did in his work on proliferation that with Iran being naturally at odds with the world powers, its leaders decided to seek proliferation.3

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Theoretical Debate on Iran’s Relations with World Powers While the present book does not analyze Iran’s intentions for having a nuclear program, it demonstrates how Tehran calculated its policy moves to build up the program in the past decade. Iran built support and power at three levels to advance its nuclear program, and its efforts justified why the country felt compelled, at least from a realist perspective, to pursue nuclear power as a rational response to protecting its interests in a hostile environment.4 Firstly, Iran’s narratives challenged prevailing political and security interpretations forwarded by the world powers that questioned the country’s logic for possessing a strong nuclear program.5 Instead of idealistically promoting a nuclear disarmament narrative, Iran offered competing narratives that exposed world power double standards that justified them having nuclear weapons but denied others the option of a strong nuclear program. Iran also questioned the inability of the world powers to develop nuclear disarmament regimes in the Middle East, if Israel could possess nuclear weapons but other countries could not. In addition, Iran mobilized public opinion domestically and internationally to challenge the narratives that the world powers employed to discourage developing nations like Iran from possessing an advanced nuclear industry. Iran’s narratives explained the dim prospects of disarmament through engagement with world powers, especially when those powers struggled to salvage the JCPOA after the United States abandoned the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018. In January 2022, Iran’s defiant narratives over its nuclear program came to light once again, after the world’s leading nuclear powers (the United States of America, the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the French Republic) agreed to move toward ceasing the spread of atomic weapons in accordance with their obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but failed to offer a modality to reach the goal. Secondly, Iran built leverage by association with Asian countries such as the Republic of India that possessed nuclear weapons but had reservations about the privileged nuclear status of the major powers, i.e., Russia, China, the United States, Britain, France and to an extent Germany given that it housed US nuclear weapons. Iran and India emphasized the need for a multipolar world and the transformation of the international system

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on the issue of nuclear proliferation and disarmament, while advancing their nuclear infrastructures. Encouraged by its engagement with India, Iran attempted to leverage other Asian powers as well, such as China and Russia, in order to collectively challenge US-led unilateralism and predominance in dictating the future of the nuclear proliferation regime.6 Thirdly, Iran resorted to tactics to shame the United States, Britain, France and Germany by exposing and condemning US actions and Europe’s lack of action that undermined the JCPOA. Iran’s shame tactics specifically exposed challenges in the transatlantic bond between the European powers and the United States. Washington often ignored Britain, France and Germany (E3) over the JCPOA, even when the E3 attempted to salvage the deal. This chain of events marking the weakening of the transatlantic alliance over Iran in turn propelled Tehran to advance its nuclear industry, and enrich uranium at higher speeds and grade levels, which reaffirmed the dominance of political realism in its calculations to build power. From a neorealist security perspective of rational deterrence theory, which applies western-based approaches to how the international system molds a state’s deterrent capabilities, Tehran’s actions on the nuclear front were seen as having a military component even when the country aimed to use its enrichment capacity to enhance its negotiating power with world powers. Iranian actions thus raised concerns by Israel, the West and even among Iran’s Arab neighbors that were less hesitant to condemn its nuclear program directly, that the country could reach closer to advancing nuclear weapons capabilities.7 Tehran calculated that its actions could force the world powers to understand that they were better off helping Iran advance its nuclear program than by fighting it. Iran emphasized the defensive aspects of its military strategy to ease international concerns that its nuclear program could possess offensive military components. But to divide the world powers, it also worked tirelessly to prove that it could stand on its own as a middle power, and did not need help from others to advance its nuclear program. Iran was far from a country merely shaped by world power politics in this nuclear arena, as neorealists would presume. Increasingly, it placed itself in the midst of global power politics in order to reshape it. Although international relations theory including neorealism assumed dichotomies for classifying states, into great powers and others like Iran that were not great powers, Iran was successfully adopting realist calculations to enhancing its power.8

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Moreover, Iran’s historic experience of being pushed around by the big powers dictated that the country should not remain a passive player in reshaping the world. Along the way, Iran’s unlimited aspirations made it not easily fit into a world or regional order that the major powers sought a part in. From a security perspective, Tehran was never keen to contribute to any specific order in which Iran did not play a prominent role, although it supported policies that aimed at marginalizing US centrality in world politics. Rather, Tehran was keen to use the middle power agency it had to build its own security and broaden its discourse with other powers, shifting our understanding of international relations and security theory from a top-down analysis of major power dictations on others to a bottom-up approach of other lesser powers dictating their terms to the world powers. The present book draws on classical realism and then broadens the scope of the argument that “a middle power is a state actor which has limited influence on deciding the distribution of power in a given regional system, but is capable of deploying a variety of sources of power to change the position of great powers and defend its position on matters related to national or regional security that directly affect it.”9 Iran challenged the notion that US hegemony and dominance carried with it stability for other developing nations. More importantly, the notion that a single and relatively isolated middle power like Iran possessed capabilities to influence world powers suggested that myriad theories were required to explain the complex relations between Iran, the six major global powers and India. Consequently, attempts to describe Iran as a middle power in any neat theoretical category in relation to the major powers appeared confining and problematic. Therefore, this book unveils the nuances of Iran’s relations with the world powers in the past decade by remaining open to multiple theoretical perspectives that is present in each chapter, and that aim to offer alternative narratives to studying Iran’s role in world politics. A few theoretical discussions in the book lean on classical realism which accepts the notion that there is an independent realm of power for middle powers to assume, and thus grants agency to Iran in its interactions with major powers. In this context, Iran is not just a monolithic state as neorealism might assume, that delivers different outcomes in terms of its inter-state level interactions with major powers. Classical realism argues that all states have enough power to shape inter-state ties, identify the foreign policy goals of rival states and counter them through different

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means. Through classical realism, one can even safely assume that Iranian capabilities and performance can be differentiated in its interactions with each major power studied in this book.10 More importantly, classical realism focuses on security as the center of investigation for middle powers. Thus, material and non-material aspects of security including Iran’s ideational goals constitute sources of power. As a result, classical realism allows us to explore Iran’s role by accounting for a broad spectrum of power sources that shape its interactions with the major powers. Iran can build a strategic partnership with China, and seek to advance economic liberalism with the European Union, while retaining its ideational revolutionary character toward the United States, all in the course of negotiating the fate of its nuclear program and appeasing Russia as its big neighbor. A combination of classical realism and constructivist theory further accounts for factors such as ideational norms, and how identity shapes Iran’s interactions on the world scene.11 Iran’s middle power status is explored here as a relational concept that exists on the continuum of inter-state ties. Thus, the book reveals the distinctive nature of Iran’s power and its limits on deciding the distribution of world power. Then, it sets out to explain how Iranian power is different from great powers in influencing the international system. In Kenneth N. Waltz’s terms, relations among great powers collectively as a club with enough resources allow them to decide the distribution of power of a regional or international political system to which Iran may belong. But I show here that while Iran is limited in injecting its power, it can change the position of great powers and assert its position on national, regional or international security issues.12 The question of the rise and fall of great powers, examined by Brooks and Wohlforth, shapes segments of the present book to the extent that Iran’s ideational values defy unipolarity or a multipolarity based on the distribution of power only among a big power club. Unsurprisingly, Iran seeks to align its interests with multiple power poles to measure the performance of the major powers and see how its actions can lead to power shifts that favor Iran. In this game, Iran builds closer associations with similar minded countries on certain issues pertaining to its nuclear program, but it does not always observe the changing relations among the major powers accurately. Furthermore, it is unable to apply strong methods and clear concepts to measure those changes, given the country’s relative isolation on the world scene. Hence, its policy calculations

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in negotiating a nuclear deal with the major powers suffer from frequent flaws.13 Iran does not assume that the world is unipolar, and it opposes such a notion. Instead, Iran engages in a dichotomous analysis about how multipolarity can help determine the fate of its nuclear program. For Iran, multipolarity is a shifting concept given that from an ideational perspective, the country is unable to inherently trust any stable power polarities other than those which it can dominate. A larger question in the context of this book is how polarity captures the relationship between power and agency among multiple actors including Iran, and how this in turn alters the system in which the United States as a primary player dictates the outcome of the nuclear deal to Iran, and to other powers. All these other countries that are examined in this book, besides the United States, could also transform the world system into numerous multipolar systems. Since assuming that major powers have unlimited power is not what Iran does well, and in fact it tries to reverse that assumption, Iran’s unlimited aspirations and ideational values have the power to make it a formidable middle power challenge to the major powers. In the absence of a workable threshold that Iran is unable to cross, for example a strong nuclear deal, these values could influence an emerging order. In the meantime, to better assess how quickly Iran could ascend or descend the ladder of power in its interactions with the major powers, it is best to explain the distribution of its capabilities toward negotiating a nuclear deal as this book does. Iran is armed with a range of ideological, economic, military, nuclear, industrial and technological, security and foreign policy capacities that play out over a host of power distribution trajectories.14 Although Iran is hardly able to operate on equal levels with the major powers, it has rapidly built institutions and infrastructures for it to operate at higher power levels in order to advance a nuclear program. As alarmist as this statement may sound, tracking Iran’s power trajectory in relation to big powers demonstrates barriers in Iran’s comparatively lesser capabilities which forces the country to step back at times in some areas before it can contemplate its next moves on how to ascend the power ladder and establish an effective dialog with other major powers. This huge gap separating the capabilities of Iran as a middle power and those of major powers leads to unclear benchmarks to assess how Iran might displace other major powers as it pursues its ideational goals and its nuclear program.15 Taken in this context, balancing against other major powers, or counter-balancing their moves, as neorealist theory might assume, is a

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risky business for Iran. Combined with efforts made by major powers to contain Iran, a very different picture of Iran emerges in this book in which it is unlikely that its bilateral ties with each of the major powers can replicate those powers’ more important ties with each other. More importantly, barriers to overcome by Iran to enforce balancing seem too high. Termed the “systemic balancing constraint,” this reality pushes Iran to increasingly rely on its indigenous capabilities to offer incentives or disincentives to major powers in terms of their level of engagement with Tehran. Iran’s local-level policy choices may not immediately serve to counterbalance what the major powers do, but they help weaken the resolve of those powers to counter Iran’s power without first accommodating some of its needs. As a result, broader daily calculations have shaped Iran’s relations with the world powers, and its nuclear negotiations with them, to help avert a full crisis over the fate of the Iranian nuclear program.16 No book can offer a systemic analysis of the debates that take place in Iran on this issue. But there are certain facts worth exploring in this book. In terms of the distribution of capabilities, the United States tries to force other major powers to follow it with respect to containing or engaging with Iran. Putative global powers like Russia, China and India can do less in preventing the United States from pursuing unfettered policies toward Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran’s main problem is with the United States. If Iran is unable to maintain a strong network to engage with major power alliances, on a comparable level to US power and capabilities, the security of the Iranian state is dramatically undermined. The present book shows how Iran sought new options to build its security. For example, Iran embraced an East Asia pivot policy. Iran demonstrated that it was willing to negotiate a set of core nuclear commitments, but it simultaneously explored how to advance its positions with the world powers. Along the way, Iran’s unlimited aspirations were tested through a tight sanctions regime to curtail Iranian power, and the country grew weaker while apparently appearing stronger in terms of its nuclear capabilities. The challenge that a disorderly Iran presented to the world powers was incalculable as was any emerging order that could result from it, despite Iranian efforts to maintain continuity in the conduct of its foreign policy. This placed Iran in a constant place between peace and war, as Brooks and Wohlforth would argue, and in a varying state of limbo with respect to its major power interlocutors.17

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Overview of Iran’s Negotiations with World Powers Negotiating the fate of Iran’s nuclear program is dependent on working with Tehran, and on world powers being able to take collective steps to contain the Iranian nuclear program. Though in practice the real problem is Iran’s nuclear program, the world powers use the context of the nuclear negotiations with Iran to enhance their own power at the negotiating table while advancing collective goals. This explains to an extent why a deal over Iran’s nuclear program failed to fully materialize and remain in force in the past decade, especially as the United States exerted its will unilaterally to manage the talks. The Islamic Republic of Iran invited the United Kingdom, France and Germany (E3) to negotiate a nuclear deal, after information surfaced about two clandestine nuclear sites in the Iranian cities of Arak and Natanz in 2002. In October of that year, Iran and the E3 reached an agreement to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In November 2003, Tehran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment for tactical purposes while negotiations on a long-term agreement continued. In December, Iran signed the IAEA Additional Protocol (AP) called for under the terms of the NPT to invite snap inspections of its nuclear sites. Iran was further required in the deal struck with the E3 to provide an expanded declaration of its nuclear activities. In January 2004, the nuclear talks halted after Tehran declared that it was constructing a heavy water nuclear reactor in Arak. In February, the hardliners in Iran criticized Tehran’s decision to sign the Additional Protocol. By March, the Esfahan uranium conversion facility was inaugurated. Later in October, the E3 and the United States discussed offering incentives to Tehran to return to negotiations by November in Paris, including help developing nuclear research reactors. Iran briefly suspended its enrichment program for three months so it could build a comprehensive agreement covering a wide range of security issues with regard to its nuclear program. But in February 2005, the IAEA referred Iran’s nuclear file to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Despite efforts to make a compromise deal that would grant limited enrichment rights to Iran, and the issuance of a fatwa by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

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banning the use of nuclear weapons (but not banning developing knowhow to produce those weapons), Tehran failed to convince Washington to join a new agreement. Iran’s ability to develop low-enriched uranium (LEU), and to build the next generation of centrifuges was soon revealed to the world. In 2006, Russia followed by the United States and China joined the nuclear talks with Iran to form the P5+1, while the E3 transformed into a broader European Union dialog (known as the EU/EU3) with Iran. Iran agreed to explore larger deals that would include issues related to building regional stability in the Persian Gulf, and it calculated that should a nuclear agreement transpire, through improved ties with the United States, it would build better relations with its Arab neighbors including Saudi Arabia. On July 31, 2006, the UNSC adopted Resolution 1696 under Article 40 of Chapter VII of the United Nations (UN) Charter. The resolution gave Iran until the end of August to suspend nuclear enrichment and reprocessing, including research and development, or face economic and diplomatic sanctions. Even Russia and China voted in favor of the resolution, but after receiving some reassurance that the United States would refrain from using military options to attack Iran. After concluding that Iran continued its enrichment, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1737 to block the transfer of nuclear materials and equipment to Iran, and to freeze financial assets supporting Iran’s proliferation activities on December 23, 2006. On March 24, 2007, the UNSC passed Resolution 1747 that tightened sanctions on Iran. A year later, on March 3, 2008, the UNSC passed new sanctions through Resolution 1803. It then passed Resolution 1835, to reaffirm the four previous resolutions, on September 27, 2008. As Iran’s nuclear program fell into disarray given the country’s tensions with the world powers, Tehran made renewed efforts but failed to build a nuclear deal in 2009, and faced renewed threats of sanctions by the United States including on its gasoline industry and financial institutions. In May 2010, Iran reached an agreement dubbed the Tehran Declaration with Turkey and Brazil to exchange LEU for fuel for its research reactor. The deal was by and large ignored by the major powers. In June 2010, the UNSC passed Resolution 1929 to impose further bans and sanctions on Iran. Then, the EU/EU3 proposed a freeze on Iranian enrichment activities in return for the lifting of all sanctions in July 2010,

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concerned that Iran had continued its enrichment program despite sanctions since 2009. In June 2011, the UNSC Resolution 1984 extended the sanctions regime, followed by US gasoline sanctions on Iran. It took the following two years to lay out and agree on principles for a long-term agreement between Iran and the P5+1. In November 2012, the P5+1 and Iran pursued fresh talks. They met in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in February 2013. Talks to reach an agreement began in October and November 2013. As a rising regional power and being energy-dependent, India tried to support Iran in this period and through the final nuclear agreement that was concluded in July 2015. On July 20, 2015, the UNSC passed Resolution 2231 to endorse the JCPOA and its terms, including the removal of previous UN sanctions against Iran. The resolution allowed Iran to advance certain aspects of its nuclear program. Unlike six previous sanctions against Iran that were passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the new resolution no longer viewed Iran’s nuclear activities as a threat to world peace and security. In October 2015, Adoption Day enabled the entry into force of the JCPOA, 90 days after its endorsement by the UNSC. In December, a Report by the Director General of the IAEA verified that, after completing a decade-long investigation, Iran’s nuclear program did not have possible military dimensions (PMDs). The IAEA Board of Governors issued a new resolution to that effect. Iran subsequently agreed to dismantle most of its advanced nuclear infrastructure. Washington hailed the step as it believed that it ensured that Iran’s nuclear weapons program would not be revived, despite Iran’s insistence that its program did not have military components. The deal in effect contained Iran’s nuclear activities so that if the JCPOA broke down or was challenged, that it would take the country at least one year to develop breakout capability to build weapons. In the absence of an agreement, Iran could reach that breakout point within months. In the event of suspected violations of the deal, the UNSC could also enforce a ‘snapback’ mechanism that remained effective for ten years in order to reinstate sanctions on Iran. Many of the restrictions placed on Iran under the terms of the JCPOA had expiration dates, including the fact that Tehran could operate advanced centrifuges within ten years after the JCPOA Implementation Day (January 16, 2016), and enrich uranium at higher grade levels within 15 years. These so-called sunset provisions delayed Iran’s ability

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to possibly build nuclear weapons, but could not ensure that Iran would not pursue the option or use sanctions relief to fund a future and stronger nuclear weapons program. In the absence of trust, the sunset provisions turned out to be a deal breaker for the United States. Finally, under the terms of the deal, Iran would submit to IAEA monitoring and verification and work with a Joint Commission representing all negotiating parties to monitor implementation. In the event that a party failed to uphold obligations under the terms of the JCPOA, such a breach could be referred to a Joint Commission to initiate a dispute resolution process that would take no more than 15 days, unless a consensus agreement was reached to extend the period. The Foreign Ministers of the negotiating parties could look into any further unresolved issues through a three-member advisory board that could operate in parallel or in lieu of consideration by the ministers within a time period of 30 days, after which a 5-day consideration period by the Joint Commission could lead to the ceasing of commitments by any disputing party to the JCPOA if the matter remained unresolved. Finally, the United States, the UN and the EU agreed to lift nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, and lift a UN ban in five years which would allow the transfer of conventional weapons or even missiles to Iran if the IAEA certified Iranian compliance with a civilian nuclear program.18 In May 2018, the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal, and Iran was forced to continue negotiating with the remaining parties to the deal in order to salvage the JCPOA. Although western intelligence agencies could not fully substantiate that Iran aimed to produce nuclear weapons, when the policy of engagement with Iran failed, the US-led sanctions regime against Iran intensified, thus significantly lowering Iran’s ability to export oil even compared with the pre-JCPOA era when the country faced oil sector sanctions. As a result, Tehran shifted toward plans to neutralize the impact of sanctions rather than expecting the world powers to lift the sanctions. Tehran also swiftly reached the conclusion that it might never build a strong or lasting nuclear deal with the world powers, as long as US pressures on Iran persisted, despite remaining open to holding seven rounds of talks with the P4+1 (excluding the United States) and indirectly with the administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. throughout 2021. Tehran further concluded that if the sanctions were not permanently lifted, and if it failed to reap the economic benefits of a nuclear deal, reaching an agreement was unlikely. More importantly, Iran feared that

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the United States could force Tehran to contain its missile program and regional influence in the Middle East by offering to extend exemptions on sanctions to enable trade, but make those extensions conditional on Iran’s change of behavior. To buy time to decide its next moves, Iran constrained IAEA access to its nuclear facilities in 2021, said it would completely stop implementing the Additional Protocol and made IAEA access conditional to the removal of sanctions and the revival of the JCPOA. A long list of sanctions that Iran urged the world powers to remove included restrictions placed on its energy industry, ports, transportation systems and banks, as well as US sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) signed into law in August 2017. CAATSA addressed specifically sanctions related to Iran’s ballistic missile and potential weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, the transfer of military equipment or assistance to Iran, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Iran also demanded that the world powers pass a final test by committing to permanently lifting sanctions and reviving the JCPOA. By early January 2022, the eighth round of nuclear talks in Vienna showed signs of modest progress in establishing thresholds for Iran’s nuclear activities, but after the United States informed Iran through diplomatic channels of severe consequences if a deal was not made. Iran, however, insisted on the removal of sanctions and a more binding agreement, while stressing that it remained committed to talks for as long as it took the world powers to recommit to the JCPOA. From Iran’s point of view, the removal of sanctions meant that firstly no additional ones would be imposed. Secondly, sanctions would not be re-imposed by the United States under any legal, presidential act, congressional or other pretext. Thirdly, the activation of the snap back mechanism in the event of a breach of the JCPOA by Iran would not bar Iranian access to its energy revenues generated from the sale of oil that would be sold prior to snap back.19 A major problem that barred Iran from fully embracing direct talks with the United States in the seventh round of negotiations in 2021, in the course of nearly two weeks of indirect meetings, was Tehran’s belief that Washington had persistently undermined the Iranian nuclear program even in the course of the nuclear talks. Under President George W. Bush, during the nuclear talks between the E3 and Iran, Washington rejected the notion that Iran should have a right to enrich nuclear material, after the United States proposed a ban on the transfer of the fuel

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cycle to countries like Iran that did not possess the fuel at advanced levels. Tehran further maintained that the Obama administration never came to terms with the fact that Iran was on its path to developing advanced nuclear technology, even as Washington encouraged the transfer of the nuclear fuel cycle to Iran post-JCPOA as long as the country adhered to the Additional Protocol. Not surprisingly, once the nuclear deal almost collapsed after the US withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018, the Asian pivot of Iran’s foreign policy rapidly took shape. But voices in Tehran that were inclined to call Iran an Asian power and hence justify its Asian pivot were weak, given that Iran’s Middle East foreign policy, which was also a major theater for its dealings with the United States, remained its strongest focus and main security concern. Consequently, Tehran understood that without a deal with Washington, its prospects to improve Iran’s ties with its Arab neighbors remained dim. The present book is divided into six chapters to discuss the evolution of Iran’s relations with the world powers and the nuclear negotiations from 2011 through 2021. Following the introduction in Chapter One, other chapters address the application of theory to Iran’s relations with each of the major powers. This is followed by chapter sections that review Iran’s bilateral relations with each of the major powers. The chapters then proceed to review Iran’s ties with each of the major powers including India before, during and after the nuclear deal in separate timeframes between 2011–2012 (pre-nuclear talks), 2013–2016 (nuclear talks and implementation of the nuclear agreement) and 2017–2021 (period after the finalization of the nuclear agreement). Chapter 2 looks at how USIran ties in the course of the nuclear talks contributed to the enduring hostility between the two, and led to unresolved conflicts. Chapter 3 addresses the EU3 policy of engagement with Iran in the context of the nuclear talks. Chapter 4 studies the alignments that shape an indispensable partnership between Russia and Iran, and their impact on the nuclear talks. Chapter 5 examines what I term China’s ‘auxiliary’ partnership with Iran as the latter embarked on an East Asia pivot policy to circumvent sanctions and defy US pressures in the course of the nuclear talks. Chapter 6 frames the nuclear talks in terms of India’s role in promoting a multipolar world system in which New Delhi and Tehran thrive to be important actors.

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Notes 1. See conversations with Musa Hagghani, “Did the Islamic Republic Lie to the People About the Pahlavi Regime?” Mashregh News, Bahman 30, 1393, https://www.mashreghnews.ir/news/390804/%D8%A2%DB% 8C%D8%A7-%D8%AC%D9%85%D9%87%D9%88%D8%B1%DB%8C-% D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C-%D8%AF%D8%B1% D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%87-%D8%B1%DA%98%DB%8C%D9%85-% D9%BE%D9%87%D9%84%D9%88%DB%8C-%D8%A8%D9%87-%D9%85% D8%B1%D8%AF%D9%85-%D8%AF%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%BA-%DA% AF%D9%81%D8%AA. 2. See Etel Solingen, Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 3. See Jacques E. C. Hymans, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 4. For realist views on proliferation see Tanya Ogilvie-White, “Is There a Theory of Nuclear Proliferation? An Analysis of the Contemporary Debate,” The Nonproliferation Review, Volume 4, No. 1 (1996): 43–60, https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/ogi lvi41.pdf. 5. For the role of narrative explanations see Hidemi Suganami, “Narrative Explanation and International Relations: Back to Basics,” Millennium— Journal of International Studies, Volume 37, No. 2 (December 2008): 327–356, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258171266_Narrat ive_Explanation_and_International_Relations_Back_to_Basics. 6. For leverage in international relations theory, see H. Richard Friman, The Politics of Leverage in International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); for how international linkage can impact regime change and behavior see Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “Linkage Versus Leverage: Rethinking the International Dimension of Regime Change,” Comparative Politics, Volume 38, No. 4 (July 2006): 379–400, https:// www.jstor.org/stable/20434008. 7. For neorealist theory on proliferation see Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Paper, No. 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981), https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/waltz1.htm; Kenneth N. Waltz, “Nuclear Myths and Political Realities,” American Political Science Review, Volume 84, No. 3 (September 1990): 731–745, https://www. cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/ abs/nuclear-myths-and-political-realities/9EF3533A2C5DDEFBADB05 63BC86EE2F7; Elli Lieberman, Reconceptualizing Deterrence: Nudging Toward Rationality in Middle Eastern Rivalries (London: Routledge, 2013).

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8. For more on these theoretical debates in other contexts see Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Waveland Press, 1st edition, 2010). 9. See Dong-min Shin, “Concept of Middle Power and the Case of the ROK: A Review,” Korea Yearbook 2012: Politics, Economy and Society (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 131–152. 10. See Dong-min Shin, “A Critical Review of the Concept of Middle Power,” E-International Relations, December 4, 2015, https://www.eir.info/2015/12/04/a-critical-review-of-the-concept-of-middle-power/; John Hobson, The State and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). 11. See Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978). 12. See Dong-min Shin, “A Critical Review of the Concept of Middle Power”; Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House), 97; Martin Wight, Power Politics (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978), 50–59. 13. See Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Twenty First Century: China’s Rise and the Fate of America’s Global Position,” International Security, Volume 40, No. 3 (Winter 2015/16): 7–53. 14. See also Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 22–96. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Kali Robinson, “What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal?” Council on Foreign Relations, last updated on August 18, 2021, https://www.cfr.org/backgr ounder/what-iran-nuclear-deal; Michelle Nicholas, “Fact Box: A Breach of Iran Nuclear Deal Could Trigger Sanctions Snapback,” Reuters, June 27, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-factbox/fac tbox-a-breach-of-iran-nuclear-deal-could-trigger-sanctions-snapback-idU SKCN1TS35U. 19. “West is Delaying / Iranian Diplomats Will Be Stationed in Jeddah,” Fararu, Dei 21, 1400, https://fararu.com/fa/news/527446/%D8%BA% D8%B1%D8%A8-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%84-%D9%85%DB% 8C%E2%80%8C%DA%A9%D9%86%D8%AF-%D8%AF%DB%8C%D9%BE% D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AA%E2%80%8C%D9%87%D8%A7%DB% 8C%E2%80%8C-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%AF% D8%B1-%D8%AC%D8%AF%D9%87-%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9% 82%D8%B1-%D9%85%DB%8C%E2%80%8C%D8%B4%D9%88%D9%86% D8%AF.

CHAPTER 2

US-Iran Relations: The End-Game

When the pandemic due to the coronavirus broke out around 2020, Iran turned the building of the Embassy of the United States of America in the capital city of Tehran into a makeshift workshop to produce face masks. The embassy was seized by Iranian students in November 1979, as a sign of anger at the United States for meddling in Iran’s affairs. That anger persisted and after the pandemic, strong anti-American sentiments fueled a misinformation campaign in Iran to blame the outbreak of the coronavirus on the United States. The virus outbreak arrived less than two years after Iran went through another major shock. In May 2018, President Donald J. Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and reinstated economic sanctions on Iran to slow down the advancement of its nuclear program. But Iran’s nuclear program continued to advance, while its economy remained modestly sheltered from the crises that hit most other economies, given the country’s relative isolation from world markets. Consequently, and rather acrimoniously, Iranian diplomats delivered predictions about a future world in which America’s primacy would be shattered by the pandemic toll on its much larger and globallyinterconnected economy. Energized by this prospect, they also called on Iran’s leaders to embrace a new world in which the power scales will tip in their favor as the United States grows weaker.1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Keynoush, The World Powers and Iran, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09249-7_2

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Tehran may have heeded these calls when it decided to speed up the installation of advanced uranium-enriching centrifuges, and in so doing, brought pressure on the incoming administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to lift sanctions in 2021. In June, the ultra-conservative candidate Ebrahim Raisi won the presidential race in Iran by promising to fix the country’s economy without tying this prospect to the issue of sanctions. Simultaneously, Raisi remained open to reviving the nuclear talks with the United States, but said that he expected sanctions relief even if Washington did not return to the JCPOA. His position was bolstered by prevailing negative sentiments toward Washington during Iran’s election season. Other hardline presidential candidates including a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Saeed Mohammad, demanded that Iran leave the JCPOA or accept a nuclear deal without the United States on board.2 But pressing economic concerns that pushed Iran to revive the nuclear deal trumped the country’s anti-American presidential campaign debates. Tehran understood that while hostilities would influence the trajectory of US-Iran ties for the foreseeable future, it had to weigh their cost if it were to ensure regime survival. This entailed elite debates in Iran in support of negotiations to build a nuclear deal with world powers. But supporters of the country’s hardline Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected the idea of engaging in direct talks with the United States. They had long concluded that having a strong nuclear program was beneficial for Iran even if it faced sanctions, especially if the program helped deter the United States from entertaining a military invasion of Iran. Others such as former hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili did not dismiss engaging with the United States if it helped generate guarantees by the world powers to help advance Iran’s nuclear program. President Hassan Rouhani, who was replaced by Raisi, maintained that Tehran should build its relations with Washington in order to guarantee Iran’s security. His mentor, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, tried to advance a strategic dialog with the United States, but he was criticized by the Supreme Leader for irrationally presupposing that such a dialog would even stand the chance of success with an enemy that was relentless about regime overthrow in Iran. In the end, street-smart calculations encouraging low-cost regime survival strategies drove Iran’s leaders to engage with the United States. Iran’s approach to building elite consensus on the issue involved mobilizing support among its political ranks (the hey’ati approach) for a

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commonly shared idea, i.e., to engage with Washington on a conditional basis. But the task proved to be difficult given that internal political divisions and rivalries would surface each time Iran’s conditions were not met. For example, President Rouhani and senior IRGC commanders frequently clashed over the red lines that Iran should protect and not cross by compromising with the United States over the fate of the Iranian nuclear program. The IRGC and its trans-border operational body the Quds Force and its leader Qasem Soleimani who was assassinated by US forces in Iraq in January 2020 were neither for nor against a nuclear deal. But they opposed Rouhani’s initiatives that compromised Iran’s security and its nuclear program to the point of potentially making the country co-dependent on US security guarantees.3 Even after Tehran decided to conclude a nuclear deal with Washington back in 2014, the Iranian political elite was divided about the merits of engaging with the United States. The only single issue that Iran’s revolutionaries seemed to agree on was the need to give America’s first African-American president, i.e., Barack Hussein Obama, an opportunity to prove that he was different from all previous US leaders and meant well by engaging with Iran. Yet, most of Iran’s elite believed back then that talks were a trap to allow the United States to control the Iranian nuclear program, irrespective of President Obama’s stated intentions to build a political dialog with the Muslim world including Iran. Many in Tehran even openly resented the new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani who assumed office in 2013, and his somewhat flamboyant Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, for turning prideful in their confidence to build a nuclear deal and thus risking playing into America’s hands. In the end, the hey’ati approach dictated how the nuclear negotiations with the United States would be led. Specifically, it entailed a nonconformist approach that rested first and foremost on a difficult consensus building process in Iran at the national level. Iran’s calculations on how to lead the nuclear talks with the United States were somewhat chaotic as a result, given divided views about the merits of such talks. This reality foreshadowed efforts by Rouhani and Zarif to shape the direction of the chaos in order to conclude a nuclear deal involving the United States.4 In light of the above, there was no neat way of theorizing the relations between the United States and Iran, given their enduring hostility. Classical realism and the neorealism theories that explained the nature of inter-state ties could partially address the reason for their enduring hostility even after a nuclear deal was finalized in 2015. The theories

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only described why Iran believed that maintaining an advanced nuclear program was necessary as an act of “internal balancing” designed to enhance its power. They also explained why the United States wanted to keep the Iranian nuclear power in check, and why Iran might seek nuclear weapons to protect itself. These theories further showed why the United States built strong alliances with Israel or the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC—states of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar) to contain Iran’s regional power in the Middle East before, during and after the nuclear deal. Finally, they described how Iran built regional alliances of its own with proxies, sub-state and non-state actors, and with friendly Arab regimes through acts of “external balancing” designed to represent an alliance arrangement to counterbalance the US containment policy against Iran.5 In sum, the trajectory of US-Iran relations was shaped by the fact that while the United States may have encouraged power imbalances to support its allies against Iran, it simultaneously undermined the goal of a stable regional order in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf that US administrations claimed they wanted. Consequently, Tehran concluded that Washington harbored a hidden agenda to build an unstable region, which also meant remaining hostile with Iran over its nuclear program. As a result, Iran advanced its nuclear program even if it fueled instability, once the United States withdrew from the JCPOA. As Iran challenged America’s primacy on the world stage, the regional sub-system in the Persian Gulf and in the larger Middle East was marked by instability which contributed to the US inability to contain Iran’s nuclear program and to Iranian inability to easily advance the program. These consequences may have contributed to the goals harbored by the United States and Iran to maintain an expanded regional and global influence, which realist and neorealist theories presumed that states have, but they sustained the enduring hostility between the two countries which no theory could easily explain. To simplify America’s complicated ties with Iran, US policymakers chose to view Tehran as a threat that subsided when friendlier Iranian presidents came to power. Perhaps they subconsciously also used familiar Cold War Game Theory conceptions, to assume as neorealism or structural realism might suggest that Washington could model its strategic interactions with Iran in order to produce an optimal decision-making process and mode of engagement with Iran. The example of the JCPOA

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showed that game theory might work temporarily, if by imposing sanctions, the United States could force a nuclear deal on Iran, but the deal broke down. Thus, these simplified approaches to Iran did not fully serve US politicians and lawmakers in dealing with an unknown actor like Iran, but it enabled them to ignore complex internal Iranian politics. Along the way, the United States paid a hefty cost for miscalculating Iran’s moves as the country moved toward a noncooperative mode, and pushed USIran relations into chaos mode in which interactions were dominated by random and unpredictable behavior post-JCPOA. In reality, if US politicians and lawmakers paid careful attention to Iran’s internal developments, they would have recognized early on that Tehran’s nuclear program advanced under the leadership of different Iranian presidents irrespective of their politics, while the United States was preoccupied reasoning that by engaging with or isolating Iran’s leaders it could encourage their moderation or influence the country to change course. Washington overlooked the fact that Tehran’s shifts between defying and engaging with the United States hardly represented a duality of strategy by respective Iranian presidents or leaders, but were two sides of similar strategies to weaken US resolve to confront and contain Iran, albeit through different negotiating methods and political representations. Furthermore, Washington often ignored the fact that Iran’s leaders were fundamentally trained in similar worldviews, irrespective of their opinions about whether or not to engage with the United States. Famous graduates of the somewhat secretive Hagghani School of Thought in Iran, for example, included Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi (President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s spiritual mentor), Hassan Rouhani and Ebrahim Raisi. Although the Hagghani School welcomed western and eastern philosophical influences to better understand the world (known as the elteghati idea), its core religious education focused on expediting the return to earth of the missing savior saint-like figure, the Shia Imam Mahdi (also known as Imam Zaman), who is expected to bring justice and whose final death in the future would herald the end of the world. The belief in the Mahdi went hand-in-hand with Iran’s harboring of unlimited aspirations to shape history, despite limited Iranian capabilities as a middle power, in order to hasten Mahdi’s return to earth from a state of spiritual and physical occultation, which led to constant struggles in its earthly dealings with the United States.6

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A few observers of US-Iran ties debated if constant enmity could be avoided between the two. Some justified the enmity as a tool to advance geopolitical interests. Others concluded that Tehran’s oscillation between rejecting or engaging with the United States could represent a dual strategy, which was based on identity politics and crude financial costbenefit calculations.7 Neither geopolitical factors, nor identity-driven and materially-driven realities in shaping Iran’s approach toward the United States could be ignored. But I argue here that the ideational aspects of Iran’s foreign policy always threatened to trump material considerations in the end-game which was to project Iran’s revolutionary worldview across the globe by containing US power, while material factors including the advancement of a nuclear program played a role in consolidating the revolution’s power to achieve this goal. The underlying strategic antagonism between the United States and Iran risked reshaping, or in my view ‘breaking,’ the future of the international order and re-defining the tools of legitimation that each of the two countries used to ensure influence on an emerging order, or again in my view on ‘an emerging disorder’.8 While the concept of order presumed US ability to work with a series of actors in the Persian Gulf region, US ties even with its allies, let alone with adversaries like Iran, were fraught with tension. Furthermore, the United States was unequipped to manage threats and opportunities with countries like Iran that harbored unlimited aspirations. In this context, the nuclear negotiations were naturally fraught with unresolved conflicts that went to the heart of questions on whether a unilateral world order that the United States dictated on Iran could last in the absence of a well-formed multipolar order that Iran preferred. Consequently, Iran preferred to maintain fluid interactions with the United States as an unpredictable negotiating partner. Furthermore, Iran’s preference and modus operandi to engage with other world powers on better terms aimed to parsimoniously counterbalance the US challenge. Therefore, compelling a nuclear deal appeared to be an unachievable goal in this context, let alone building a stable order in the Persian Gulf, and challenged Iran, its neighbors, the world powers and the United States.

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Overview of US-Iran Relations The United States helped Iran acquire nuclear know-how under the Atoms for Peace program in the early 1950s. Iran embraced the program to advance its scientific capacity and to build status and prestige, without having a national debate on whether it needed it. Simultaneously, backed by the United States, the country militarized rapidly. In 1957, the United States and Iran signed a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement, which led to building the Tehran Nuclear Research Center in 1959. The American company, the United Nuclear Corporation, provided fuel for the research reactor. Iran subsequently signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968, and ratified it in 1970, to reaffirm its commitment to peaceful nuclear activities.9 In 1974, Iran established the Atomic Energy Organization to generate nuclear power, and invited Germany, France, Britain, Canada, India and Australia as partners. Still, Iran’s government opposed plans to rapidly embrace a civilian nuclear program. But the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, intervened to ensure the operationalization of the Atomic Energy Organization. He contemplated developing know-how to build nuclear weapons as well, and believed the move would not prevent Iran from consolidating the non-proliferation regime because he could reverse the non-civilian aspects of the Iranian nuclear program. But by the late 1970s, Washington was concerned that the Shah might acquire nuclear weapons, after he made deals with Britain, France and Germany to develop the fuel cycle, and concluded a secret nuclear deal with South Africa. As soon as the Shah departed Iran in the course of the Islamic revolution in January 1979, his Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar canceled a US$6.2 billion deal with Washington for the sale of nuclear equipment and technologies, passed by the US Congress in 1975 after it ascertained that Iran’s nuclear program was not designed to build bombs. Back then, Washington had also offered to help Iran master the nuclear fuel cycle production. As events leading to the Iranian revolution unfolded, the United States halted the delivery of enriched uranium to the Tehran Nuclear Research Reactor in 1979, while a large group of Iran’s nuclear experts fled the country.10 Following the revolution, Iran attempted to advance its nuclear program with assistance from Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, China, Pakistan and North Korea. Its efforts to build a nuclear program slowed down during the Iran-Iraq War (1989–1988), given war-time

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priorities and Iraq’s heavy bombardment of Iranian industrial facilities. In the 1990s, an increasingly isolated Iran decided to advance an indigenous military, defense and nuclear program. When the full scale of Iran’s nuclear program was revealed in 2002 as a secret venture, although Washington may have already possessed some information about the Natanz and Arak nuclear facilities, Tehran insisted that its goals were peaceful. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa declaring that Islam banned the use of nuclear weapons. The fatwa did not declare a ban on acquiring the know-how to produce nuclear weapons which would grant Iran a certain latency and breakout capacity to produce weapons if it needed to. As US pressures mounted on Iran to contain its nuclear ambitions, Tehran decided to engage in talks with Europe. But in 2005, Iran was told by Britain, France and Germany (E3) that Washington would not accept its centrifuge operations, despite Iran’s efforts to negotiate limited enrichment in exchange for a so-called grand bargain agreement with the United Sates. The bargain would cover a broader range of security concerns and a promise by Tehran not to divert its nuclear program to produce nuclear weapons. But the bargain did not materialize because hardliners in Iran questioned the wisdom of sharing a broad security outlook with Washington.11 The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meanwhile referred Iran’s nuclear file to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in February and September 2005. In June 2006, the United States announced that it was prepared to engage in a formal dialog with Iran along with other major powers and permanent members of the UNSC, if Iran suspended its nuclear enrichment and reprocessing activities. Tehran rejected the terms, because as I was told by the Iranian diplomat Hussein Fereidoon (and Hassan Rouhani’s brother) that it had learned the hard way that its interests were ignored when it accommodated Washington, but they were less ignored whenever Iran defied US demands despite the heavy cost. In July, the UNSC adopted Resolution 1696 and then Resolution 1737 in December. In March 2007, it passed Resolution 1747 followed by Resolution 1803 the following year to impose new sanctions on Iran.12 In November 2007, the US National Intelligence Council issued Iran’s Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, a report that stated Iran had halted its clandestine nuclear activities. Washington, meanwhile, may have coordinated cyberattack plans with Israel on the Natanz nuclear site, under the code name Operation Olympic Games (or the Stuxnet attack)

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as Iran insisted on its right to enrichment despite US efforts to reach a compromise on the issue. In April 2009, after President Obama assumed his office, the United States said it would take part again in the P5+1, while the US Senate Banking Committee held hearings to impose financial and banking sanctions on Iran. In September, President Obama, along with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, announced that Iran was building a covert uranium enrichment facility near the religious seminary town of Qom, and that the Iranian government presented information about this Fordow site to the IAEA only years after it had started construction. Under the terms of a 2003 agreement, Iran was bound to inform the IAEA regarding its nuclear facilities. At the UN in New York in 2009, Ahmadinejad was visibly taken aback by the announcement and told reporters that Iran had informed the IAEA about wanting to construct a new site. The agency’s inspectors visited the site in 2009, two years after its initial construction according to Iran, but seven years after according to the IAEA. By October 2009, Iran agreed to facilitate IAEA inspections of its nuclear sites, and ship 70% of its Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) to Russia for enrichment to 20% grade levels. The uranium would then ship to France to process for fuel plate fabrication for medical isotopes that Iran needed. But Iran pulled back from the agreement by proposing a phased exchange of its LEU for fuel, and suggested that it take place on Iranian territory. The United States and the IAEA rejected the proposal over its inconsistency with the original agreement, and in December, the US Congress proceeded to draft the Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (RPSA) bill to halt Iran’s access to gasoline and petroleum products. In February 2010, the IAEA said there was evidence that Iran was producing nuclear warheads, and had advanced the military components of its nuclear program after 2004, despite US assessments that these activities had halted by 2003. In June 2010, the UNSC adopted Resolution 1929 to establish a Panel of Experts to decide that Iran would not acquire commercial uranium or produce nuclear materials and technology. In the same month, Iran’s nuclear facilities were hit by the Stuxnet computer worm. Despite the setbacks, Iran mastered the nuclear fuel cycle that year.13

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US-Iran Relations Before, During and After the Nuclear Deal The sections below are divided into three timeframes to review US-Iran ties, i.e., 2011–2012 (pre-nuclear talks), 2013–2016 (nuclear talks and implementation) and 2017–2021 (period after the agreement). Washington-Tehran Ties in 2011–2012 After several rounds of talks with Iran by the end of 2010, the Obama administration concluded that sanctions remained the best course of action to force Iran to scale down its nuclear program. In discussions with a senior Obama administration official, he informed this author that sanctions were necessary given that Ahmadinejad was behaving like a “loose cannon” and raising concerns in Washington.14 Back in Iran, Ahmadinejad was busy consolidating his power after an alleged vote rig to be reelected in 2009. Despite his attempts to engage with Washington, his political prospects were dimming by 2010 as a result of infighting among rival political factions. An Iranian government source informed this author that “too many interest groups were operating to run the nuclear file, and building elite consensus was difficult.”15 It would take the downing of an American Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle in December 2011, and the replication of the model to produce drones, to build elite consensus and confidence in Iran to engage in real talks with the United States, believing that Tehran’s show of force would be taken seriously by Washington.16 By then, the 2011 US National Security Estimate showed that Iran’s nuclear fuel program was in disarray, signaling that Washington did not need to compromise in its negotiations with Tehran. Yet, Iranian decision-makers calculated that the time for real talks had actually arrived because Washington was worn out by lengthy military campaigns, and certainly welcomed negotiating with Tehran. As a result, Iran played hardball to force the United States to compromise. In a meeting of the P5+1 in Baghdad in May 2012, Iran confidently refused demands to halt enriching uranium at 20% grade levels unless the sanctions regime eased, and said it would continue to restrict IAEA access to its nuclear sites. Meanwhile back in Tehran, the government assessed that Obama was serious in his outreach efforts, and the Iranian media was

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given state permission to build narratives that would encourage national support for a new round of nuclear talks by the summer of 2012.17 A key challenge, however, was to convince Iran’s Supreme Leader to agree to comprehensive talks with the United States. Iran’s leader had to reconcile the country’s anti-American worldview with the reality that it needed to engage with the world power. For nearly four decades since its revolution, Iran had resorted to certain narratives to shame the United States. The term ‘imperialism” (estekbar), for example, was borrowed from the Holy Quran to denounce US policies of intervention in Iran’s internal affairs. Fighting estekbar (estekbar setizi) and a world order based on it became a mantra for Iran’s leader. Iran’s aspirations to challenge the United States further demanded that it replaces a US world order with a new world inspired by Iran’s Islamic revolution. It was therefore necessary to divide the world into two forms. The first was the US-dominated world order. The second was a world dominated by the interests of oppressed nations such as Iran.18 Concerned that the United States had a hidden agenda to destroy Iran’s nuclear industry, and eager to expose the plot not by fighting Washington but by using the logic of diplomacy (manteq-e diplomacy) to bring world attention to Iran’s nuclear plight, the supreme leader demanded a deal that would publicly legitimize the Iranian enrichment program under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). He then reluctantly agreed that Tehran could hold talks but expressed hope that its outcome will expose the underlying imperial (estekbari) principles that shaped Washington’s policies. Such revelations could weaken the logic of oppressive (zalemaneh) sanctions and foil further efforts by Washington to destroy Iran’s standing in the world. Ayatollah Khamenei also reminded the Iranian negotiators to imagine that they were in a battlefield to neutralize so-called enemy plots and sanctions. Even Washington could not dismiss the fact that it too saw itself in a battlefield with Iran, given its long history of pursuing a so-called militarization diplomacy with Iran, according to then US negotiator William Burns. The Iranian leader’s brief conciliatory approach, despite a lack of trust in Washington, was famously termed a ‘heroic softening’ (gardesh-e ghahremananeh).19

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Washington-Tehran Ties in 2013–2016 Iran dismissed holding regional security talks with the United States in the course of the nuclear negotiations. Regional talks, from Tehran’s perspective, could scale back Iran’s defense capabilities and undermine its security in the Middle East. Furthermore, Tehran was unprepared to extend dialog to its GCC neighbors as part of the nuclear negotiations with the P5+1. It calculated that it did not need to depend on the GCC because the regional balance of power was working in Tehran’s favor if it was engaging in direct nuclear talks with Washington through the P5+1. More importantly, Iran feared that the GCC could make demands in the course of the talks, and discourage Washington from accommodating Iran’s regional positions. The US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman who stepped into the negotiations with Iran after the veteran diplomat William Burns conducted secret talks with Tehran admitted that a great deal of time was taken up in this period, briefing these US allies, and getting their support for talks that were designed only to address Iran’s nuclear program.20 In February 2013, in another show of force, Iran provocatively announced the discovery of new uranium mines, and said it would develop plans to build 16 nuclear power plants. In March, Iran’s Supreme Leader dispatched a representative to hold secret talks with the United States in Oman. At the time, the Iranian representatives did not even have state clearance to sit at the same table with US representatives, and the talks were delayed as Tehran scrambled for security clearances to enable its negotiators to travel to Oman. Nonetheless, according to Iranian negotiator Ali Akbar Salehi, progress was achieved during the first round of talks. By the second round of the negotiations, senior diplomat Ali Asqar Khaji made it clear that talks would proceed if the United States recognized Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment. Shortly after, Oman’s Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said sent a letter to Ahmadinejad, informing him that Washington recognized Iran’s right to enrichment. The letter was received reluctantly by Tehran, where pervasive lack of faith in the outcome of the negotiations dampened preparations to draw up a roadmap for talks. The negotiations halted briefly during President Obama’s reelection campaign, which Tehran assessed was not to its advantage given that Washington was more receptive to Iranian positions in the pre-election period. They halted again, during Iran’s presidential race in June 2013. When Tehran returned to the talks, it discovered much to its dismay that US positions had hardened.21

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Based on my conversation with a key member of the US delegation at the talks, no real progress was achieved through the early summer of 2013. President Obama signed an executive order authorizing more sanctions on financial transactions with Iran in July 2013, after the US Congress approved legislation to limit Iran’s energy exports earlier in May, calculating that these moves would prompt the next Iranian president to engage in serious talks. Once Rouhani was elected into office over the summer period, he immediately signaled intentions to embrace talks after being briefed about the level and speed at which the secret talks had progressed before President Obama’s reelection. Iran’s nuclear file was also transferred from the Supreme National Security Council, which handled the nuclear talks under Ahmadinejad, to the Office of Iran’s President and the Foreign Ministry, both of which lacked sufficient experience to lead the nuclear talks with the United States.22 Hesamuldin Ashna, an advisor to the president, told this author in 2014 that Iran’s new foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, was seen by presidential candidates in Iran’s latest race as the right choice to lead the Foreign Ministry and the nuclear negotiations in light of his prior experience serving as Iran’s representative at the UN in New York. But Ashna’s remarks carried an unstated undertone of concern about whether Zarif was really the right choice for the task of leading the nuclear talks. Zarif may not have been the best candidate for the job given that he quickly became a divisive figure in Iran, and it may have been that the position of foreign minister was informally first offered to other candidates including Salehi who turned it down. Moreover, Zarif had hyped the threat of a possible US attack on Iran at least since 2003 to urge Tehran to engage in nuclear talks, which may have had the reverse effect of accelerating the Iranian nuclear program especially after the US invasion of Iraq. Zarif’s analysis of Washington’s intents was bound to mislead Iran’s decision-makers who were often at a loss to understand US policy motives clearly given the absence of bilateral diplomatic relations between Washington and Tehran. As Zarif confidently passed on his erroneous policy pronouncements in 2003–2004, in Washington most senior American government officials including the late Richard Holbrooke told this author that they were certain this attack would not take place. In the course of the nuclear talks in 2013 and onward, Zarif’s judgments were repeatedly questioned inside Iran where observers watched his penchant for hyping events with concern. Moreover, his team was suspected of distorting translations of the final text of the JCPOA when

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it arrived in 2015, to mislead Iranian critics of the deal. Zarif himself delivered contradictory remarks about the language of the deal which he was forced to backtrack, raising further concerns among Iranian hardliners that he and Rouhani were quietly corroborating with the United States in the hope to receive guarantees of Washington’s support if they were to remain key figureheads in Iranian politics. In this author’s early comparisons of the English and Farsi texts of the JCPOA and more importantly statements issued by Zarif in the course of the finalization of the deal versus statements issued in the West, some clear examples of mistranslation and misinterpretation were evident, as were frequent misreading of the terms of the agreement by Iranian researchers working in government. But Zarif’s team promised to deliver a clear and concise final text of the agreement. Even so, six years after the conclusion of the JCPOA, Zarif once again admitted to acts of omission on his part in interpreting the language of the deal. For example, Iran’s Foreign Minister had earlier insisted that the very important word “suspension”—in reference to Iran’s nuclear activities—was never used in the text of the JCPOA, but would admit in 2021 that the word was included four times in the annexes of the text, but said he was unaware of the additions.23 Another Iranian diplomat, Abbas Araghchi, who was asked to help lead the nuclear talks given his past expertise with negotiations and even-keeled temperament also spoke to this author in New York in 2013, revealing Iran’s relative unfamiliarity with how the US government functioned. Araghchi told this author that talks with the United States would likely succeed, based on Tehran’s calculation that President Obama needed a foreign policy victory given his other failures in the Middle East to fix conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Araghchi’s evident optimism overlooked the fact, which I politely pointed out in the conversation, that the US Congress would need to step in to uphold any nuclear agreement with Iran in the long haul. Iran’s top nuclear negotiator replied, half incredulously, that US democrats would be able to preserve a nuclear deal.24 Under Rouhani, Tehran again erroneously calculated that the nuclear talks presented an opportunity to improve ties with the United States. Across the United States, however, most businesses and politicians with whom this author spoke did not see a long-term prospect of success with Iran even after the conclusion of the JCPOA. But establishing better ties with Washington was important to Tehran, and it had to believe that it could happen if it aimed to balance its relations with the world powers.

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In addition, Tehran wanted to end attempts once and for all by Europe to sabotage Iranian efforts to work out its problems with Washington directly rather than through European intermediaries. That prospect of Tehran working directly with Washington could undermine European security and economic interests in Iran, if American diplomats and companies entered Iranian policy circles and markets, and would prevent Britain, France and Germany from using their access to Iran to leverage the United States in the context of their bilateral and multilateral relations. Mindful of these realities, President Rouhani frequently sent a public message aimed at President Obama warning that the nuclear dispute should be resolved quicker, hoping to enable normalized ties between Washington and Tehran. In addition, Iran’s president needed a deal to salvage his role as a credible leader as he came under increased attack by hardliners for reaching out to Washington. The Supreme Leader, for example, who initially agreed to a short round of talks with the United States, gave Iran’s president a brief timeframe to show that the negotiations could work but laid out numerous red lines inhibiting the normalization of ties with Washington. When Rouhani failed to meet his goals because he had to adhere to the red lines, he was advised by the leader to give up and place his faith in God’s hands especially if he believed that he could not deliver a good and lasting deal while sticking to the red lines.25 Despite these setbacks, in October and November 2013, Iran and the P5+1 held talks to reach an agreement on a Joint Plan of Action. But Tehran and the IAEA failed to reach a comprehensive agreement for the verification of the peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program. The harshest and most intrusive sanctions against Iran remained in place, until the country complied with more rigorous inspections, in return for very modest sanctions relief. Washington demanded access to Iran’s uranium mines and mills and centrifuge production and storage facilities to monitor the country’s nuclear supply chain. In January 2014, Iran agreed to a Joint Plan of Action to expand further cooperation with the IAEA. The P5+1 extended the talks while several expert-level meetings were held to uphold a final deal. The United States insisted that the time had arrived to make difficult choices. Iran’s negotiators, however, believed that Washington was over-bearing by making too many demands, including demanding Iran to allow the IAEA daily access to declared Iranian nuclear facilities.26

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As a compromise, the Obama administration signaled that Iran could expect to expand its regional influence by concluding a nuclear deal. Simultaneously and to appease America’s Arab allies, President Obama sought tougher sanctions on Iranian allies including Hezbollah, which sent a signal to Tehran that hostilities in the region with the United States could persist even with a nuclear deal in place. But a deal, rather than a no deal, seemed a good option if it helped lift Iran out of relative diplomatic isolation. As the negotiations dragged on, and disagreements with Washington persisted about the region, in Tehran experts concluded that staying on course to reach a limited nuclear agreement was a reasonable goal, as long as Iran gave up the expectation to improve US-Iran relations. They also concluded that US hostilities toward Tehran would persist, but that should not prevent a final agreement.27 Iran’s economy meanwhile shrank under sanctions by showing negative growth rates in March 2014, pushing Rouhani’s government to welcome some sanctions relief despite internal criticism by the hardliners for not asking for a full and permanent removal of all sanctions. In response, Rouhani supporters lashed out at hardliners for bringing on the sanctions in the first place. Then, oil prices fell from US$100.75 per barrel in August to US$45.46 the following year. In response, Rouhani insisted that a nuclear deal would bring political and economic capital to Iran. But Iran’s hardline factions remained pessimistic about a deal especially when President Obama allowed the US Congress in May 2015 to vote on an eventual end to sanctions and to back a nuclear agreement, the result of which he promised to veto if legislation emerged to block the deal. Under the text of the final nuclear deal revealed in July 2015, the United States committed to lifting all nuclear-related sanctions on Iran. But other US sanctions remained in place that targeted Iran’s militarization programs, support for terrorism and human rights violations. Though Washington committed itself to lifting sanctions on Iran’s energy exports, it maintained restrictions on financial transactions with Iran.28 In September, democrats and republicans in Congress debated a resolution of disapproval on the Iran nuclear deal, which failed to gain a majority, but raised concerns in Tehran about the deal’s enforcement. Facing mounting pressures by hardliners, and to sell the agreement at home, Rouhani stressed in his first press interview following the JCPOA that Iran’s image was changing for the better as a peace-loving nation because of a deal.29 Zarif called the agreement a balanced text, in which neither side was able to get everything it wanted, but they collectively

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contributed to advancing world peace and stability. He also insisted that this win-win agreement meant that Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment was finally recognized by the United States.30 But if the JCPOA was partly designed to ensure Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment, in reality the NPT granted Iran that right implicitly despite the JCPOA. Rouhani and Zarif also overplayed their achievements in the nuclear talks, and insisted that western companies were ready to offer big investments to Iran, when in reality the West held deep reservations about investing in Iran as long as Washington did not commit to the removal of sanctions that could ease financial transactions with Iran in the long haul. Zarif and Rouhani, however, blamed the lack of western commitment to invest in Iran on the country’s hardliners and their strong anti-western positions.31 In the end, policy experts in Iran frequently challenged the positive assessments offered by the Rouhani team about the prospects of the nuclear deal, and argued that Iran should not have compromised its nuclear program when clearly it was Washington that needed a deal to stop Iran’s rapid nuclear advancement. The former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and other advisors close to the Supreme Leader said Iran did not negotiate from a position of strength, but from a position of need. This enabled the United States to negotiate from a position of strength, and keep many sanctions in place after the deal. Furthermore, the US Congress could vote for more sanctions at any point. Iran’s Supreme Leader stressed that it was wrong to have an optimistic view about the deal, because the end-game for the United States was clearly to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.32 The most radical political factions in Iran believed that the JCPOA would make Iran weaker over time and pave the way for the United States to attack the country, just as it had attacked Iraq and Libya after the two countries made security compromises with the West and the United Nations by opening up their respective chemical and nuclear weapons programs to international inspections, before the United States led coalitions to attack Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.33 On January 16, 2016, the IAEA verified Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA, which led to Implementation Day to enforce the terms of the deal. In a speech delivered to mark the day, President Obama argued the JCPOA ensured that Iran’s nuclear program remained peaceful. Under the terms of the agreement, Iran shipped 25,000 pounds of enriched uranium out of the country, removed or dismantled two-thirds of its centrifuges, removed the calandria from its heavy water nuclear reactor

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and replaced it with concrete, and provided access to its nuclear facilities and supply chain. Obama outlined a long list of sanctions that stayed in place on Iran’s missile technologies and conventional weapons, acts of sponsoring state terror, ballistic missile program, human rights violation and destabilizing regional activities.34 President Obama further believed that the deal would lead to the improvement of Iran’s relations with its Arab neighbors. However, because the JCPOA did not lead to the normalization of TehranWashington ties, Iran-Arab tensions persisted. Therefore, the expectation by President Obama that the JCPOA should desecuritize some of the tensions with Iran in the Persian Gulf region, and over its nuclear and military programs, was unreasonable as long as US-Iranian hostilities persisted. Taken in this light, the JCPOA was not a good deal from a security perspective, and it failed to advance the stability that international relations security theories would expect from multilateral non-proliferation agreements such as the JCPOA.35 Voices in Tehran stepped up criticism of the deal for its lack of enforcement, given that US sanctions prevented a great many activities, while the US Congress stepped up its pressures on Obama to abandon the deal and keep tougher sanctions in place. In December 2016, President Obama refused to sign a 10-year renewal of sanctions against Iran, in an effort to prevent Congress from enforcing sanctions. Tehran filed a complaint with the United Nations about the renewal, and said it will build nuclear-powered ships if JCPOA terms were violated by the US Congress.36 Despite subsequent efforts by the Obama administration to ensure sanctions relief under the terms of the JCPOA, most American and European companies decided against doing business in Iran because Washington was unlikely to lift a host of primary sanctions that banned entities linked to US companies from trading with Iran. Nonetheless, the Rouhani government celebrated the deal’s tangible achievements, including the authorization for the release by the United States and the European Union of over US$100 billion in Iran’s frozen assets abroad, and the removal of secondary sanctions by Washington on Iran’s oil sector. But US-led financial sanctions prevented the full implementation of banking arrangements with Iran, and caused hurdles in Iran’s ability to receive oil revenues.37 In light of these events, critics of the JCPOA in Tehran argued that tying Iran’s economy to the outcome of the nuclear deal was a nonstarter, given the broad scale of US sanctions. But Tehran ultimately

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calculated that the deal could enable it to strengthen Iran’s military capabilities. For example, UNSC Resolution 2231 paved the way for a case-by-case monitoring of Iran’s military advancements, especially activities that could have dual purposes to develop nuclear weapons. It also banned all arms and related materials transfers to or from Iran until October 18, 2021. Meanwhile, Iran would commit to not use goods and technology that could contribute to the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems through October 18, 2023. However, states could participate in the supply of major conventional arms to Iran as defined by the UN Register of Conventional Weapons, as well as related components and services, if the UNSC offered a case-by-case approval through October 18, 2021, after which this restriction was lifted. Before the finalization of the JCPOA, Iran faced hurdles finding spare parts to fix its existing military equipment. Internal assessments indicated that the air force required spare parts to fix 80% of its fleet. Some 20% of the force’s airplanes were non-operational because of lack of spare parts. Iran expected Russia and China to step in to offer spare parts after the JCPOA. Russia indeed completed the delivery of S-300 air defense missiles to Iran in October 2016. As a result of the lifting of partial sanctions and the unfreezing of Iranian assets, Iran’s military budget allocation also further increased by 32% after the nuclear deal compared to nearly 10% each year in the two years preceding the JCPOA. Combined with Iranian ability to export arms with fewer constraints following the deal, this increased Iran’s military budget by several billion dollars, enabled the country to test new missiles including the medium-range ballistic Emad missile and expand the scope of its military maneuvers. The removal of Iranian companies and individuals from sanctions in the final JCPOA text was instrumental to helping Iran reach foreign markets for military purposes. As a result, Iran bought military arms and equipment and engaged in joint military projects with other foreign countries. Some delisted Iranian companies and individuals were directly linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Iran’s Defense Ministry, including Qasem Soleimani although Washington claimed the name did not refer to the Quds Force commander but another individual by his name.38 Ultimately, the JCPOA proved to Iran that it could gain by talking with the United States, and partially neutralize some sanctions, even if such talks led to temporary deals or deals that were not fully enforceable.

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Washington-Tehran Ties in 2017–2021 In January 2017, the Trump administration banned citizens of Iran from entering the United States for 90 days. By October, it refused to certify Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal required every 90 days under the Congressional Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) of 2015. The measure enabled Congress to reinstate sanctions suspended or waived under the nuclear deal. Earlier in February, the US Department of the Treasury sanctioned Iranian individuals and entities linked with Iran’s ballistic missile program. In the following months and years, the United States passed a series of other sanctions against Iran and some of its senior officials. In addition, Washington increased counter-terrorism coordination with Iran’s Arab neighbors, encouraged the setting up of a Saudi-led Arab military coalition to contain Iran and vowed not to certify Iranian compliance with the JCPOA that could ease trade with Iran. In response, Iran accelerated its rocket launch delivery systems including for space satellites.39 In May 2018, President Trump refused to certify the JCPOA and withdrew the United States from the deal, but offered for the last time extensions and sanctions exemptions to a number of countries trading with Iran. In 2019, Washington stopped offering waivers, which brought Iranian oil exports to a near standstill, although Iran could still produce and sell about half a million barrels of oil daily. Tehran argued that the measure to end waivers was in violation of the terms of the JCPOA, and gave Iran the right to resume nuclear activities outside the agreed framework in the deal. The United States argued that since it left the deal and was no longer a party to it, its action did not violate any JCPOA terms, which meant Iran should continue to comply with the nuclear deal. In conversations with this author in 2017–2019, advisors to President Donald J. Trump insisted that they aimed to engage in talks with Iran to build a new nuclear deal, but were not hopeful that such a deal could be had. As a result, Washington imposed a longer list of sanctions on Iran against hundreds of Iranian individuals, entities and organizations. The August 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) was signed into law by the US president, imposing sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction programs, constraining the transfer of military equipment to Iran and restricting the activities of the Iranian revolutionary guards. In response, Tehran rejected US appeal for new talks, by calculating that it will need to yield to a

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long list of US demands in those talks that could harm Iran’s regime security in the long haul. Some early demands before they were withdrawn by Washington would lead Tehran to pull out forces from across the Middle East. As a result, Iran insisted that it was in no rush to invite the US back to a deal, and embarked on a so-called maximum resistance policy against President Trump’s ‘maximum pressure policy.’ Tehran believed this would buy time until a new US administration came to office, and would fervently believe the prospect of Trump leaving office after a first term could happen, especially after the outbreak of the global pandemic and the subsequent weakening of the Trump administration due to delays in formulating adequate responses to the pandemic and the rise of domestic tensions in the United States.40 In February 2019, Washington held a Middle East conference in the Polish capital of Warsaw that coincided with the 40th anniversary of Iran’s revolution. The conference was an anti-Iran gathering, because advisors to President Trump met with Iranian opposition figures on the sidelines. In April, the Trump administration designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. In May, it gradually ended offering final waivers to sanctions that allowed a number of countries to purchase Iranian oil, and announced the deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and a bomber task force to the Persian Gulf. If these measures had the intention of forcing Tehran to capitulate to renewed nuclear talks, they had the opposite effect. Iran announced a 60-day moratorium to reduce its commitments under the nuclear deal, resumed uranium enrichment exceeding 3.6% enrichment cap specified in the deal, and said it will leave the JCPOA unless it resumed trade. Over the summer, several sophisticated attacks on Saudi tankers and pipelines attributed to Iran’s IRGC forces suggested that regional tensions could rise. In addition, the IAEA reported that some of Iran’s nuclear activities exceeded the terms of the JCPOA, including breaking mandates on its heavy water stockpile, centrifuge operations, and research and development activities. In June, Iran downed an RQ-4A Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in the Persian Gulf. The US response, targeted strikes on sites related to the downing, was measured so as not to provoke a war. The following month, Washington sanctioned Zarif who hinted that Iran could negotiate its missile program, and offered to seek parliamentary ratification for the IAEA Additional Protocol for the verification of nuclear safeguards, in return for the lifting of sanctions. Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran was to ratify the protocol by 2023. Washington

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rejected Zarif’s other proposals to lift sanctions in return for enhanced inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites, and said it would engage in talks only if they were authorized by the Supreme Leader.41 Tehran subsequently issued a statement saying that its missile program was nonnegotiable.42 As the mindset for resuming talks with the United States lost currency in Iran, the country strictly adhered to the Supreme Leader’s resistance (mogavemati) policies to reduce commitments to the nuclear deal although it held nuclear talks with the remaining parties to the JCPOA in Vienna in July 2019. Iran was keen not to compromise the deal’s ‘sunset provisions’ which by default served as a countdown to Iranian ability to advance its nuclear program.43 Washington responded by sanctioning Iran’s Central Bank in September 2019. Iran’s banking networks came under additional pressure to comply with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) regulations, set up by the industrial nations to ensure that countries adhered to antimoney laundering and counter-terrorist financing regulations. Iran was unable to build internal consensus to adhere to the regulations which made the country a High-Risk Jurisdiction Subject, and hindered the Central Bank’s international financial engagements. By October 2021, Iran’s Interior Minister and former IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi suggested that Iran would not adhere to FATF regulations. By December 2019, Iran also stepped up attacks on US strongholds in Iraq, aided by Iranian allies, including near Kirkuk in northern Iraq, which led to retaliatory US strikes on the Iranian-backed Iraqi armed group Kata’ib Hezbollah. The ensuing conflict in Iraq led to the gradual repositioning of US military deployments in the country, from small to larger bases, and the deployment of Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile systems. When public protests broke out in Iraq calling for the US withdrawal of its forces, as well as the halting of Iranian meddling in Iraq, rioters attacked the US Embassy in Baghdad. The United States proceeded to order the killing of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soliemani in Iraq on January 2, 2020. The assassination pushed Tehran to accelerate its nuclear enrichment program to 60% purity by the following year, and the move was endorsed by Iran’s Supreme Leader.44 Earlier, Iran’s parliament passed a bill designating as terrorist organizations the US military and the Pentagon. On November 27, 2020, a top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Mahabadi, was assassinated in Iran. In December, Iran’s parliament passed the Strategic Action to Annul Sanctions and Defend the Iranian Nation’s Interests

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bill, to lay out conditions for reviving the nuclear talks. The legislation encouraged the use of advanced 1000 IR-2m centrifuges for enrichment purposes. Rouhani, meanwhile, claimed that the bill prevented the talks to advance with the United States which was prepared to lift sanctions. But most political pundits in Iran dismissed Rouhani’s claims and overpromises, which he repeatedly had failed to show proof of or deliver, while masterfully distracting his political rivals by placing the blame on them for the slow progress in talks. In 2020–2021, Tehran developed advanced centrifuges, resumed heavy water production in Arak, enriched uranium at the Fordow site, constructed a centrifuge production center in Natanz which was targeted through sabotage attacks blamed on Israel, passed a law demanding further enrichment in Fordow and fabricated enriched uranium metal while informing the IAEA of three stages to advance the fabrication in order to produce higher quality nuclear fuel. Iran was likely driven in these actions by a desire to seek revenge, to showcase its ability to produce fuel at higher grade levels of 40–60% and to prove that its scientific advancements in the nuclear arena could not be contained.45 On February 23, 2021, Iran suspended the implementation of the Additional Protocol and all supplementary inspection provisions by the IAEA. In an interview, Iran’s former Minister of Intelligence Mahmoud Alavi implied that the Supreme Leader’s nuclear fatwa was framed in language to allow the country to seek nuclear weapons if it came under pressure, while the leader issued statements allowing enrichment at 20–60% grade levels. Iran hoped that these statements and positions might pressure Washington to lift sanctions, but to strike a conciliatory tone, it may have allowed the Iranian media to attack the minister for making the fatwa comment.46 After assuming office in 2021, President Biden asked Iran to stop violating the JCPOA through advanced levels of enrichment. Rouhani agreed to renewed talks in Vienna, but hardliners in Tehran rejected a proposal for a step-by-step removal of sanctions and warned that the new US president would continue the Trump era policies to pressure Iran. Moreover, they felt confident that as long as democrats and republicans were divided over Iran, the United States would get weaker in managing the Iranian challenge while Tehran would get stronger confusing the United States about the right course of action. Washington’s sanctions and threats of military intervention in this context appeared to amount to a lack of real policy rather than a methodic engagement with Tehran, as did frequent urging in Washington’s policy centers about the need to

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expand the framework of the JCPOA talks to include discussions over Iran’s military and security programs each time the JCPOA talks lapsed. To test that the United States would revive the nuclear deal, the hardliners made maximalist demands, including holding direct talks with Washington only after it removed all sanctions and offered compensations for financial damages the sanctions had caused, by arguing that Iran lost US$170 million daily due to sanctions.47 The Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Hossein Bagheri, opposed holding direct talks with the United States because its hostility toward Iran would never cease. Rouhani and Zarif, who hoped to have sanctions removed before they left office, were accused of being intoxicated by the West, and placing their trust in the outcome of talks with the Biden team. But to appear conciliatory toward the hardliners, Zarif charged the Biden administration of pursuing the Trump era maximum pressure policy.48 President Biden, however, continued to welcome the meeting of the JCPOA Joint Commission to discuss methods to advance the nuclear deal including the possible return of the United States to the agreement in early April 2021. On April 7th, the Joint Commission resumed its work in Vienna.49 Araghchi announced that Iran would not hold direct or indirect talks with the United States, but only with the P4+1 group (Russia, China, Britain, France plus Germany), and that Iran’s demand was straightforward, that the United States should withdraw all sanctions including those under CAATSA.50 Iran’s IR-9 centrifuge mechanical tests started on the same day as the Vienna talks on April 10th, to mark the Iranian National Day for Nuclear Technology. The IAEA reported a day earlier that Iran had violated its commitments under the JCPOA.51 Iran restricted IAEA access to its nuclear sites within the terms of the safeguard agreement it had with the agency, but offered temporary extensions to allow for limited verifications to take place. Those inspections stopped as Tehran prepared to hand over power to a new government led by Ebrahim Raisi, who was sanctioned by the United States, after which time Iran could return to the nuclear talks by September. Before the suspension of the sixth round of the Vienna talks in June 2021, which took place after Raisi’s election but before he assumed office in August, diplomats said progress was made on a number of technical issues, but that it was time for governments involved in the negotiations to make hard political choices to build common language on a few divisive issues. One such choice involved the quick release of Iran’s revenues in the future

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that would be derived from oil sold before the use of snap back mechanism, which the parties were unable to agree on. Iran further demanded the removal of all Trump era sanctions, whereas Washington maintained that only sanctions harming the implementation of the JCPOA should be lifted. From Iran’s point of view, this meant that while Iran maintained that all sanctions imposed after the US withdrawal from the JCPOA should be lifted, Washington stressed that only those Trump era sanctions that barred Iran’s access to economic resources derived through the framework of the JCPOA should be cancelled. As a result, Tehran continued to insist that the JCPOA should be revived in its entirety without additional preconditions, aiming to lift JCPOA-related sanctions as a first step, and all other sanctions through follow-up measures.52 Furthermore, the talks could advance from Iran’s point of view if the United States also agreed to prisoner exchanges and the unfreezing of Iranian assets, offered guarantees that it would not break its commitments under a newly negotiated term, and removed most sanctions directly linked to Iran’s nuclear program as well as sanctions against Iran’s toptier leadership. Part of the demands was based on Zarif’s latest 262-page report to Iran’s parliament, which concluded that a new agreement with the United States could lead to the removal of sanctions outlined in the JCPOA. In addition, Zarif called for resolving the nuclear file through talks with the EU3 and the United States before Iran’s presidential elections took place, during which time other major powers worked hard to ensure that the United States would either return to the JCPOA or ensure the consistent implementation of newly agreed nuclear terms that could lead to Iran resuming its JCPOA commitments.53 Iran’s Supreme Leader, however, argued that the United States remained hostile in the Vienna talks held before Iran’s elections, by making promises to lift the sanctions but failing to deliver its words and by laying out terms and conditions on a host of issues related to Iran’s regional policies and missile program. Hardliners close to the leader including an adviser, Gholam Hossein Hadad Adel, maintained that the United States kept the sanctions in place so Rouhani could build elite consensus to limit Iran’s nuclear activities, and to ensure that he would be replaced by a candidate who would be equally sympathetic to Washington when Iran held its presidential race in June 2021. Hadad Adel termed this as US meddling in Iranian elections, and warned Tehran to safeguard the race from foreign interference. In the course of the ensuing nuclear talks, Tehran categorically rejected discussing its missile program

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as part of a larger deal with Washington, an idea labeled by the media in Iran as the JCPOA-plus. Iran’s supreme leader added his voice to groups opposed to Rouhani, by saying that he was unimpressed by the performance of Iran’s nuclear negotiators who served the president, and the real lesson Rouhani left behind was to prove that Iran would face setbacks by counting on the outcome of the talks with the West, and face success if it gave up on western powers once and for all.54 But the new US administration was eager to have an aspirational deal that could also lead to prisoner exchanges, the humanitarian-based trade with Iran and the reduction of tensions between Iran and some of its Arab neighbors including Saudi Arabia. The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked for longer and more permanent agreements with Iran. National Security Advisor Jacob Sullivan said that re-entry into a nuclear deal would involve a discussion about Iran’s ballistic missile program. Washington further reiterated that it was committed to diplomacy with Iran, but it had other options if talks failed, while Israeli officials stepped up threats about the near eventuality of a military strike against Iranian nuclear sites. By then, Tehran was exploring different approaches to making a socalled hard return to the nuclear deal, mindful of the need to receive guarantees that it would not face more damages to its economy or nuclear sites moving forward. It had decided, as well, that it would not tie talks about prisoner exchanges to the outcome of the nuclear talks despite mixed messages on this front by both Iran and the United States, and would halt demands for the unfreezing of US$7 billion in frozen Iranian assets which the Biden team had declined. The US negotiating team in Vienna was split over whether to engage in talks given Iran’s delay tactics and efforts to buy time, and Tehran’s refusal to build on six previous rounds of nuclear talks held in Vienna in 2021. Splits among US negotiators may have also occurred over whether to negotiate to revive the JCPOA or to build a different agreement, disregarding the fact that Tehran had clearly rejected having a different agreement.55 But as a compromise, Washington lifted sanctions on two Iranian suppliers of military-grade goods, the Mammut Industrial Group and Mammut Diesel. However, Tehran continued to delay a ‘hard return’ to the nuclear talks while stressing that it would demand an equal give and take. It also confirmed that it would return to Vienna after preparing texts for the agenda for future talks, and would never halt negotiations.

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But according to Raisi’s Chief of Staff and Iran’s First Vice President, Mohammad Mokhber Dezfuli (who was also sanctioned while simultaneously leading talks with Oman which served as a go-between for Tehran and Washington), it was unlikely that the nuclear talks would go far because Iran could no longer afford to pin hope on foreigners to fix its problems, nor could it ever come to terms with accepting a role for global hegemonic powers such as the United States.56 His remarks pointed to the untold truth that as long as Iran challenged what Stephen M. Walt would term “the foreign policy of American primacy,” the country’s elite felt they had to battle a hegemon.57 Strategically, it implied that Iran would attempt to checkmate Washington to avoid being checkmated itself during the nuclear talks, and thus diminish prospects for a gradual strategic alignment of interests between the two capitals. The republican influence over the US Congress aiming to punish Iran, and the uncertain prospects of future midterm US Congressional elections in 2022, seemed to further diminish Tehran’s trust in the outcome of a deal with Washington. As of the time of this writing at the end of 2021, Tehran continued to insist on seeing concrete results through talks, such as the lifting of sanctions given its need for quick economic relief, without significantly compromising the Iranian defense and nuclear programs. In addition, Tehran refused to hold direct informal talks with US representatives in Vienna, although it hinted it might and agreed to participate in two more rounds of negotiations within the framework of the P4+1 in late November 2021 and in January 2022. In November 2021, the Iranian delegation arrived in Vienna to discuss what it termed as ‘drafts’ reviewed in the course of the six previous rounds of talks held during the spring and summer in the Austrian capital. Tehran proceeded to submit two final drafts for negotiations, rejected offers of a temporary deal that would lift some sanctions in exchange for a halt in Iranian enrichment activities, and stressed that it would consider speaking to the United States to build a good deal without surrendering to its archenemy. Washington and Tehran also remained open to exchanges to coordinate the activities of the JCPOA Joint Commission, and brought in teams of nuclear, banking and sanctions experts to help build a deal. Finally, they delivered non-papers that described their respective positions in these talks, according to Iran’s Foreign Minister Hussein Amirabdollahian, who also said that the United States was all talk and no action when it came to building trust with Iran. A few minor steps that

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Washington took to build the trust, but which Tehran deemed insufficient without long-term guarantees of US commitment to the nuclear deal, included briefly enabling the sale of Iranian oil within the span of a long day (considered to constitute 48 hours, given time differences between Washington and Tehran) and the processing of the financial transaction.58 Amirabdollahian, however, argued that Washington could take additional practical steps to show that it was committed to reaching a deal, including the unfreezing of billions of dollars of Iran’s oil revenues or the issuance of presidential executive orders to remove some sanctions.59 The measures could help partially alleviate Iran’s financial troubles, and help it buy time to continue the nuclear talks. Iran received word that some of its frozen assets would be released, and said it would return to the Vienna talks if Washington offered responses to Iranian suggestions to help break the impasse in the negotiations. Disagreements between Washington and Tehran, however, persisted over whether the IRGC would be delisted in its entirety or even partially as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under US laws, including section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act of April 2019 and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

Conclusion Excruciating talks led by the world powers and the IAEA to get Iran to return to Vienna over the summer and fall of 2021 were a symptom of widespread mistrust between Washington and Tehran. Prevailing concerns in Iran about real US intentions, which Tehran presumed involved regime change regardless of which administration was in power in Washington, barred the Iranians from appreciating the efforts led by the Biden administration to scale back America’s involvement in the Middle East in part by fixing problems with Iran. While the desire to rebuild a nuclear deal did exist in Washington and Tehran, there was no indication that Iran saw a dire need for negotiating with the United States. Meanwhile, the Biden team viewed the JCPOA as a benchmark to contain Iran’s nuclear aspirations. But Iran needed guarantees that sanctions would be lifted, including those unrelated to the nuclear program to help it overcome America’s institutional influence over global banking and financial transactions. Short of an agreement, the United States could reimpose sanctions including non-nuclear-related sanctions and executive orders in place to punish Tehran.

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Unsurprisingly, Iran’s underlying strategic antagonism toward the United States persisted. But while Iran did not envision a détente in its ties with the United States, it planned to reduce the cost of controlling US antagonism. One other important goal was the end-game to create a world in which US power was reduced and Iranian power pronounced. By remaining open to the nuclear talks, Tehran could achieve these goals. It could avoid being driven into a trap hole defined by direct conflict with the United States, and avoid being checkmated over its nuclear program by the United States while advancing the program until a better deal arrived.

Notes 1. “Shaterzadeh: Through Foreign Relations, More Than 400 Billion Dollars of Wealth Is Produced,” Mehr News Agency, Tir 21, 1399, https://www.mehrnews.com/news/4970005/%D8%B4%D8%A7%D8% B7%D8%B1%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%AF%D9%87-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8% B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8% AC%DB%8C-%D8%A8%DB%8C%D8%B4-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%DB%B4% D9%A0%D9%A0-%D9%85%DB%8C%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%B1% D8%AF%D8%AF%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%AB%D8%B1%D9%88% D8%AA-%D8%AA%D9%88%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D9%85%DB% 8C-%D8%B4%D9%88%D8%AF. 2. “My Administration Will Respect JCPOA, Says Presidential Hopeful,” Tehran Times, May 8, 2021, https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/460 726/My-administration-will-respect-JCPOA-says-presidential-hopeful. 3. See “Narratives of Hajizadeh About Year 96 Warning by IRGC to Rouhani; Qasem Soleimani Said: ‘Do You Want to be Like Ahmadinejad?’” BBC Farsi, January 12, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/ persian/iran-59962592. 4. This analysis is based on the author’s interviews with Iran’s government officials, and Iranian clerics close to the government, about the different schools that shape the country’s foreign policy; see also conversations with Musa Hagghani, “Did the Islamic Republic Lie to the People About the Pahlavi Regime?” Mashregh News, Bahman 30, 1393, https:// www.mashreghnews.ir/news/390804/%D8%A2%DB%8C%D8%A7-%D8% AC%D9%85%D9%87%D9%88%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9% 84%D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C-%D8%AF%D8%B1%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8% B1%D9%87-%D8%B1%DA%98%DB%8C%D9%85-%D9%BE%D9%87%D9% 84%D9%88%DB%8C-%D8%A8%D9%87-%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%AF%D9% 85-%D8%AF%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%BA-%DA%AF%D9%81%D8%AA.

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5. For the impact of the balance of power on Iran’s regional policies, see Banafsheh Keynoush, Saudi Arabia and Iran: Friends or Foes? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)—and Iran’s Interregional Dynamics in the Near East (New York: Peter Lang, 2021); for sub-state diplomacy see Elin Royles, “Sub-State Diplomacy: Understanding the International Opportunity Structures,” Journal of Regional and Federal Studies, Volume 27, No. 4 (2017): 393–416; for the concept of para-diplomacy see Iñaki Aguirre, “Making Sense of Paradiplomacy? An Intertextual Enquiry About a Concept in Search of a Definition,” Regional and Federal Studies, Volume 9, No. 1 (December 1999): 185–209. 6. For the role of unlimited aspirations in security studies, see John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy (New York: Penguin Press, 2017); for the impact of the balance of power on American primacy see Stephen W. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy (New York: Harvard University Press/W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 29–60. 7. See, for example, Morgan Colleau, “Iran’s Janus-Faced US Policy: The Rouhani Administration Between Continuity and Change, Opportunity and Constraint,” in Iran in the World: President Rouhani’s Foreign Policy, eds. Shahram Akbarzadeh et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 33–35. 8. See Flynt Leverett, “The Iranian Nuclear Issue, the End of the American Century, and the Future of the International Order,” Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs, Volume 2, No. 2 (2013): 240– 271, https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1062&con text=jlia. 9. Mustafa Ki.baro˘glu, “Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions from a Historical Perspective and the Attitude of the West,” Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 43, No. 2 (March 2007): 223–245, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4284538. 10. Seyyed Hesamuldin Yasini, Elnaz Nikseresht, “Iran’s Nuclear Strategy under Second Phalavi Era from a Realist Perspective,” Faslnameh Khareji, Volume 16, No. 62 (Spring 1396): 133–189, http://www.hfrjournal.ir/ article_74200_b6d4173f2d17193a4da3fc4c84cba045.pdf; “Timeline of Iran Nuclear Program,” Tasnim News Agency, Aban 16, 1392, https:// www.tasnimnews.com/fa/news/1392/08/16/146990/%DA%AF%D8% A7%D9%87-%D8%B4%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D9% 86%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%87-%D9%87%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%87-%D8% A7%DB%8C-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86; “Timeline of Iran Nuclear Program Before Revolution,” DW, September 12, 2012,

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11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

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https://www.dw.com/fa-ir/%DA%AF%D8%A7%D9%87%D8%B4%D9% 85%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%85%D9% 87-%D9%87%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%A7% DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%BE%DB%8C%D8%B4-%D8% A7%D8%B2-%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%A8/a-162 66752. For details about the evolution of Iran’s nuclear policy see Banafsheh Keynoush, Saudi Arabia and Iran, 157–169. Banafsheh Keynoush, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and author’s discussions with Iranian diplomat Hussein Fereidoun, New York, September 24, 2006. “IAEA Report Raises Concerns About Iranian Nuclear Facilities,” CNN , November 16, 2009, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/ 11/16/iran.iaea.nuclear.facility/index.html; “Iran” Nuclear Threat Initiative, last updated on June 2020, https://www.nti.org/learn/countries/ iran/nuclear/; James J. Wirtz, “How Could Getting It Right Go So Wrong? The 2007 Iran NIE Revisited,” Intelligence and National Security, Volume 36, No. 2 (January 2021): 157–159, https://www.tandfo nline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02684527.2021.1857070. Author’s discussions with an Obama administration official, Washington, DC and New York, December 2010 and September 2013. Author’s discussion with an Iranian government source who did not wish to be identified, New York, June 2, 2018. Heidar Ali Baluchi, “JCPOA and Its Achievements, Military Issues and Analyses,” Center for Strategic Studies of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 488–504, http://www.css.ir/Media/PDF/1396/11/06/636525 831612124642.pdf. See Banafsheh Keynoush, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and author’s discussions with an Obama administration official. Habibollah Hassan Shirazi, “Dissecting the Nuclear Talks Between Iran and the United States That Led to JCPOA and the Passing of Resolution 2231,” PhD diss., Khordad 27, 1394, 12–13, http://prb.iauctb.ac.ir/art icle_519164_c2595dead05de032de3f5a275c3ebc81.pdf. Shirazi, “Dissecting the Nuclear Talks”; William J. Burns, “Trump’s Iran Policy Is ‘Untethered to History,’” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 28, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/03/28/ trump-s-iran-policy-is-untethered-to-history-pub-78727. “Email, Secretary of State to Various Diplomatic Posts, ‘Secretary Sherman’s Briefing for the Diplomatic Corps on ISIL and Iran,’ ‘Sensitive but Unclassified,’” National Security Archive, Documenting Iran-US Relations, 1978–2015, September 16, 2014, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/doc ument/19816-national-security-archive-doc-12-e-mail.

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21. “Unsaid Stories by Ali Akbar Salehi About Secret Talks in Oman/What Official Secret Letter Did Oman’s King Give the Leader?” Khabar Online, Mordad 13, 1394, https://www.khabaronline.ir/news/443155/%D9% 86%D8%A7%DA%AF%D9%81%D8%AA%D9%87-%D9%87%D8%A7%DB% 8C-%D8%B5%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B2-% D9%85%D8%B0%D8%A7%DA%A9%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%85% D8%AD%D8%B1%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%87-%D8%AF%D8%B1-% D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%BE%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%B4% D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86-%DA%86%D9%87-% D9%86%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%87. 22. “Review of What Went on in Nuclear Talks,” Fars News Agency, Mehr 2, 1392, https://www.farsnews.ir/news/13920617001115/%D9%85% D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%A8%D8%B1-%D8%A2%D9%86% DA%86%D9%87-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D9%85%D8%B0%D8%A7%DA%A9% D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%87%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%87%E2%80% 8C%D8%A7%DB%8C-%DA%AF%D8%B0%D8%B4%D8%AA%D9%87-% D8%A7%D8%AA%D9%81%D8%A7%D9%82-%D8%A7%D9%81%D8%AA% D8%A7%D8%AF; author’s discussion with White House official, New York and Washington, DC, September 2013, and with Hesamuldin Ashna, advisor to President Hassan Rouhani, Tehran, July 2, 2014; “Narrative By Ali Akbar Salehi About Secret Talks Between US and Iran in Oman,” Radio Farda, Mordad 17, 1394, https://www.radiofarda. com/a/o2-salehi-iran-us-talk/27178828.html. 23. Syed Zafar Mehdi, “Iran’s Zarif Stirs Fresh Controversy Over JCPOA Text,” Anadolu Agency, October 7, 2021, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/ middle-east/irans-zarif-stirs-fresh-controversy-over-jcpoa-text/2386147; “Jalili Criticism and Zarif Defense of Nuclear Deal in JCPOA Commission,” BBC Farsi, September 14, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/persian/ iran/2015/09/150913_l26_jalili_zarif_barjam_nuclear_deal. 24. Author’s conversations with Iran’s nuclear negotiator Abbas Araghchi, New York, September 26, 2013. 25. “Rouhani: No Step Was Taken Without the Views of the Supreme Leader in Nuclear Talks,” Voice of America, Azar 16, 1395, https://ir.voanews. com/persiannewsiran/iran-president-rouhani-nuclear-0. 26. “Timeline of Iran Nuclear Talks in 2014”; “The Secret Talks That Led to the Negotiations With Iran,” NPR, July 21, 2015, https://nsarchive. gwu.edu/document/19816-national-security-archive-doc-12-e-mail. 27. Mehdi Shahpouri, “Iran Before the Nuclear Deal,” Center for Strategic Studies, http://www.css.ir/Media/PDF/1396/11/06/636525 817792985054.pdf. 28. Jordain Carney, “Senate Overwhelmingly Approves Iran Review Bill in 98–1 Vote,” The Hill, May 7, 2015, https://thehill.com/blogs/ floor-action/senate/241355-senate-votes-to-approve-Iran-review-bill; Kali Robinson, “What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal?” Council on Foreign

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29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

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Relations, last updated on August 18, 2021, https://www.cfr.org/backgr ounder/what-iran-nuclear-deal. Mohammad Reza Dehshiri, Hussein Masoudnia, Mohsen Rezae Jafari, “Nuclear Agreement as an Emergence from New Iran Identity Before World Public Opinion,” International Relations Research Quarterly, Volume 1, No. 16 (1394): 73–102, http://www.iisajournals.ir/article_4 1984_99db42559691c09861ca1efce2c80d3f.pdf. Habibollah Hassan Shirazi, “Dissecting the Nuclear Talks Between Iran and the United States Until the Finalization of JCPOA and Passing of Resolution 2231,” International Relations Studies Scientific Journal, Volume 8, No. 30 (Summer 1394): 9–56, http://prb.iauctb.ac.ir/art icle_515651.html. “Zarif Delivered His Last Report on JCPOA to Parliament; Expressed Hope to ‘Complete’ Nuclear Negotiations in Raisi Term in Office,” Voice of America, Tir 21, 1400, https://ir.voanews.com/top-stories/iran-nuc lear-zarif. Hamed Shahbazi, “Role of the Revolution’s Leader’s Red Lines in Protecting Nuclear Achievements,” Fars News Agency, Tir 6, 1394, https://www.farsnews.ir/news/13940406000601/%D9%86%D9%82% D8%B4-%D8%AE%D8%B7%D9%88%D8%B7-%D9%82%D8%B1%D9%85% D8%B2-%D8%B1%D9%87%D8%A8%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%82% D9%84%D8%A7%D8%A8-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%AD%D9%81%D8% B8-%D8%AF%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%AF%D9% 87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D9%87%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%87%E2%80%8C% D8%A7%DB%8C. Heidar Ali Baluchi, “JCPOA and its Achievements”. “The Historic Deal That Will Prevent Iran From Acquiring a Nuclear Weapon,” The White House, January 17, 2016, https://obamawhiteho use.archives.gov/issues/foreign-policy/iran-deal. See also Martin Beck, “An International Relations Perspective on the Iran Nuclear Deal,” E-International Relations, August 8, 2018, https://www.e-ir.info/2018/08/08/an-international-relations-per spective-on-the-iran-nuclear-deal/. “Iran Sanctions Renewal Becomes Law Without Obama Signature,” CNBC, December 15, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/15/ iran-sanctions-renewal-becomes-law-without-obama-signature.html. Kali Robinson, “What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal?” Council on Foreign Relations, last updated on August 18, 2021, https://www.cfr.org/backgr ounder/what-iran-nuclear-deal. Heidar Ali Baluchi, “JCPOA and Its Achievements”; see also “UN Arms Embargo on Iran,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, last updated April 7, 2021, https://www.sipri.org/databases/embargoes/un_ arms_embargoes/iran.

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39. Garrett Nada, “Trump and Iran in 2017,” United States Institute of Peace, The Iran Primer, December 21, 2017, https://iranprimer.usip. org/blog/2017/dec/21/trump-and-iran-2017. 40. Author’s discussions with US figures close to President Donald J. Trump, Geneva, August 22, 2018. 41. “Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif Says ‘Nothing Is Inevitable’ With US and Iran,” interview with PBS News Hour, July 19, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f9SGOas2Tc; “Supreme Leader Says Iran Won’t Negotiate With US,” Associated Press, July 31, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/supremeleader-iran-negotiate-us-72099098. 42. “Iran Denies Zarif’s Remark on Iran’s Missile Program,” Radio Farda, July 16, 2019, https://en.radiofarda.com/a/zarif-says-iran-s-missile-pro gram-could-be-up-for-negotiation-with-u-s-/30058726.html. 43. “Removing US Sanctions in Exchange for JCPOA ‘Sunset Clause,’” Mehr News Agency, Tir 28, 1398, https://www.mehrnews.com/news/ 4670644/%D9%84%D8%BA%D9%88-%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%B1%DB% 8C%D9%85-%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%A2%D9%85%D8%B1% DB%8C%DA%A9%D8%A7-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D9%82%D8%A8%D8% A7%D9%84-%D8%A8%D9%86%D8%AF-%D8%BA%D8%B1%D9%88%D8% A8-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%85. 44. “Ayatollah Khamenei: Iran’s Enriched Level Can Based on Need, Also Reach 60 Percent,” BBC Farsi, February 22, 2021, https://www.bbc. com/persian/iran-56152848. 45. “Iran Has Started Process of Producing Uranium Metal for ‘Advanced Nuclear Fuel’,” BBC Farsi, January 14, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/per sian/iran-55632754. 46. “Khamenei Says Iran Could Boost Uranium Enrichment to 60%,” France 24, February 22, 2021, https://www.france24.com/en/livenews/20210222-khamenei-says-iran-could-boost-uranium-enrichmentto-60; “Comments By Intelligence Minister Angered Media Links With IRGC,” DW, February 10, 2021, https://www.dw.com/fa-ir/%D8%A7% D8%B8%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%88%D8%B2% DB%8C%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D8%B7%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B9%D8%A7% D8%AA-%D8%AE%D8%B4%D9%85-%D8%B1%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9% 86%D9%87%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D9%86%D8%B2%D8%AF%DB% 8C%DA%A9-%D8%A8%D9%87-%D8%B3%D9%BE%D8%A7%D9%87-% D8%B1%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%DA%AF%DB%8C% D8%AE%D8%AA/a-56521073.

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47. “Saeed Jalili Harsh Criticism of JCPOA,” Khabar Online, Dei 24, 1399, https://www.khabaronline.ir/news/1475736/%D8%A7%D9%86%D8% AA%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%AA%D9%86%D8% AF-%D8%B3%D8%B9%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D8%AC%D9%84%DB%8C% D9%84%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%AC%D8% A7%D9%85. 48. “Analysis of Soft Confrontation Approach of Biden Government Toward Iran Over ‘JCPOA’,” Fararu, Bahman 6, 1399, https://fararu.com/ fa/news/473873/%D8%AA%D8%AD%D9%84%DB%8C%D9%84%DB% 8C-%D8%A8%D8%B1-%D8%B1%D9%88%DB%8C%DA%A9%D8%B1% D8%AF-%D8%AA%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%84%D9%90-%D9%86% D8%B1%D9%85-%D8%AF%D9%88%D9%84%D8%AA-%D8%A8%D8%A7% DB%8C%D8%AF%D9%86-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8% B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9% 84%D9%87-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%85. 49. “US State Department Welcomes Friday Meeting Between Iran, World Powers,” Reuters, April 1, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/irannuclear-usa-int-idUSKBN2BO6GM. 50. Enrique Mora, Twitter post, April 6, 2021, 7:37 a.m., https://twitter. com/enriquemora_/status/1379443189703131139. 51. “Use of New Centrifuges in Iran As JCPOA Talks Are Underway,” BBC Farsi, Farvardin 21, 1400/April 10, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/per sian/iran-56703856. 52. “West Is Delaying/Iranian Diplomats Will Be Stationed in Jeddah,” Fararu, Dei 21, 1400, https://fararu.com/fa/news/527446/%D8%BA% D8%B1%D8%A8-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%84-%D9%85%DB% 8C%E2%80%8C%DA%A9%D9%86%D8%AF-%D8%AF%DB%8C%D9%BE% D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AA%E2%80%8C%D9%87%D8%A7%DB% 8C%E2%80%8C-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%AF% D8%B1-%D8%AC%D8%AF%D9%87-%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9% 82%D8%B1-%D9%85%DB%8C%E2%80%8C%D8%B4%D9%88%D9%86% D8%AF. 53. “US Accuses Iran of Trying to Deflect Blame for Nuclear Talks Impasse,” Reuters, July 17, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/ iranian-deputy-foreign-minister-says-vienna-talks-must-await-irans-new2021-07-17/; “Zarif: Biden Administration Should Revive JCPOA Before 1400 Election,” BBC Farsi, March 15, 2021, https://www.bbc. com/persian/iran-56398604. 54. “Khamenei’s Assessment of Results of Vienna Talks: The Americans Did Not Even Take One Step Forward,” Euronews, Mehr 28, 2021, https://per.euronews.com/2021/07/28/iranian-leader-assesses-resultsvienna-nuclear-talks; “Zarif Delivered His Last Report on JCPOA to Parliament”; “By Loosening and Tightening Sanctions, Westerners Want

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55.

56.

57.

58. 59.

A Certain Trend to Take Over / Revolution Can Be Preserved Only Through Staff Work,” Fars News Agency, Esfand 1, 1399, https://www. farsnews.ir/news/13991201000164/%D8%BA%D8%B1%D8%A8%DB% 8C%E2%80%8C%D9%87%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8%B4%D9%84-% D9%88-%D8%B3%D9%81%D8%AA-%DA%A9%D8%B1%D8%AF%D9% 86-%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%B1%DB%8C%D9%85%E2%80%8C%D9%87% D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8%AF%D9%86%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%B1% D9%88%DB%8C-%DA%A9%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A2%D9%85%D8% AF%D9%86-%D8%AC%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%A7%D9%86%DB%8C-% D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B5-%D9%87%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%AF. Laurence Norman, “Differences Splinter US Team Negotiating With Iran on Nuclear Deal,” The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/differences-splinter-u-s-team-negoti ating-with-iran-on-nuclear-deal-11643059183; Laura Rozen, “Policy Differences Cited in Departures From US Iran Negotiating Team,” Diplomatic, January 26, 2022, https://diplomatic.substack.com/p/policy-dif ferences-cited-in-departures. “Mokhber Dezfouli Says It Is Unlikely Nuclear Talks Will ‘Go Anywhere’,” Entekhab, Mordad 23, 1400, https://www.entekhab.ir/fa/ news/632865/%D9%85%D8%AE%D8%A8%D8%B1-%D8%AF%D8%B2% D9%81%D9%88%D9%84%DB%8C-%D9%85%DB%8C%E2%80%8C%DA% AF%D9%88%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D8%A8%D8%B9%DB%8C%D8%AF-% D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA-%D9%85%D8%B0%D8%A7%DA%A9%D8%B1% D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%87%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%87%E2%80%8C%D8% A7%DB%8C-%D8%A8%D9%87-%D8%AC%D8%A7%DB%8C%DB%8C-% D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%B3%D8%AF. See Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2018). “West is Delaying/Iranian Diplomats Will Be Stationed in Jeddah”. “Iran Foreign Minister: Direct Talks with US Will Carry Heavy Cost for Our Government,” BBC Farsi, February 16, 2022, https://www.bbc. com/persian/iran-60402747.

CHAPTER 3

E3/EU3-Iran Relations: Engagement for Engagement’s Sake

When intelligence leaks revealed the scale of Iran’s nuclear program in 2002, Tehran agreed to defuse tensions by engaging in talks with the United Kingdom (UK), France and Germany (E3). Iran’s choice of working with the three European countries did not surprise political observers. In 1992–1997, Tehran and the three European powers had engaged in a Critical Dialog to address Iran’s poor human rights record. The dialog offered revolutionary Iran a chance to reengage with western powers after the breakdown of its ties with the United States of America in 1979. But engaging in human rights talks with Europe did not meet its intended goal, i.e., to moderate Tehran’s radical domestic policies or to halt its desire to export the Iranian revolution. However, it helped deescalate tensions resulting from divergent strategic visions between Tehran and Europe, aided by the fact that Britain, France and Germany were nonconfrontational toward Iran and disinclined to disrupt diplomatic ties with the country. In return, Tehran welcomed the dialog despite deep hesitations about its merits, in order to fight international isolation and build networks to advance business interests with Europe, by offering the continent a large consumers market and a gateway for trade between Central Asia and the Middle East. The three European powers were committed to engaging with Tehran over human rights issues even if it were just for the sake of engagement,

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in the course of which the British and French aligned their Iran policies more frequently with the United States, while Germany maintained a more neutral stance toward Tehran. In this same spirit, when time came to discuss the Iranian nuclear file, the United Kingdom, France and Germany encouraged engagement with Tehran to avert a conflict. Tehran welcomed the engagement if it were to lead the West to formally recognize Iranian nuclear enrichment and fuel cycle production capabilities. Furthermore, it calculated that engagement could ease US pressures on Iran post 9/11 when Washington carved out a grand Middle East policy that involved isolating Tehran. In February 2003, as a gesture of goodwill, Iran formally announced its nuclear activities in Natanz and Arak, and the E3 expanded into representing the larger European Union (EU) in talks with Tehran. By the end of the year, the three European countries (by now known as the EU3) unequivocally declared that Iran was in violation of Article II of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by manufacturing nuclear fuel secretly. Iran insisted there was nothing secret about its nuclear program, and that the West knew about its scale before 2002, but was turning it into a problem to justify Washington’s grand Middle East policy. To push the United States to accept the Iranian nuclear program, and discourage the Bush administration from entertaining a military strike on Iran, Tehran then offered to negotiate with Washington. But the United States refused to accept Iran’s uranium enrichment program or engage in enhanced-level talks. America’s main goal was to contain Iranian influence in Iraq after the United States invaded the latter country in March 2003, which also meant isolating Tehran over its nuclear activities. Europe’s engagement with Iran proved to be challenging given that Washington was not on board with the idea of working with Tehran. Moreover, the nuclear talks lacked a defined framework that could lead to a final deal, and minor agreements were reached through a consensusbased and time-consuming process. Still, Iran’s threat conceptualization dictated that it should try to talk to Washington, while retaining the dialog with the EU3. This goal was realized when the United States joined a broader initiative to support the nuclear talks in 2006, known as the E3/EU+3 (inclusive of the EU3 along with China, Russia and the United States), which reached an interim agreement with Iran in Geneva in November 2014. The agreement was a first step toward finalizing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in July 2015, which allowed Iran to retain and expand its nuclear program.

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European businesses entered Iranian markets after the JCPOA, but Britain, France and Germany were reluctant to offer and maintain investments in Iran. The Obama administration signed the JCPOA as an executive act, which enabled the US Congress to pass resolutions that could impede its implementation, despite presidential powers to veto such resolutions. This led to a state of transatlantic ambiguity over the prospects of investing in Iran and slowed down Iran’s ability to reap the economic benefits of the JCPOA. Iran complained that the Obama administration was slow to introduce mechanisms that encouraged faster and larger investments by Europe. Ultimately, the anti-Iran groupthink syndrome among most US republicans, which tilted toward destroying the Obama era nuclear deal with Iran, and which propelled the United States to withdraw from the JCPOA under the Trump administration in May 2018, weakened the transatlantic alliance to encourage and enforce a non-proliferation regime with Iran.1 In response, the EU3 complied with the post-JCPOA regime of keeping Iran isolated. The emerging economic fragility of the Iranian state challenged its ties with Europe. Increasingly, Tehran saw the EU3 as a tool used by Washington to impose western hegemony and control. In addition, Tehran was visibly upset by Europe’s double standards of prescribing progressive neo-liberal values of development for Iran, but refusing to invest in the country to reach its development goals. This suggested to Tehran that the EU3 wanted to destroy the Iranian economy through the practice of neo-liberal imperialism, a policy that entailed demanding Iran’s roll back of its hard-won nuclear achievements in exchange for modest economic incentives in some unknown time in future, and depending on US policy priorities at any given point of time. Iran’s unlimited aspirations as a revolutionary state that aimed to disrupt the regional order in the Persian Gulf and globally in relationship to world powers, combined with its unflinching will to advance its nuclear power, intensified because of a lack of resolution with the EU3 about the fate of the JCPOA. Tehran’s desire to assert its revolution’s ideational worldview grew stronger in order to defy the EU3 demand that it should cap enrichment and comply with the JCPOA. To Iran, the demand was unreasonable given that the United States had withdrawn its commitments to enforcing the deal, thereby making it difficult for Iran to retain an enrichment program under the terms of the JCPOA.2

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Against this backdrop, EU3 efforts to desecuritize relations with Iran proved to be futile. The Hobbesian space that dominated Iran’s interactions with the West, marked by a constant fear of US preemptive military strikes over Iran’s unresolved nuclear activities, left the EU3 with fewer options to please both the Americans and the Iranians in efforts to enforce the JCPOA.3 In fact, the growing gap between Iran and the EU3 in terms of their approach to the threat of nuclear proliferation presented a high impact security dilemma marked by growing mistrust, and an obstacle toward the formulation of a common goal.4 Furthermore, it weakened the transatlantic alliance to contain the Iranian nuclear threat, given disagreements between Washington and the EU3 over how best to enforce Iranian compliance with the JCPOA. Finally, it threatened to push the EU3 into playing an increasingly marginal role in future dealings with Iran, despite Europe’s efforts to discourage US unilateralism and widen the diversity of voices over the Iranian nuclear program. As of the time of this writing, the EU3 had engaged along with Russia and China with Iran in two new rounds of talks to resolve the impasse with the United States over the fate of the JCPOA, after six earlier meetings in Vienna, Austria, in mid-2021.

Overview of EU3-Iran Relations Long before Iranian students traveled to the United States to receive a higher education, they attended universities in Britain, France and Germany. Deep and lasting intellectual bonds formed between the three European countries and Iran, and together they avoided the entrapments of US policy conduct toward Tehran which suffered from a conspicuous lack of foresight. But as hard as pre-revolutionary Iran tried to retain cordial relations with Britain, France and Germany in order to reduce its dependency on the United States, there was no denying that for Europe its transatlantic relations were far more important than its ties to Iran. In January 1979, the leaders of the United States, Britain, France and Germany attended the Guadeloupe Conference to discuss Iran. During the discussions, US President Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter Jr.) made it clear that the Pahlavi reign in Iran was over. The remark slightly surprised French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, according to his recollection of the event, when he realized that Britain was of the same mind.5 Meanwhile, France itself was hosting Iran’s exiled revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and receiving promising analysis

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from Khomeini supporters in France about Iran’s better prospects under his leadership. For its part, Britain covered and broadcast news about Iran that contributed to mobilizing the country’s revolutionary fervor. Nine days after the Guadeloupe Conference, on the suggestion of the leaders at the conference, the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi compliantly abandoned power and permanently left Iran. By the time of Iran’s Islamic revolution in February 1979, many Iranians harbored deep suspicions about the role that the United States, Britain and France along with Germany played to halt Iran’s rapid path toward development under the Shah. Conspiracy theories at the time suggested that the Iranian revolutionaries were puppets that had secretly received support from the major western powers to topple the Pahlavi dynasty. But soon after, the revolutionaries joined other Iranians to show their distaste for western powers after Britain, France and Germany halted their nuclear cooperation agreements with Tehran. The three European powers had in fact agreed to help Iran advance its nuclear fuel cycle production before the Iranian revolution. In 1977, France officially entered the Iranian nuclear market by promising to build two nuclear power plants near Ahvaz. But France halted shipments of enriched uranium to Iran after the revolution, which was meant to run the Tehran Nuclear Research Reactor, and the delivery of medical isotopes from the French-based Eurodif uranium enrichment center despite Tehran’s US$2 billion investment in the facility. Germany agreed to build a pressurized water reactor nuclear power plant for Iran before the revolution. The German Kraftwerk Union AG pulled out of the project almost halfway in January 1979, leaving the two related reactors 50% and 85% complete. Kraftwerk decided against the completion of the project following the revolution.6 Iran’s revolutionary leaders took these lessons of European noncompliance with nuclear agreements to heart. Throughout the 1980s, the European powers refrained from assisting Iran in developing its Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, despite evidence that Iran’s energy consumption needs would exceed its ability to produce electric power. Tehran’s relations with the three European powers were fraught with other tensions. Britain under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher followed US policies to contain Iran. When François Mitterrand replaced Giscard d’Estaing, France began hosting a larger number of Iranian anti-revolutionary opposition groups. Tehran took solace in the fact that it could trust Germany slightly more than Britain and France, considering that German-Iranian

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ties were free of political schemes. In addition, Germany and Iran were two non-nuclear-weapons states. When Europe emerged as a unified bloc to challenge the predominance of US power in the western hemisphere in the 1990s, Tehran decided to cultivate wider ties with the continent. But its disagreements with the E3 prevented relations to easily move forward. Earlier, Iran had issued a death warrant for Salman Rushdie, the British author of the Satanic Verses , for defaming the Prophet Mohammad (May Peace Be Upon Him) in 1988. Iran’s involvement in Lebanon’s hostage crisis, which involved the kidnapping of western hostages and Tehran’s mediation to release them, increased Europe’s threat perception of Iran by 1989. In 1992, Iran was linked to the assassination of Kurdish opposition figures in Germany. Tehran’s relations with Europe were damaged further by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the continent inspired by the Iranian revolution. Furthermore, the E3 and Iran clashed over the latter’s poor human rights record, and its opposition to the Middle East Peace Process to restore peace between Israel and Palestine. By this time, Iran was viewed by the E3 as a revolutionary state that was capable of projecting its ideational worldview and material power across the Middle East and in the European continent, which made engagement with the country necessary. Even earlier in December 1992, the European Council Edinburgh Summit had decided to engage with Iran, which led to the Critical Dialog. Europe’s ties with Tehran gradually improved, and picked up after the election to office of the reformist President Mohammad Khatami in 1997. Europe subsequently questioned the extra-territoriality of the US Congressional Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) that passed in 1996, also known as the D’Amato Act. The act entailed severe US financial and legal penalties on foreign companies investing in Iran. Still, a high degree of mistrust prevailed between Europe and Tehran. When Iran’s nuclear file was discussed at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in September 2002, Tehran concluded that the E3 would oppose its nuclear program on grounds that it had a weapons component. It also believed that the E3 harbored a hidden agenda to halt the advancement of Iran’s civilian nuclear program, regardless of whether it had or did not have Possible Military Dimensions (PMDs). Tehran decided to retain its nuclear capabilities to negotiate from a position of strength, prevent the E3 from dictating terms to Iran that would force it to abandon its

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civilian nuclear program and earn Europe’s agreement to meet Iranian demands to enrich uranium.7 In 2001–2002, the EU and Iran had already held talks for a Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). But when information about the scope of Iran’s clandestine nuclear operations surfaced, concerns about peace and security started to re-shape Europe’s policies toward Iran. In 2003– 2005, the EU held talks with chief nuclear negotiator Hassan Rouhani who was then the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Since the E3 was re-bouncing from internal divisions after Britain decided to support the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Britain, France and Germany hoped to leave a better mark on the world stage by promoting a nonproliferation regime through fresh talks with Iran, despite US efforts to discourage the engagement with Tehran. The release and endorsement by the EU of two documents, i.e., the European Security Strategy (ESS) and EU Strategy Against Proliferation of WMD (WMD Strategy), respectively, in June and December 2003 helped the E3 begin the non-proliferation talks with Iran. Aiming to build a balanced partnership with the United States at the same time, the EES underscored that the transatlantic bond was Europe’s most important relationship. The WMD Strategy stressed that the EU was ready to act, for example if and when non-proliferation dialogs failed, through sanctions and the use of force by invoking the United Nations (UN) Charter’s Chapter VII.8 Mindful of looming threats from Europe, Iran began talks with the political directors of the E3 (which transformed into representing the EU in the nuclear talks in 2004) in charge of bilateral and multilateral foreign policy issues. But despite a desire especially by France, which opposed the US invasion of Iraq, to give the E3 a strong voice in the nuclear talks, negotiations turned into an ad hoc initiative with no clear structure. It took one party at the table to disagree on a point for the negotiations to halt before resuming with delays. However, Iran was able to establish a good diplomatic relationship with the E3 representatives, including the European Council’s Secretary General Javier Solana. By November 2004, the E3 and Iran removed ambiguities in their previous understandings and clearly agreed that the latter would sign and then ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Additional Protocol and suspend nuclear enrichment activities. But a new Iranian parliament shaped in 2004 delayed the ratification of the protocol, and the E3 failed to convince Iran to permanently halt enrichment.

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Tired of the back and forth with Europe and the soft position of Iran’s negotiating team, Tehran proceeded to announce that it would construct a plant to produce a heavy-water nuclear reactor in Arak, and it inaugurated the Esfahan uranium conversion facility despite a new IAEA resolution pushing for tighter oversight of Iran’s nuclear activities. In February 2005, President George W. Bush publicly backed the E3 diplomatic efforts to offer Iran incentives to work with the international community. In March, Iran made a new offer which entailed enrichment taking place on Iranian territory, as its lawful right under the NPT, which Europe rejected after consultations with the United States on grounds that the offer lacked objective guarantees that Iran’s nuclear program was peaceful. The Europeans returned with a counter-offer by August, to provide Iran its required Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) for light-water reactors (LWRs) and a nuclear fuel reserve in a third country.9 The proposition did not make sense to Iran if the West would not formally recognize its right to enrichment, because it could essentially halt Iranian ability to develop an indigenous nuclear program at any point of time. Moreover, Iran would have to depend on Europe to meet its enriched uranium needs. Considering that Britain, France and Germany had pulled out of Iran’s nuclear markets under pressure from the United States after the revolution, Iran did not want to put its nuclear program at the mercy of the western powers. Nonetheless, Iran maintained open channels of communications with the British and the French, in the hope that they may soften their positions and help Tehran avoid sanctions. In October, Tehran issued a declaration outlining the terms of talks with the world powers, based on guidelines forwarded by Iran’s new president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian president simultaneously challenged the merits of parallel discussions with London and Paris that were led by representatives of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, including by the new Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Larijani and by the adviser to the leader Ali Akbar Velayati. In so doing, Tehran’s new government thought that it was offering a clear pathway for talks, while Iran proactively advanced its nuclear program rather than wait for a response from the world powers about how best to move forward.10 In 2006, Iran decided to build an industrial scale plant to enrich uranium, despite sanctions. Tehran calculated that the United States would fail to halt its construction. Even as the Bush administration worked hard to make a case against Iran to threaten a strike on its

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nuclear facilities, US intelligence reports could not verify that the Iranian nuclear program was non-peaceful. Considering that the United States had previously invaded Iraq based on erroneous intelligence reports that it possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), even the US Congress and the E3 were unprepared to support Washington without sufficient oversight over its actions toward Iran. Instead, the Congressional bipartisan Iraq Study Group concluded that the United States should negotiate with Iran, which prompted a decision by Washington to join the E3 along with China and Russia (E3+3 format) in the nuclear talks with Tehran. The British representative Catherine Ashton replaced Solana in the role of chief negotiator, while Helga Schmid, who was office manager to German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, served as the point of contact with the EU3 and Iran. The E3+3/P5+1 group as it would be called faced new challenges coordinating its policies because China and Russia were suspicious about the sanctions regime being imposed on Iran. Germany attempted to delay sanctions by arguing that it was disingenuous as long as American and French companies, including companies linked to US Vice-President Dick Cheney (Richard Bruce Cheney) such as Halliburton, had invested in Iranian markets throughout the nuclear crisis with Tehran. Nonetheless, Britain sided with the United States to call for tougher sanctions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, in order to force Iran to scale down its nuclear activities. In response, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) detained fifteen British Royal Navy personnel in the Iran-Iraq coast in March 2007, to signal that it saw Britain as an old power failing to protect itself, let alone dictate to Tehran what it could not do. Meanwhile, France maintained that sanctions were unlikely to be effective. But without progress in the talks, and given European concerns about the sequential nature of Iranian efforts to delay a work plan, a tough sanctions regime on Iran was enforced between 2006 and 2008.11 By April 2009, the Obama administration was prepared to join the E3+3 talks in an effort to build a roadmap for peace that would allow some enrichment to take place in Iran. But Europe remained divided over President Barack Obama’s proposal to revive talks with Iran. In general terms, Europe welcomed US steps to boost the negotiations with Iran. But a number of European countries remained concerned that the proposal for direct US-Iran talks would reduce the EU’s role in the nuclear talks, and its influence over the United States and Iran. France seemed opposed to Iran having major enrichment capacity or the normalization of US-Iran relationship. In fact, the readier the United States was in making a diplomatic move toward Iran, the less enthusiasm

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for engagement ensued in parts of Europe. The E3 was also showing signs of intolerance in dealing with Iran’s holocaust-denying president.12 From Iran’s perspective, these were excuses signaling that the E3 wanted to stir turmoil with Iran to trigger regime change.13 Iranian policymakers even decided that the reason for Europe’s positions were most certainly because the E3 wanted to protect its sphere of influence in Iran, which it risked losing in the event of the normalization of ties between Washington and Tehran. Testing Iranian sincerity, the new US administration had decided to move away from zero enrichment toward allowing Iran to enrich uranium at low grade levels. But when Iran requested enriched uranium for its Tehran Nuclear Research Reactor at grade levels slightly below 20%, despite US willingness to entertain the option through a swap exchange for Iranian LEU exports to a third country, France stepped in to make new demands including that any swap take place through a single exchange. Moreover, France and Britain argued that a single swap deal would be of limited value despite Germany’s support for this arrangement. The deal broke down in November 2009, and Iran proceeded to enrich uranium at 20% to meet its medical needs.14 Europe sabotaged a subsequent tentative deal the following year between Tehran, Turkey and Brazil in which Iran would export 1200 kg of LEU in exchange for its return as fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor. Europe opposed the deal on grounds that it brought in too many partners into the nuclear talks. Britain argued it would allow Iran to retain LEU stockpiles. Tehran maintained that its nuclear activities were being deliberately securitized by the western powers, in order to force Iran to eventually succumb to pressures to dismantle its nuclear program. The subsequent UNSC Resolution 1929 prohibited Iran from developing weapon-capable ballistic missiles and sanctioned the Iranian heavy weapons systems.

EU3-Iran Relations Before, During and After the Nuclear Deal The sections below are divided into three timeframes to review the EU3Iran ties, i.e., in 2011–2012 (during the pre-nuclear talks), 2013–2016 (during the nuclear talks and the implementation of the nuclear deal) and 2017–2021 (the period after the agreement).

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EU3-Tehran Ties in 2011–2012 Iran’s hardliners opposed granting the IAEA access to the country’s military sites through 2011, including Parchin, on grounds that the country’s military facilities were not to be discussed during the nuclear talks. Iran made a tentative deal with the agency to preclude inspections of its military sites, but it was told that access to Parchin was necessary. When the United States and Europe collectively tightened the sanctions regime to push for inspections of military sites, Iran did not fully grasp or anticipate the impact this would have on its economy. Before this period, while the British and French frequently aligned their policies with the United States, along with Germany, they tried to maintain a more neutral position on Iran compared to Washington and retained trade relations with Tehran. The new sanctions, however, meant that Iran would lose its second largest trading partner, which included the combined EU member countries. Moreover, Iran’s security was compromised as European arms trade in the Middle East began heavily favoring sales to Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. The sanctions further restricted Iranian financial and banking transactions, oil sales and EU arms sales to Iran. Feeling contained and let down by Europe, especially when Iran’s oil exports gradually phased out, radical Iranian students attacked the British embassy in Tehran to force its closure in November 2011.15 In January 2012, after the IAEA revealed information on the suspected military dimension of the Iranian nuclear program, the EU Foreign Affairs Council banned the import of Iranian crude oil and froze the assets of Iran’s Central Bank within EU territory, while Britain and France ensured that Saudi Arabia’s outputs could replace Iranian oil. Iran believed it could manage the French challenge, given France’s distant interests in the Persian Gulf compared to Britain. But it was concerned that British policy to work with Saudi Arabia meant that London was seeking to consolidate its Gulf security partnerships in order to better manage the balance of threat and power in the region against Iran and in favor of the United Kingdom’s traditional Arab ally.16 Meanwhile, the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) disconnected Iranian banks from its messaging system. The measures taken collectively by Europe to contain Tehran fell slightly short of the desired

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US policy of imposing a blanket sanctions regime, by allowing European companies and individuals to still do business in Iran.17 In March 2012, the IAEA asked to inspect the Parchin military site. Tehran reluctantly succumbed to the demand, after being told by its own negotiator Abbas Araghchi that the inspection could lead to a quick resolution of issues with the agency. Iran would later look back at the decision as a major mistake, as it opened up even the Iranian conventional military program to international scrutiny and made it part and parcel of the nuclear talks. In July, the EU sanctioned Iran’s oil industry, and it prohibited metal exchanges with the country in October. As US and European sanctions policies increasingly converged, Iran took steps to restrict free navigation in the Strait of Hormuz and tested missiles.18 Tehran may have calculated that its actions would force Europe to stop working against Iranian interests. Being in closer proximity to Iran geographically speaking compared to the United States meant that Europe was susceptible to the destabilizing outcomes of any conflict with Tehran. By the same token, a stable and tension-free Iran was a barrier which Tehran argued could prevent the spread of conflicts into Europe, as well as the inflow of refugees, narcotics and countless terrorist groups from the Middle East. But Europe’s positions hardened, and the volume of trade between the continent and Iran drastically declined. By the end of 2012, EU imports from Iran fell by 95.5% and exports to Iran by 30.5%.19 EU3-Tehran Ties in 2013–2016 After assuming the presidency in August 2013, Hassan Rouhani was confident that since he had once before managed to build a shortterm agreement with the EU3 in 2004, he could probably use his networks in Europe to conclude a longer-term ten-year nuclear agreement this time around.20 Mindful of the negative impact of declining trade prospects between Europe and Iran, Rouhani also saw a strong economic incentive to build the nuclear deal. In addition, Tehran calculated that western exhaustion over its failure to fix the conflict in Iraq could encourage Europe’s outreach to Iran to prevent another major conflict from erupting in the Persian Gulf region or in the Middle East. The EU3 was indeed prepared to embrace fresh talks with Rouhani’s government, be more circumspect about sanctioning the Iranian nuclear

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program and focus on targeting the hard core of Iran’s nuclear activities rather than its public.21 However, what Rouhani failed to predict or at least publicly admit was the challenges that his government would likely face in negotiating with the less friendly European counterparts, including the conservative party of British Prime Minister David Cameron and the French Socialist Party President François Holland. Britain followed Washington’s path in the course of the nuclear talks and criticized domestic and regional Iranian policies and frequently stressed its disagreements with Tehran, while France put up resistance to building a quick nuclear deal. Against this backdrop, the P5+1 and Iran began work on a framework for the Joint Plan of Action in November 2013. But as Iran and the world powers drew closer to concluding a draft text agreement that month, France stepped in to call for a stronger agreement after appearing to have consulted Saudi Arabia on the issue. A few months earlier and before then in 2011, Saudi policy experts had informally consulted this author about Iran’s nuclear policies, during which I outlined how frequent disagreements between Iran and the EU3 had seriously undermined Iranian decision-making capabilities and increased internal divides over the nuclear program, forcing nuclear policy-making to move to higher echelons of power which may have included the Iranian military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and whose powers were over and beyond the figurehead of Iran’s presidency or its nuclear negotiators. By 2013, Saudi Arabia had drawn its own conclusion that a nuclear deal with the Rouhani government would not halt, but rather hasten, Iran’s access to nuclear weapons in the longer-haul especially if the IRGC controlled the Iranian nuclear program. To encourage European compliance to delay a deal, Riyadh concluded lucrative arms deals with European capitals as it turned into the world’s largest arms importer in 2014. However, France did not proclaim to tie its decision to delaying a nuclear deal to Riyadh’s policies. Under President Holland, representing France’s first Socialist Party president since 1995, the country was pursing an assertive foreign policy in Africa and over Syria, where its interests with Iran often clashed. Since Iran’s influence in Africa and Syria was growing, France may have decided that severe sanctions were necessary, and it remained concerned that Iran could acquire nuclear weapons. As a result, it appeared that due to some of these considerations, Paris insisted that the language of a draft nuclear deal was not strong enough, as it contained

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clauses enabling Iran to maintain a sizable number of centrifuges and store medium-enriched material while building the Arak plutonium reactor. Under a tentative plan, Iran would deliver the near-20% enriched uranium to a third country, and halt advancing its nuclear activities, while receiving a portion of its frozen assets abroad on a monthly basis. But the French intervention forced the P5+1 to extend the nuclear talks, to reach a final comprehensive agreement which was reached in April 2015. The IAEA subsequently certified the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program in several consecutive reports, by monitoring its stored centrifuges, nuclear infrastructure, components, inventories and facilities. A JCPOA Joint Commission was to be chaired by the EU to facilitate the implementation of the deal.22 Meanwhile, the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) said it retrieved 80% of its previous pre-sanction energy market share in Europe.23 In 2016, SWIFT reconnected Iranian banks to its banking transactions, and Iran’s economy showed signs of improvement. By July, the EU was ready to set up a diplomatic office in Tehran, after earlier discussions held in the capital with the High Representative Federica Mogherini. Germany and Iran implemented a new phase of trade ties following the JCPOA, after banking authorities met to resolve impediments relating to sanctions, remove ambiguities with regard to economic and banking ties, avoid market risks, and address concerns for German banks. Britain concluded trade agreements with Iran to enhance tourism and energy ties. France increased bilateral exchanges with Iran, promising a renaissance in Franco-Iranian relations in the energy, automobile, industrial and cultural sectors. Following Rouhani’s visit to Paris, some 20 agreements worth nearly US$30 billion were signed, including a deal with Airbus for the delivery of passenger jets to Iran. The EU and Tehran further agreed to start a new dialog on human rights. Mogherini established the European External Action Service’s Iran Task Force to coordinate the implementation of the JCPOA and the bilateral relations between Europe and Iran. The Task Force led to an agreement for sectoral cooperation including on human rights, economic partnerships, energy and climate change, regional issues and civil nuclear cooperation.24 Despite these breakthroughs, the growing consensus between Washington and the EU3 to maintain restrictions on Iranian nuclear activities through sanctions targeting Iranian banking and financial capabilities, while lifting the nuclear-related sanctions, presented a duality of approach toward Iran that could not be easily fixed. On one hand, the lifting

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of the nuclear sanctions raised Tehran’s hopes that by engaging with Europe, it could ignore pressures by the United States. The Europeans were regarded as benign partners for Iran given the absence of immediate security concerns or excessive economic demands in the EU-Iran partnership. In addition, Iran needed US$185 billion to rebuild its energy sector in the next six years, and it hoped that its financial need would be met through European investments. Finally, Iran expected Europe to facilitate trade and Iran’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). On other hand, Europe’s compliance with US strategies to pressure Iran slowed down the implementation of new EU-Iran agreements following the JCPOA. As a result, Iran failed to attract permanent European investments to meet the economic and technological challenges of its Vision 2025 Document designed to turn the country into a major regional power in the Middle East. More importantly, the incoherence of the EU3 policies toward Iran in the post-JCPOA period significantly harmed Europe’s position of influencing Iran through soft-power strategies to encourage engagement over regional issues or the Iranian human rights record. EU3-Tehran Ties in 2017–2021 The volume of EU trade with Iran briefly reached a high of EUR 21 billion in 2017. By February 2018, 40% of Iranian oil was exported to the EU countries. The opening of Iranian markets to European businesses and companies also led to a US$4.7 billion deal with the French Company Total to develop the South Pars Gas Field. European car companies resumed business in Iran, while the Italian company Ferrovie dello Stato signed a EUR 1.2 billion deal to build a high-speed railway. Rome and Tehran proceeded to sign a framework credit agreement worth EUR 5 billion for banking and investments. Iran explored other trade projects with the EU, to ensure that its gas would reach European markets, and develop its petrochemical production.25 But Tehran’s relations with Europe took a turn for the worse over Iran’s poor human rights record. In December 2017, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson urged Iran to free British detainees in Iranian prisons. Following the crackdown on public protests in Iran in December, French President Emmanuel Macron called on Iran’s security forces to show restraint. German lawmakers called out Iran’s human rights violations, including severe crackdown on workers and activists. By focusing

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on Iran’s human right record, the EU3 was determined to ensure that a nuclear deal with Iran would also moderate its behavior. But Britain, France and Germany were also keen to appease the administration of President Donald J. Trump which aimed to demand that Iran make further concessions in order to reap the benefits of the JCPOA. In May 2018, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the nuclear deal and demanded 12 conditions from Iran for a new deal. Iran ignored the demands, including that it withdraw military advisers and personnel from Syria and Iraq, and terminate support for Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. As the first wave of Trump era sanctions hit Iran, the general feeling in Europe, however, was that pursuing sanctions not related to the nuclear deal was inconsistent with the JCPOA.26 Meanwhile, the volume of Iran’s energy exports to Europe drastically declined, despite sanctions exemptions offered by the United States to a few European countries to import oil from Iran. Despite the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal, Europe was determined to preserve the JCPOA. In May, the European Commission announced its intention to invoke a 1996 blocking statute to protect European companies from the extra-territorial application of US-led sanctions. The step could nullify US sanctions to ban European citizens and companies from working with Iran, but it risked hurting the transatlantic alliance and trade. Even so, the Commission took an extra step to instruct the European Investment Bank to facilitate investments by European companies in Iran. The statute was updated to expand its scope and application in August. But the measure, viewed mainly as a political statement than a binding regulation, was not enough to completely prevent the United States from blocking European banks or businesses, and imposing penalties and fines. Furthermore, major European companies and banks doing business with the United States avoided Iran. In October 2018, the Director of Political Affairs in the German Foreign Ministry Antje Leendertse met with Iran’s Assistant Foreign Minister for Political Affairs Abbas Araghchi in Tehran. Discussions focused on Europe’s efforts to avoid US sanctions, by implementing a ‘Special Purpose Vehicle’ to use new financial transfer systems to do business with Iran.27 But Europe’s intended goal of promoting a rule-based global order seemed like a hollow promise to Iran, given the slow progress in trade, a point that came across during the “Iran-Europe Cooperation and Future of the Nuclear Deal” meeting held in Brussels on October 9, 2018. The Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi

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said this resulted in Iranian suspicion that Europe might not fulfill its obligations under the nuclear deal.28 Tehran was additionally concerned by the fact that Britain and France could back measures by the United States to replace the JCPOA with maximum pressures on Iran. Even when Germany supported the idea of avoiding comprehensive sanctions on Iran, it was improbable that divergent positions within the EU3 would lead to significantly different policies toward Iran. As this reality sunk, Tehran invoked the Dispute Resolution Mechanism (DRM) under the JCPOA, partly because of the lack of EU commitments to enforcing the nuclear deal. Exhausted by Trump’s unilaterally-driven maximum pressure policy against Iran, especially when a second wave of sanctions targeted Iran’s oil exports in November 2018, the EU3 succumbed to backing Washington. Even Germany called for a new deal that went over and beyond the terms of the JCPOA. Still, Europe attempted to but failed to fully operationalize the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX)—a mechanism set up for EU and non-EU countries as a special purpose vehicle for trade and humanitarian purposes with Iran in January 2019. Europe took the extra step of tying INSTEX to the Iranian parliamentary approval and ratification of bills related to Financial Action Task Force (FATF) regulations backed by the powerful G-7 group of developed nations that would enhance international supervision over money laundering and terrorism financing activities. This added hurdles and Iran failed to attract foreign trade, by setting up a Special Trade and Finance Instrument to mirror INSTEX and enable incoming and outgoing transactions. Iran had to also agree to extend the revision of legislation to meet FATF requirements, called Action Plan, to remove the country from the body’s blacklist of high-risk jurisdiction. The EU proceeded to further tighten the sanctions regime on Iran while trying to salvage the JCPOA. In January 2019, the EU sanctioned Iran over its involvement in terrorist-related operations against Iranian opposition members based in Europe. Germany proceeded to ban the Iranian Mahan Air flights the same month. In February, Chancellor Angela Merkel stressed that the split between the United States and Iran would not force Germany to leave the JCPOA. In April, however, the EU extended sanctions in relation to Iran’s human rights record. By May, Iran announced a reversible three-step plan to reduce its commitments to the JCPOA, unless sanctions were lifted. The first and second

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steps each involved a 60-day grace period in between to increase uranium stockpiles to levels beyond the 300 kg cap of 3.67%-enriched fuel. Iran would then operationalize advanced centrifuges, including 20 IR-6 and IR-4s to enrich at cycles ten times faster than the old generation of IR-1 centrifuges. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council subsequently announced that its “strategic patience” with the Europeans was over.29 In August 2019, President Macron tried to salvage the nuclear deal by inviting Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to visit Biarritz in France on the sidelines of a G-7 Summit to meet with President Trump. Macron’s efforts at mediation failed and the US-Iran meeting did not take place, because Tehran rejected the proposed plan, despite Macron’s agreement with Zarif to resume Washington-Tehran talks, and Rouhani’s statement suggesting that he was prepared to meet with Trump. In exchange for this meeting, Washington was reportedly prepared to consider offering exemptions to the sanction regime by supporting a US$15 billion line of credit to Tehran by selling oil. France was to offer the initial US$5 billion credit line, and the remainder US$10 billion would be granted if Tehran was prepared to negotiate issues related to its regional influence and entertain a freeze in the progression of Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for a freeze in US-led sanctions. The hardliners in Tehran mocked the French proposal, and called it insulting.30 In November 2019, Tehran took its fourth step of moving away from the nuclear deal by increasing enrichment activities in its underground Fordow nuclear facility. Washington proceeded to impose new sanctions that tied Iran’s oil and shipping industry to its funding of terrorist activities in the Middle East.31 In January 2020, the EU3 triggered the JCPOA dispute mechanism to encourage Iran to re-commit to the terms of the nuclear deal. But as of the time of this writing no diplomatic solution was reached despite European proposals to add Iran’s additional sanctions relief requests in brackets in the text of the JCPOA.32 Iran stockpiled sufficient LEU to make a nuclear bomb if the material was further enriched. Iran also announced in the same month a fifth step to reduce its commitments to the JCPOA, by ending restrictions on the number of centrifuges it chose to operate, although it promised that these steps and those preceding it were reversible if the nuclear agreement was fully implemented. But following the withdrawal by the United Kingdom from the European Union or Brexit in January 2020, Tehran was concerned that London and Washington might push ahead with plans to further contain

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Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Prime Minister Johnson subsequently called the JCPOA a flawed deal, the three European powers triggered the article 36 dispute mechanism under the JCPOA over Iran’s breaches of the nuclear agreement after being urged by the Trump administration, and UN human rights experts called on Iran to release foreign prisoners including British citizens. Tehran remained divided over how to manage its relations with Britain post-Brexit. On one hand, it calculated that post-Brexit there was no guarantee that Britain could build mega trade deals in partnership with the United States and would thus be inclined to retain the negotiations with Iran and use EU channels to promote the trade with Tehran. Iran’s ripe and untouched markets, and its tech-savvy population presented attractive partnership opportunities to UK firms. On other hand, Tehran calculated that Britain might succeed in maintaining a co-dependent security partnership with the United States, insist on retaining sanctions and refuse to align its Iran policy with France and Germany. Ultimately, given the speed by which Prime Minister Johnson switched sides from backing the Trump administration to offering his support to the Biden administration when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. assumed office in 2021, Tehran concluded that British security interests would remain beholden to US interests at any given point of time and dominate its views about Iran including the viewpoint that the Iranian nuclear program remained a threat.33 Thus, the tensions between London and Tehran increased when the latter refused to release British-Iranian citizens in Iranian prisons. Meanwhile, British citizens were told to avoid travel to Iran. In exchange, Iran brought up demands that Britain pay its debts after receiving Iranian money to supply military equipment to the country before the revolution, while London and Tehran continued to hold bilateral talks.34 Ultimately, the tensions between the United Kingdom and Iran damaged Tehran’s outreach to the West. By April 2020, INSTEX (which included 9 European countries including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden) concluded its first transaction for the sale of EUR 500,000 worth of medicine by a German company to Iran after the outbreak of COVID-19. But Germany also proceeded to ban Hezbollah activities on German soil. President Trump took the additional step to stall international efforts to operationalize INSTEX unless Iran first agreed to a new comprehensive agreement.35 In June, the IAEA Board of Governors

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passed a resolution calling on Iran to cooperate with the agency’s investigation into possible undeclared nuclear materials and activities from the pre-2003 period. Iran blamed the EU3 for the passing of the resolution. The lack of a concerted EU approach toward engaging with Iran in this period encouraged Tehran’s defiance as it rejected the possibility of renewing talks to change the terms of the JCPOA. In August 2020, the United States failed to win support at the UNSC for snapback, a mechanism set up under the terms of the JCPOA that could nullify an approaching sunset on restrictions on Iranian arms purchases and exports beginning in October. The EU3 expressed concern over Iran’s ability to purchase arms. Tehran subsequently warned the EU3 that further attempts to trigger the snapback mechanism, which could also restrict Iran’s ballistic missiles activity and require halting of uranium enrichment, would force Iran to limit international inspection of its nuclear activities even as the EU entertained triggering the JCPOA dispute mechanism option. In September, Britain, France and Germany refused a request by the United States to trigger the snapback mechanism to reimpose tight international sanctions on Iran, which could also entail UNSC sanctions, and bring Iran a step closer to facing the prospects of war under UN Chapter VII. Even so, Iran declared that it had lost its so-called strategic patience with European non-compliance with the JCPOA. In December 2020, the Iranian parliament passed the Strategic Action Plan to Lift Sanctions and Protect Iranian Nation’s Interests, a bill that laid out strict conditions for any future negotiations with the West. In April 2021, the EU sanctioned top IRGC commanders for their involvement in the crackdown of protests over rising fuel prices in Iran in 2019. To lessen tensions with Europe, Tehran agreed to revive parliament bills to examine Iran’s ratification of the FATF standards. But as of the time of this writing, the fate of the FATF remained unresolved, and hardliners in Iran rejected any measures to open the country’s financial dealings to international scrutiny. Iran also reminded Europe that it should urge the United States to remove all Trump era sanctions in March 2021. Tehran also halted extensions for IAEA inspections of its nuclear sites granted the year before under the threat of the latest IAEA resolution that was pushed forward by the EU3. Tehran and the IAEA would later reach an agreement to restore damaged surveillance cameras in the Karaj nuclear facility, with Iran trying to control the timing for the release of the contents of the footages.

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Given mutual trade interests, however, Iran’s trade exchanges with Europe continued despite the Trump era sanctions, and France kept up its efforts to save the JCPOA throughout 2020. Iran hoped to engage in technical and scientific cooperation with Europe through its indigenous danesh bonyan firms that recruited an educated and skilled class of Iranian human power, even if it could not engage in energy trade. Iran was the EU’s 56th biggest trade partner in 2020. The EU was Iran’s second largest trade partner, with trade volume according to some figures even reaching US$4.5 billion.36 However, by the end of the year, these figures were not easily adding up. Other figures showed that Iran’s trade volume with Europe had clearly declined. In the first seven months of 2020, trade between Iran and the EU reached EUR 2.649 million, showing a 9% decline compared to the previous year. The pandemic and sanctions, according to Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, led to the lower trade volumes. Germany remained Iran’s largest trade partner in Europe, and trade between the two accounted for nearly 41% of Iran’s total trade with the continent. Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and France were Iran’s other main trade partners, each holding, respectively, 15%, 11%, 6% and 6% of the total trade volume between the EU and Iran. Iran’s trade volume with France declined by 37% compared to the previous year. While Iran exported food and live animals to the EU, it imported mainly transportation equipment which accounted for 713 million euros of the total trade volume with Europe.37 In July 2021, the European powers said Iran’s decision to produce enriched uranium metal in the Esfahan facility was a breach of the JCPOA, and that it threatened international efforts to revive the deal and boost trade. In response, when Iran’s new president Ebrahim Raisi assumed office with plans to fix the country’s economy in August 2021, he offered an olive branch by welcoming the expansion of ties with France, including over regional issues concerning stability in Afghanistan and Lebanon.38 Tehran further insisted that the United States was no longer the right model for Europe to follow given Washington’s mishandling of regional crises, that Europe needed to engage with Iran in managing regional issues and in order to assert European sovereignty over US world dominance, and hoped that the EU3 would not invest time in rebuilding a transatlantic partnership with the Biden administration considering the flakiness of US policy conduct toward Tehran. Iran further stressed to Britain the need to hold a respectful dialog, reminded it of the disaster of the US and British withdrawal from Afghanistan in mid-2021, and

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criticized the EU3 lack of action to fix the issues related to the implementation of the JCPOA while again reminding London of the need to pay back the financial debt it owed.39 Tehran continued to hold dual Iranian-European citizens in its prisons, including British and French citizens, as a tool to advance its negotiating leverage with the West. In addition, Tehran welcomed the resumption of nuclear talks but made it clear that it would not tie its economic and security interests to the outcome of the nuclear deal. Furthermore, it encouraged the EU3 to focus on working with Iran on a host of security issues including counter-terrorism, migration and narcotics, rather than merely on the outcome of the nuclear talks. Raisi insisted that his government would not reengage in the nuclear talks unless sanctions against Iran were lifted. Meanwhile, Iran’s new nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani, who previously negotiated with the EU3 for almost six years during Ahmadinejad’s presidency, saw the European powers as followers of US policies rather than as independent actors and expressed surprise over efforts by the Rouhani government to portray the EU3 as benevolent powers. Bagheri Kani insisted that Iran’s leadership never really wanted the nuclear deal, raising speculations that the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei only backed the negotiations under public pressure but did not personally believe they would succeed. Furthermore, the negotiations enabled Tehran to buy time to advance its nuclear program, which may have been the only reason for Iran’s leadership to proceed with talks. More importantly, Iran could not afford to wait for Europe to unify its position with the United States in order to salvage the nuclear deal, nor could Tehran accept a unified EU-US approach in containing the Iranian nuclear program which was why Tehran rejected the EU3 proposal to negotiate directly with the United States.40 These scenarios placed the JCPOA in a gray zone, even after six rounds of fresh talks in Vienna between Iran and the P4+1 (China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom plus Germany) in 2021. They also pushed Tehran to maintain contacts with the EU3 for utilitarian purposes only to help buy time to advance Iranian interests in the nuclear arena including the stockpiling of enriched uranium roughly 16 times beyond caps set by the JCPOA of 202 kilograms of 3.67% grade levels, and enriching uranium till up to roughly 60% and even reportedly 90%. This enabled Iran to tip the balance in its favor when time came to resume talks and

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demand more in the process of reaching a new deal, while offering to scale back portions of its enrichment program. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei meanwhile insisted that the country was in no rush to resume the nuclear talks, and that since Iran did not face a threat of immediate war with the United States after President Biden assumed office, a no deal was preferable to a bad deal. This pushed the Europeans to intensify talks with Tehran. Furthermore, from Iran’s perspective, the Biden administration was inclined to drag the nuclear talks if need be, in order to buy time to put its house in order in Washington, while avoiding a confrontation with Tehran over its nuclear program until a solution could be found to resolve the nuclear impasse. This perspective enabled Tehran to seek more in the course of its talks with the Europeans.41 Iran also signaled to Europe that it would welcome a seventh round of talks in November 2021, examined an agenda for an eighth round of talks in Vienna in January 2022 and reminded the EU3 that they were seen as protectors of international norms rather than a disruptor of those norms. This implied that Tehran hoped the EU3 would uphold the JCPOA and work with Iran to remove sanctions, rather than insist on a new deal. Given Europe’s geopolitical mosaic of multiple countries, Iran felt it had a better chance of convincing the EU3 to represent the interests of all regional countries across the European continent, and it aimed to commit to boosting the collective EU position vis-à-vis Washington. These included allowing the EU3 to maintain a central role in the JCPOA talks under the Biden administration, while trying to remind the EU3 that it was supporting a larger bloc rather than simply the interests of its main powers, i.e., the United Kingdom, France and Germany. This approach could help Iran hold the EU collectively accountable for the failure to revive the JCPOA or the possible breakdown of the nuclear talks, thus raising the cost of non-engagement with Iran for Europe. In so doing, Tehran hoped to align the positions of France and Germany in specific, that were more inclined to working with Iran compared to London, closer to Brussels. In this process, Iran insisted on the legality of the JCPOA within the framework of international law, and presented itself as a law-abiding country for trying to save the deal unlike the United States. Finally, Iran expected that in the event that earth-shattering developments jeopardized the US-Iranian connection, the EU would step in to neutralize tensions or excessive American pressures by keeping doors open to have the nuclear talks with Iran.42

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Iran went as far as advancing its undeclared uranium enrichment capacity in 2022, according to the IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi. The move may have aimed to bring pressure on the West to make a deal. The EU would also indeed step in to offer a compromise solution to break the impasse in the nuclear talks between Washington and Tehran in early 2022, by suggesting the partial delisting of the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under US laws even if these laws continued to restrict the activities of the Quds Force. But the EU was clear that only the United States was in a position to make that choice.43

Conclusion Iran understood that the nuclear talks with the EU3 stood very little chance of yielding substantial results unless the United States joined the negotiations, whether before or after the JCPOA. The transatlantic paradigm shift under the Biden administration, compared to the Trump era, to support broad efforts to engage with Iran backed the EU3 to resolve the nuclear impasse with Tehran. A meeting of the JCPOA Joint Commission was held on April 2, 2021, to enhance overseeing the nuclear deal and the possible reentry of the United States to the agreement. The commission was chaired on behalf of the European Union by the EU High Representative Josep Borrell, by the European External Action Service Deputy Secretary General Enrique Mora, and was attended by China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and Iran at the level of Deputy Foreign Ministers/Political Directors.44 While a level of effective multilateralism shaped to salvage the nuclear deal as of the time of this writing, and achievements were made by way of discouraging the United States from contemplating severe unilateral action against Iran’s nuclear program, they resulted from US policy shifts from the Trump era to the Biden administration, rather than any clear European influence. The EU3 may have tempered US actions, but it was not enough to balance ties between the United States and Iran in a manner that could encourage non-proliferation. As a result, a constructive transatlantic dialog with Iran did not shape as of the time of this writing. The insistence on a non-military solution to resolving Iran’s nuclear crisis was Europe’s only lasting legacy—although that insistence waned when Britain reminded Iran that all options were on the table in early 2022— while sanctions remained the major unifying element in the transatlantic partnership over Iran.

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The frustration in Iran over Europe’s limited power was palpable and led to the significant eroding of confidence with the European capitals. The immediate future offered new opportunities for European mediation in the Vienna nuclear talks, and witnessed unity by the EU3 on the issue. But the failure to make change for the better in the course of the seventh round of nuclear talks that took place in Vienna in 2021 denied the United Kingdom, France and Germany a chance to ensure that Iran’s engagement with the West resulted in peace and stability, let alone in the upholding of a liberal international order. Serving as a mere implementer of US policies on Iran never served the EU3 and only weakened its position and influence over the outcome of the nuclear talks with Iran. The contestation of wills between the United States, the EU3 and Iran consequently severely undermined the goal of nuclear non-proliferation, even as an eighth round of nuclear talks yielded promising results to reach a conclusion in early 2022.

Notes 1. See Alex Mintz and Karl DeRouen, Understanding Foreign Policy Decision-Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Sina Abolghasem Rasouli, “The Puzzle of US Foreign Policy Revision Regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program,” E-International Relations, July 10, 2020, https://www.e-ir.info/2020/07/10/the-puzzle-of-u-s-foreign-pol icy-revision-regarding-irans-nuclear-program/. 2. See R. O. Kheoane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); for neo-liberal debates on Iran see, “What Is Liberalism and Who Is a Neo-Liberalist?” Iran International, Azar 29, 1398, https://iranintl. com/%D8%AF%DB%8C%D8%AF%DA%AF%D8%A7%D9%87/%D9%84% DB%8C%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%B3%D9%85-% DA%86%DB%8C%D8%B3%D8%AA-%D9%88-%D9%86%D8%A6%D9% 88%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%84-%DA%A9%DB% 8C%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%9F. 3. See Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979). 4. See B. Buzan and O. Waever, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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5. “What Happened in Guadalupe Summit?” Iran’s Metropolitan News Agency, Dei 16, 1399, https://www.imna.ir/news/466329/%D8%AF% D8%B1-%D9%86%D8%B4%D8%B3%D8%AA-%DA%AF%D9%88%D8% A7%D8%AF%D9%84%D9%88%D9%BE-%DA%86%D9%87-%DA%AF%D8% B0%D8%B4%D8%AA. 6. “Timeline of Iran Nuclear Program,” Tasnim News Agency, Aban 16, 1392, https://www.tasnimnews.com/fa/news/1392/08/16/146990/% DA%AF%D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%B4%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A8% D8%B1%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%87-%D9%87%D8%B3%D8%AA% D9%87-%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86; “Timeline of Iran Nuclear Program Before Revolution,” DW , September 12, 2012, https://www.dw.com/fa-ir/%DA%AF%D8%A7%D9%87%D8% B4%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D9%86%D8%A7%D9% 85%D9%87-%D9%87%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8% A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%BE%DB%8C%D8%B4-% D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%A8/ a-16266752. 7. Majid Abbasi, Foreign Policy Challenges of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the European Union Post September 11 (Tehran: Imam Sadegh University Press, 1392), https://bookroom.ir/book/37119/%DA%86%D8%A7% D9%84%D8%B4-%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%B3%DB%8C%D8% A7%D8%B3%D8%AA-%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%AC%DB%8C-% D8%AC%D9%85%D9%87%D9%88%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B3% D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7% D9%86-%D9%88-%D8%A7%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%A7%D8%AF%DB% 8C%D9%87-%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%88%D9%BE%D8%A7-%D8%AF% D8%B1-%D8%AF%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%87-%D9%BE%D8%B3-%D8% A7%D8%B2-11-%D8%B3%D9%BE%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%A8% D8%B1-2001. 8. Oliver Meier, “European Efforts to Solve the Conflict Over Iran’s Nuclear Program: How Has the European Union Performed?” EU Non-Proliferation Consortium, Non-Proliferation Papers, Number 27, February 2013, https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/168617/eunpc_no%2027. pdf. 9. Colette Mazzucelli, “EU3-Iranian Nuclear Diplomacy: Implications for US Policy in the Middle East,” Miami-Florida European Union Center of Excellence, Volume 4, No. 6 (March 2007): 4–5. 10. Banafsheh Keynoush, Saudi Arabia and Iran: Friends or Foes? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 157–169; Mojtaba Dehghani, “Manuchehr Mottaki’s Narrative of Khamenei’s Parallel Diplomacy in the Ahmadinejad

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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Era,” Independent Farsi, June 26, 2021, https://www.independentp ersian.com/node/157386/%D8%B3%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%B3%DB% 8C-%D9%88-%D8%A7%D8%AC%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B9% DB%8C/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%AA-%D9%85%D9% 86%D9%88%DA%86%D9%87%D8%B1-%D9%85%D8%AA%DA%A9%DB% 8C-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%AF%DB%8C%D9%BE%D9%84%D9%85% D8%A7%D8%B3%DB%8C-%D9%85%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%B2%DB% 8C-%D8%AE%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%86%D9%87%E2%80%8C%D8%A7% DB%8C-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%AF%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9% 86-%D8%A7%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%AF%DB%8C%E2%80%8C%D9%86% DA%98%D8%A7%D8%AF. Abed Akbari, “Analysis of Tehran-London Ties in Rouhani Government,” Donya-e-eqtesad, September 15, 2021, https://donya-e-eqtesad.com/% D8%A8%D8%AE%D8%B4-%D8%AE%D8%A8%D8%B1-64/3786197-% D8%A2%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%B2-%D8%B1%D9%88% D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%AA%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-% D9%84%D9%86%D8%AF%D9%86-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%AF%D9%88% D9%84%D8%AA-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%AD%D8%A7%D9%86%DB%8C. Meier, “European Efforts to Solve the Conflict Over Iran’s Nuclear Program: How Has the European Union Performed?”. Interview with Iranian Officials, New York, September 23, 2010. Meier, “European Efforts to Solve the Conflict Over Iran’s Nuclear Program: How Has the European Union Performed?”. Robert M. Shelala II, Brandon Fite, and Nori Kasting, “US and Iranian Strategic Competition: The Impact of the EU, EU3, and nonEU European States,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 4, 2013, https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/ legacy_files/files/publication/130404_eu_iran_chap_12.pdf. Akbari, “Analysis of Tehran-London Ties in Rouhani Government”. Meier, “European Efforts to Solve the Conflict Over Iran’s Nuclear Program: How Has the European Union Performed?”. “Timeline of Iran Nuclear Program”. Shelala II, Fite, and Kasting, “US and Iranian Strategic Competition: The Impact of the EU, EU3, and non-EU European States”. Habibollah Hassan Shirazi, “Dissecting the Nuclear Talks Between Iran and the United States That Led to JCPOA and the Passing of Resolution 2231” (PhD diss, 1394), 12–13, http://prb.iauctb.ac.ir/article_519164_ c2595dead05de032de3f5a275c3ebc81.pdf. Willem van Kemenade, “China vs. the Western Campaign for Iran Sanctions,” The Washington Quarterly, Volume 33, No. 3 (July 2010): 99.

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22. Tarja Cronberg, “No EU, No Iran Deal: The EU’s Choice Between Multilateralism and the Transatlantic Link,” The Nonproliferation Review, Volume 24, No. 3–4 (2017): 243–259. 23. “Iran Wins Back 80% if Its European Oil Market,” Mehr News Agency, July 17, 2016, https://en.mehrnews.com/news/118136/Iran-wins-back-80of-its-European-oil-market. 24. “State of Play of EU-Iran Relations and the Future of the JCPOA,” Policy Department for External Relations, Directorate for External Policies of the Union, October 2020, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/Reg Data/etudes/IDAN/2020/603515/EXPO_IDA(2020)603515_EN.pdf; “Tehran’s Last Tango in Paris; How Did Iran’s Relations with France Proceed in 1397?” Khabar Online, Farvardi 6, 1398, https://www.kha baronline.ir/news/1244459/%D8%A2%D8%AE%D8%B1%DB%8C%D9% 86-%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%86%DA%AF%D9%88%DB%8C-%D8%AA% D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D9%BE%D8% A7%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%B3-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8% B7-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%A8%D8%A7-% D9%81%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%B3%D9%87-%D8%AF%D8%B1-% D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%84-%DB%B9%DB%B7. 25. Radoslaw Fiedler, “Iran and the European Union After the Nuclear Deal,” CES Working Papers, Volume X, No. 3, 2018, https://www.econstor. eu/bitstream/10419/198546/1/ceswp-v10-i3-p291-305.pdf; “Italian Holding to Sign EUR 5 Billion Investment Deal with Banks,” Financial Tribune, September 20, 2021, https://financialtribune.com/articles/ domestic-economy/79745/italian-holding-to-sign-5b-investment-dealwith-banks. 26. Krishnadev Calamur, “Iran Deal Has ‘Implications for the Credibility’ of the US, EU Ambassador Says,” The Atlantic, October 6, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/eu-amb assador-iran-deal/542307/. 27. “Iran Calls on Europe to Implement Special Purpose Vehicle,” Mehr News Agency, October 17, 2018, https://en.mehrnews.com/news/138810/ Iran-calls-on-Europe-to-implement-Special-Purpose-Vehicle. 28. “Explaining Iran’s Nuclear Position: An Interview with Iranian Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi,” Arms Control Association, September 2020, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2020-09/interviews/explaining-iransnuclear-position-interview-iranian-ambassador-majid-takht.

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29. “Prospects of Europe’s Actions After Iran’s Third Step,” Fararu, Shahrivar 16, 1398, https://fararu.com/fa/news/411074/%DA%86% D8%B4%D9%85-%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%B1% D9%88%DB%8C%DA%A9%D8%B1%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%88% D9%BE%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8%B9%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%DA% AF%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%B3%D9%88%D9%85-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8% B1%D8%A7%D9%86. 30. “Saving the JCPOA: Will Mission be Accomplished?” Fararu, Shahrivar 12, 1398, https://fararu.com/fa/news/410682/%D9%86%D8%AC% D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%85-%D9% 85%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9% 86%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%85-%D9%85%DB%8C%E2%80%8C%D8%B4% D9%88%D8%AF; “From Oil Sanctions to Setting Up Reward to Disrupt IRGC Work; Dissecting New US Measures Against Iran,” Fararu, Shahrivar 14, 1398, https://fararu.com/fa/news/410910/%D8%A7% D8%B2-%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%B1%DB%8C%D9%85-%D9%86%D9% 81%D8%AA%DB%8C-%D8%AA%D8%A7-%D8%AA%D8%B9%DB%8C% DB%8C%D9%86-%D9%BE%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%B4-%D8% A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%AE%D9%84%D8%A7% D9%84-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%DA%A9%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%B3%D9% BE%D8%A7%D9%87-%D9%88%D8%A7%DA%A9%D8%A7%D9%88%DB% 8C-%D8%A7%D9%82%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AA-% D8%AC%D8%AF%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D8%A2%D9%85%D8%B1%DB% 8C%DA%A9%D8%A7-%D8%B9%D9%84%DB%8C%D9%87-%D8%A7% DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86. 31. “Why Has France Not Tired from Mediating Between the United States and Iran?” Fararu, Shahrivar 18, 1398, https://fararu.com/fa/news/ 411169/%DA%86%D8%B1%D8%A7-%D9%81%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9% 86%D8%B3%D9%87-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D9%88%D8%B3%D8%A7%D8% B7%D8%AA-%D9%85%DB%8C%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%A2%D9%85% D8%B1%DB%8C%DA%A9%D8%A7-%D9%88-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8% B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%87%D9%86%D9%88%D8%B2-%D9%86%D8% A7%D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D9%86%D8%B4%D8%AF%D9% 87%E2%80%8C%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA. 32. “State of Play of EU-Iran Relations and the Future of the JCPOA”; Laura Rozen, “Policy Differences Cited in Departures From US Iran Negotiating Team,” Diplomatic, January 26, 2022, https://diplomatic.substack. com/p/policy-differences-cited-in-departures.

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33. “Relations Between Iran and Britain In Post-Brexit Period,” Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, Esfand 25, 1398, https://www.scfr.ir/ fa/300/30102/122380/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-% D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%88-%D8%A7%D9%86% DA%AF%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%B3-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%AF%D9% 88%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%BE%D8%B3%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8% B1%DA%AF%D8%B2%DB%8C/. 34. “Cross Road in Tehran-London Relations in Post Brexit,” Islamic Republic News Agency, Bahman 14, 1398, https://www.irna.ir/news/ 83658823/%D8%AF%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%87%DB%8C-%D8% B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%AA%D9%87%D8%B1%D8% A7%D9%86-%D9%84%D9%86%D8%AF%D9%86-%D8%AF%D8%B1-% D9%BE%D8%B3%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B1%DA%AF%D8%B2%DB%8C% D8%AA. 35. “State of Play of EU-Iran Relations and the Future of the JCPOA”. 36. “Iran,” European Commission, June 21, 2021, https://ec.europa.eu/ trade/policy/countries-and-regions/countries/iran/. 37. “In Which European Countries Did Iran’s Trade Turn Negative?” Tejarat News, Mehr 6, 1399, https://tejaratnews.com/%D9%85%D8%A8%D8% A7%D8%AF%D9%84%D9%87-%D8%AA%D8%AC%D8%A7%D8%B1%DB% 8C-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%88-%D8%A7% D8%B1%D9%88%D9%BE%D8%A7-%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%84-2020. 38. “Ayatollah Raisi in Phone Contact with French President: Iran Welcomes Expansion of Relations With France Specifically in Economic and Trade Fields,” Islamic Republic of Iran Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Shahrivar 24, 1400, https://mfa.ir/portal/newsview/650659/%D8%A2%DB%8C% D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%84%D9%87-%D8%B1%DB%8C%DB% 8C%D8%B3%DB%8C-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%A7% D8%B3-%D8%AA%D9%84%D9%81%D9%86%DB%8C-%D8%B1%DB% 8C%DB%8C%D8%B3-%D8%AC%D9%85%D9%87%D9%88%D8%B1-% D9%81%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%B3%D9%87-%D8%A7%DB%8C% D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%B3% D8%B9%D9%87-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%A8% D8%A7-%D9%81%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%B3%D9%87-%D8%A8% D9%88%DB%8C%DA%98%D9%87-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%B2%D9%85% DB%8C%D9%86%D9%87-%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D9%82% D8%AA%D8%B5%D8%A7%D8%AF%DB%8C-%D9%88-%D8%AA%D8% AC%D8%A7%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%82% D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84-%D9%85%DB%8C-%DA%A9%D9%86%D8%AF.

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39. “Amirabdollahian Tweet on His Talks with British Foreign Minister,” Iranian Students’ News Agency, Shahrivar 24, 1400, https://www.isna.ir/ news/1400062417621/%D8%AA%D9%88%DB%8C%DB%8C%D8%AA-% D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%B9%D8%A8%D8%AF%D8%A7% D9%84%D9%84%D9%87%DB%8C%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%AF%D8%B1% D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%87-%DA%AF%D9%81%D8%AA-%D9%88% DA%AF%D9%88%DB%8C%D8%B4-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D9%88%D8% B2%DB%8C%D8%B1-%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%AC%D9%87-% D8%A7%D9%86%DA%AF%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%B3. 40. Masoud Azar, “House Cleaning in Iran’s Diplomacy Machine and Negotiations with the Wild Wolf,” BBC Farsi, September 16, 2021, https:// www.bbc.com/persian/iran-58522226. 41. Azar, “House Cleaning in Iran’s Diplomacy Machine and Negotiations with the Wild Wolf”; Pouria Nabipour, “Giving Europe and the United States a Chance Can No Longer be Justified,” IRDiplomacy, Farvardin 21, 1400, http://www.irdiplomacy.ir/fa/news/2001613/% D9%81%D8%B1%D8%B5%D8%AA-%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AF%D9%86-% D8%A8%D9%87-%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%88%D9%BE%D8%A7-%D9% 88-%D8%A2%D9%85%D8%B1%DB%8C%DA%A9%D8%A7-%D8%AF% DB%8C%DA%AF%D8%B1-%D9%87%DB%8C%DA%86-%D8%AA%D9% 88%D8%AC%DB%8C%D9%87%DB%8C-%D9%86%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8% B1%D8%AF. 42. “Europe’s View About Future of Ties with the United States and Several Recommendations for Iran,” Iranian Students’ News Agency, Shahrivar 14, 1400, https://www.isna.ir/news/99082013719/%D9%86%DA%AF% D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%88%D9%BE%D8%A7-%D8%A8% D9%87-%D8%A2%DB%8C%D9%86%D8%AF%D9%87-%D8%B1%D9%88% D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8%A2%D9%85%D8%B1% DB%8C%DA%A9%D8%A7-%D9%88-%DA%86%D9%86%D8%AF-%D8% AA%D9%88%D8%B5%DB%8C%D9%87-%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB% 8C-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86. 43. John Follain and Golnar Motevalli, “IAEA Sounds Alarm on Iran’s Atomic Work as EU Tries to Save Deal,” Bloomberg, May 10, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-10/iaea-says-it-sconcerned-about-iran-s-undeclared-atomic-work; “EU Makes Last-Ditch Effort to Save Iran Accord,” Financial Times, May 7, 2022, https:// www.ft.com/content/8d0a6389-0692-4fa6-8296-9fc745e410ca. 44. “JCPOA: Chair’s Statement Following the Meeting of the Joint Commission,” European Union, Press Release, April 2, 2021, https://eeas.eur opa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/96151/jcpoa-chairs-sta tement-following-meeting-joint-commission_en.

CHAPTER 4

Russia-Iran Relations: Indispensable Neighbors

That Russia is never a good neighbor is a popular saying in Iran, a country that has nonetheless turned to its northern neighbor to advance the Iranian nuclear program. What explains the continuity of the ties between Russia and Iran is the indispensable partnership between the two neighbors over their shared security challenges vis-à-vis the West. Additionally, unlike the West, Moscow has remained engaged with its neighbor’s culture, language, and people. In fact, despite Iran’s “neither West, nor East” foreign policy orientation since its Islamic revolution in 1979, Russia reportedly retained the largest pool of informants inside Iran, and in specific in the seminary city of Qom. This in turn granted Moscow unhindered access to intelligence that enabled it to evaluate Iran far better than any other world power. Iran’s intelligence services identified many of these informants, but opted to ignore them to avoid reactions that could cause tensions with Moscow. This paved the way for Moscow to engage with Tehran through layers of intelligence, security and military dealings that remained mostly concealed to outside observers, but which offered Tehran a lifeline to manage the challenges that it faced over its nuclear program.1 Yet, Iran’s nuclear activities posed a multi-layered list of challenges for Russia. Firstly, Iran’s steady rise as a middle and potential nuclear power complicated Russian policies as a major world power. Russia engaged Iran to keep its nuclear activities in check, but it was apprehensive about Iran turning into a rival nuclear state. As a middle power harboring ideological worldviews along with a strong sense of nationalism, Iran had the potential to build nuclear weapons to contain Russia as a major power. In response, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Keynoush, The World Powers and Iran, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09249-7_4

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Russia decided to balance against the potential Iranian threat through basic realist power calculations, by concluding that it was not necessary to fight Iran’s ideologically oriented foreign policy behavior, as the United States of America set out to do at considerable cost but failed to contain, but limit and weaken the scope of the Iranian nuclear program when it did not serve to enhance the Russian national interest and power.2 Secondly, Iran’s potential access to nuclear weapons posed a direct threat to Russian power and prestige across Central Asia. Moreover, the proliferation of nuclear weapons across the Persian Gulf, in the event that Iran was to decide to acquire non-conventional weapons, would lead to further instability and an increase in western foreign power interventions in the region that would in turn contain Russian power and influence across the Middle East. In response to this second challenge, Russia encouraged an outcome to the nuclear talks between Iran and the world powers that helped build stronger relations between Moscow and Tehran, increased Iranian dependency on Russian security guarantees, and kept potential Iranian belligerence contained in the Persian Gulf region. But Moscow’s inability to fully control Iran over its nuclear activities risked fueling Tehran’s power ambitions and triggering overt and covert western power interventions inside Iran and in the Persian Gulf against Iranian interests. Foreign interferences in Iranian affairs were catastrophic to Russia’s maneuvering of its ties with the West and with Iran, witnessed in the shaky foundations of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and Russian inability to fully preserve or guarantee the deal when the United States pulled out of it in 2018. Furthermore, it weakened Moscow’s control over sources of Iranian aggravations that pushed the country to advance its nuclear program and destabilize the Persian Gulf region. For its part, Iran suspected that Russia did not always have good will in the handling of the Iranian nuclear file if it aimed to maximize the benefits of a nuclear deal for Russia. In fact, Tehran never identified Moscow as a real strategic partner in the nuclear sphere. Russia likely believed that this viewpoint was flawed, considering that the Russian nuclear industry had helped advance a peaceful Iranian nuclear program. But Tehran frequently expressed dissatisfaction over delays in Russian promises to complete the operation of Iranian nuclear power plants. Tehran was also led by a strong conviction that its power, built on an Islamic identity, would contain and outlive Russian power. This conviction fed on historic Iranian grievances about Russia’s superpower status and

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ability to influence Iran’s domestic and foreign affairs. Consequently, revolutionary Iran preferred often to delude itself into thinking that Russia was rapidly witnessing the deterioration of its power on the global scene. Tehran also frequently projected its unlimited aspirations to become a major power through ideational values that rejected communism and the imposition of Russian power over Iran. These ideational values helped advance the Iranian narrative of its right to possess a strong nuclear program.3 Whether this narrative was part of a grander Iranian strategy to contain Russian power was debatable, given that measuring grand strategy as it unfolded was nearly impossible, and that Iranian power capabilities could barely compete with Russian power. But to the extent that a strategy was in place in Iran, it pointed to a desire to quietly outsmart the Russians over the Iranian nuclear program.4 However, Russian penetration into Iran’s power structures was undeniable and it may have altered by some accounts the manner in which Iran’s authorities made policy choices with respect to the nuclear file. Russian power over Iran thus carried the potential to alter the Iranian ideational power in favor of building material power for Moscow. And Iran was indeed obsessed by Russians penetrating Iranian decision-making processes. That may have partly explained why Iran’s new president Ebrahim Raisi selected Esmaeel Khateeb to head the Ministry of Intelligence in August 2021. Khateeb’s previous counter-intelligence experience in Qom possibly included the delicate tracking and observing of Russian informants in the Iranian seminary city where ironically most of the current leaders in Tehran received their theological education.5 The issue of Russian penetration into Iran’s security, intelligence and political decision-making structures was even discussed in leaked tapes by Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. In the tapes, Zarif implied that Moscow may have controlled some of Tehran’s vital foreign policy choices including possibly over its nuclear program. His revelations described how Russian influence over Tehran, for example, was instrumental in containing Iran’s policies in Syria in the course of the country’s civil conflict after 2011 and the Iranian army’s defense capabilities once Tehran dispatched military forces to Syria after exchanging views with Moscow.6 According to a former Iranian lawmaker, Ali Mottahari, Moscow’s influence over Tehran was so alarmingly huge that it forced Iranian authorities into silence when it came time to criticize questionable Russian

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conduct. Mottahari also questioned Moscow’s material support to Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War (1989–1988), while offering only limited material help to Tehran, but coopting Iranian politicians and influential figures to avoid criticizing the Russian conduct. While the extent of potential Russian influence over Iran’s nuclear policy remained unknown, Mottahari attempted to shed some light over the issue as well, when he openly questioned why Iran’s national television was quick to criticize the British more than the Russians when a posting emerged on social media of a photograph that led to a diplomatic row in Tehran in August 2021, after Iranian authorities delayed returning to negotiations with the world powers in order to salvage the JCPOA.7 The photograph showed the Russian Ambassador to Iran Levan Dzhagaryan and his British counterpart Simon Shercliff sitting in the same balcony where the Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill and the American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once sat to strategize the course of the Second World War at the Tehran Conference in 1943. Iran was humiliated by the negligible role it played at the conference, despite hosting it, and for helplessly watching its territory almost nearly divided into three parts by the three powers in the course of the war. The social media photograph, re-staged in 2021 with an empty seat between the Russian and British ambassadors to represent the absence of the United States of America, served as a painful reminder to Tehran that the foreign powers that agreed to ensure Iranian sovereignty during the war were capable of maintaining or challenging that sovereignty if Tehran did not comply with their nuclear demands. The photograph further reminded Iran of its place in the world, as a middle power, by suggesting that the country’s leaders had to modify any grand plan which they may have secretly harbored to advance the Iranian nuclear program. Tehran may have felt betrayed by Moscow when the photograph emerged and resented Russian ability to force the Iranians to abandon their apparent unlimited power aspirations. Yet, Tehran overtly aligned some of its nuclear policies with Russia in demanding the removal of sanctions to revive the JCPOA, but it also developed sufficient flexibility to diversify its nuclear strategy by increasing uranium enrichment in higher levels that did not always meet the Russian goal of encouraging Iran to limit enrichment. Iran also used delay tactics to return to the negotiating table with the world powers in Vienna, Austria, in 2021.

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These unfolding events demonstrated that Moscow and Tehran never fully shared similar security perspectives, even if their narratives about the Iranian nuclear program seemingly aligned at times. Although the two capitals remained concerned about growing western dominance in global affairs, their tactics and strategies to address those concerns varied.8 Policy alignments between Moscow and Tehran served to strengthen their partnership by jointly shaping the balance of power with other major powers over the Iranian nuclear file. But their diverse strategies to engage with the West left room for each capital to pursue independent policy goals. Furthermore, neither Russia nor Iran had sufficient power to enforce its will over the partnership at all times. Their diplomatic, economic and military strategies were geared toward reaching the goal of maximizing their own power through mutual partnership but on a case-by-case basis.9 Russia strengthened its ties with the West when their relations were less hostile, in order to contain Iran. Iran was therefore unable to pursue diplomacy with Russia irrespective of western interests. Russia, meanwhile, conditioned its diplomacy to enabling Moscow to remain a broker of its own interests with both Tehran and the West. From a theoretical perspective, Russia classified its foreign policy by making, what Charles F. Hermann identified, necessary program changes and alterations designed to address its ties with Iran.10 Consequently, Russia insisted on the need to uphold international law to encourage Iran’s non-proliferation in the nuclear sphere and yet it demanded to trade with Iran despite sanctions. Russian demand to trade with Iran continued after the outbreak of the Russian-Ukranian conflict in 2022, and Moscow in turn defended Iran’s peaceful nuclear demands against unreasonable western pressures. Simultaneously, Russia balanced its energy interests with the West through policies designed to ultimately channel Iran’s energy resources toward Russian-controlled global markets. In return, Russia was able to dominate the diplomatic conversation with Tehran over its nuclear file and future energy prospects. Moreover, diplomatic attempts by Russia to strengthen or dilute the western-led sanctions regime on Iran were conditioned to crafting an independent big power policy toward Tehran that was increasingly defined by Russian interests rather than by the interests of other major powers. Russia’s decision to support collective international measures to manage the Iranian nuclear fuel cycle production, by the same token, was designed to enable Moscow to strengthen its partnership with Tehran over the latter’s nuclear program. For example, Russia backed initiatives that helped it serve as a guarantor to store or enrich nuclear material for Iran, or

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exchange nuclear fuel with the country. Despite wavering Russian and Iranian commitments to see these fuel agreements reach results, seeds of a more enduring alignment between them shaped over the need to preempt US-led unilateral measures, and major international-scale collisions in the Persian Gulf.

OVERVIEW

OF

RUSSIA-IRAN RELATIONS

Russia’s foreign policy approach toward Iran involved two enduring elements that never shifted before or after the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979. Firstly, Moscow advanced its foreign policy goals vis-à-vis Tehran by building connections not just with the Iranian state, but with influential Iranian groups or individuals. As a result, throughout history, the Russians held tremendous sway over Iranian civil society groups, including political parties, media and the clerical establishment. The Russian approach aimed primarily to keep extreme manifestations of Iranian identity, either through hyper nationalism under the Pahlavi monarchy or hyper religiosity under the Islamic republic, under tight control in a manner that would not present a threat to Russia or its interests in the Middle East. Secondly, to secure those interests, Russia attempted to prevent the United States from getting too involved in Iranian affairs. For example, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev famously warned Washington not to interfere in Iran’s domestic affairs in a speech delivered on the eve of the Iranian revolution in late 1978. Russia was content maintaining these two enduring elements of its ties with Iran. In every other respect, as a major power, Russia never showed interest in developing an alliance or a strategic partnership with an ambitious neighboring middle power such as Iran unless a move in these directions helped safeguard the enduring elements of its partnership with Tehran. Consequently, the nature of regimes in Iran was irrelevant to Moscow’s implementation of its policies toward the country. Moscow could work with any Iranian regime, and more recently with Iran’s Islamist revolutionary agenda, as long as this agenda did not significantly undermine Russian power and prestige. Unsurprisingly, the former Soviet Union chose not to see Iran’s Islamic revolution as a major threat. The Brezhnev Doctrine that enunciated threats to Russian interests in practice did not support measures to intervene in Iran in order to alter the course of its revolution. At the 26th CPSU

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Congress in 1981, Brezhnev even implied that the Iranian model of promoting Islamic movements which at the time was seen in the West as a major global threat, could also be seen as a liberating force if it aimed to end western influence.11 In subsequent years, Russia signaled to Iran that it would remain a non-hostile neighbor as long as the latter did not interfere with or undermine in any major way the Russian military intervention in Afghanistan (from 1979 to 1989), after the country’s communist-led party was overthrown by an Islamic jihadi movement in 1979. The Russian position forced on Iran the need to contain and reconstruct its conception of religious identity and ideational power if they underserved the advancement of ties with Moscow.12 Revolutionary Iran briefly felt that it stood the chance of pursuing an independent foreign policy that was not beholden to the world powers including Russia. Tehran even tried to alter its historic ties with Moscow by lecturing the Soviet Union’s communist leaders to embrace Islam. The founder of Iran’s revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, famously predicted the fall of communism represented by the Soviet state, because it represented a material rather than a spiritual ideology, and invited Russian leaders to study Islamic philosophy. Iran also steadfastly insisted that its religious identity would outlive worldly ideologies such as communism, and that by the same token, the Iranian revolution’s power would outlast Russian power.13 Moscow was amused but chose not to react to these Iranian verbal provocations, content to watch America’s power over Iran recede after the revolution in 1979, which also led to the dismantling of US military bases on Russia’s borders in the Iranian ports of Turkmen and Kabkan. In return, Russia kept revolutionary Iran content by offering it limited military supplies during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), after Moscow initially condemned the war despite supporting Baghdad, and cut off supplies to both warring armies until 1982. The resumption of Russian arms sales to Iran was triggered by a desire to maintain balance in Middle East markets for Russian arms, boost military sales, and retain a degree of influence over Tehran. Iran’s arms imports from the Soviet Union stood conservatively at US$975 million in the period between 1979 and 1983.14 But to make sure that Iran understood its place in relationship to Russia, Moscow sent the bulk of its military supplies in the tune of billions of dollars to Baghdad. Tehran maintained that nearly 85% of the Iraqi military supplies during the war in fact came from the Soviet Union.15 Russia’s approach toward Iran remained true to the goal of containing Iranian

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influence, and particularly its Islamic influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus even throughout the 1990s. In return, by 1992 Russia agreed to supply Iran with the needed technical know-how to develop the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant (BPP), which the western powers had refused to complete. The project promised to help revive the Russian nuclear industry in the aftermath of the breakup of the Former Soviet Union in 1991. In 1989, Russia and Iran had agreed to build agreements to develop Bushehr, and worked together to advance deals in the field through 1996. In addition, the two countries discussed arms deals, while Moscow attempted to encourage Tehran to commit to non-proliferation especially during the presidency of Russian president, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. Iran’s commitment not to interfere in the first Chechen War of 1994–1996 helped appease Russian nationalist voices, resulting from 1995 in Russia offering early investments in BPP in the tune of US$800 million, offering more than 300 training workshops to the Iranians to help complete the plant’s construction by 2000, and engaging 300 Russian companies in the process.16 In 1995, Russia’s interest in Iran’s markets grew after Moscow and Washington failed to build closer economic ties. Subsequently, Zarubezhatomenergostroi signed a contract to complete BPP. Russian military aide to Iran kept the military balance between international arms suppliers even as Washington contained Iran. In the 1990s, Russia was selling Iran weapons systems including tanks, missiles such as the S-200 air defense complexes, combat aircraft, armored personnel carriers, infantry combat vehicles and satellite technology. Russian-Iranian ties showed signs of improvement when Mohammad Khatami assumed Iran’s presidency in 1997. Khatami’s reformist agenda promised to ease international tensions with Iran and pressures by the West on Russia for working with Tehran. Between 1998 and 2001, the value of arms transferred between Russia and Iran was US$300 million, and Moscow was instrumental in advancing the Iranian ballistic missile and space programs.17 By 1999, however, the Russian Scientific Research and Design Institute of Energy Technologies came under international scrutiny and was sanctioned by the United States for facilitating the Iranian nuclear enrichment program. The Russian aviation industry was sanctioned for supplying Iran with military technology. The D Mendeleyev University of Chemical Technology of Russia, a public university based in Moscow, was sanctioned in 1999, for aiding Iran’s missile program. A year later, Russia withdrew

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from a 1995 deal with Iran, pushing Tehran to demand payments to complete the BPP project. In December 2000, Russia ignored the 1995 secret Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement that barred the sale of weapons to Iran after December 1999 in return for Washington not objecting to Russia’s previous transfers of sophisticated weapons to Tehran or imposing sanctions mandated under US laws as a response to those transfers. The shift in Russia’s approach arrived on the heels of mounting disagreements with the United States under the Bush administration which planned to build a grand Middle East strategy, threatening encroachment by western forces along Russia’s borders with the region. In March 2001, President Vladimir Putin hosted President Khatami, leading to the signing of the Treaty on the Basic Elements of Relations and the Principles of Cooperation. The visit revived military contacts between Moscow and Tehran, to pave the way for future contracts worth billions of dollars. It also reaffirmed Russian and Iranian commitment to withhold support to an aggressor in the event of an attack on either party. In 2002, the Ministry for Atomic Energy of the Russian Federation (MinAtom) and Iran discussed evaluating the construction of a second nuclear reactor, having held earlier talks to construct an enrichment plant for Iran back in 1995. But the advanced scale of the Iranian nuclear enrichment program led to increased international pressures on Tehran and Russia to cease cooperation.18 The volume of arms deals between Moscow and Tehran declined subsequently in 2001–2005, but Iran insisted that it was receiving conventional weapons that should not raise concerns in Washington. Overall, between 2002 and 2005, the value of arms agreements between Moscow and Tehran peaked to US$1.7 billion, enabling Russia to expand its commercial activities in Iran.19 As part of plans to fulfill its obligations to the BPP, Moscow then engaged with Tehran to receive the latter’s Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) for storage or further enrichment. In 2003, then Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Hassan Rouhani announced formally in a visit to the Kremlin that Iran would suspend nuclear enrichment and agree to sign the Additional Protocol, in order to show that it strictly adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and aimed to advance its partnership with Moscow. The volume of trade between Russia and Iran doubled that year, and then grew by another third in 2004.20

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But Iran failed to keep its end of the bargain to inform Russia of the scope of its nuclear activities. After Iran’s intentions to have a centrifuge plant in Natanz were uncovered in 2002, Russia backed an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution to supply the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) with recommendations that would lead to sanctions against Iran. Russia first opposed but would then comply with those sanctions. Between 2002 and 2003, Russia may have also decided to slow down the completion of BPP, by invoking technical reasons, and it listed Iran’s nuclear program as having “unclear status”. In 2004, at a G-8 summit at Sea Island, Georgia, Russia signed a declaration to end nuclear fuel cycle cooperation with countries that violated the NPT and IAEA safeguards commitments.21 Once Great Britain, France and Germany (E3) advanced the nuclear talks with Iran in 2003–2004, Russia also agreed to expand its nuclear cooperation with Tehran by helping complete BPP in October 2004. Moscow and Tehran held further talks to build seven more power plants for Iran, as long as Tehran rapidly ratified and implemented the IAEA Additional Protocol. Iran meanwhile hoped to build a strategic partnership with Russia to boost trade, advance joint security and reach markets in Central Asia.22 By the end of 2005, Russia and Iran signed an air defense system contract worth about US$800 million, marking the largest weapons deal on a single item and its related technologies with Iran in the post-Soviet period. The deal was followed by discussions pointing that Iran was prepared to receive 70% of its arms imports from Russia within a decade. In 2006, the United States enforced sanctions against two Russian defense centers, the state-owned Rosobornoexport and the fighter aircraft producer Sukhoi for violating US laws by supplying Iran with weapons.23 Iran, meanwhile, refused international offers that could curtail its nuclear activities, which then led Russia to support UNSC Resolution 1696 in July 2006. In October 2007, President Putin traveled to Iran before a planned visit to Israel, after dismissing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s calls to build a strategic alliance in January. But the Russian president was clear that he would not accept US military action against Iran. Russia backed three more sanctions regimes against Iran between 2007 and 2010, through UNSC Resolutions 1747, 1803 and 1929. In 2010, Moscow informed Tehran that as long as sanctions were in place, it could not join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a political, economic and security group established in 2001.

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Iran had deep misgivings over the political constraints that it faced to expand a partnership with Russia. Russians were equally frustrated, based on the information shared with this author, by the Iranian bureaucracy, factional infightings and corruption linked with the completion of the BPP project. Iranian officials including parliament member Alaeddin Boroujerdi who represented circles close to the supreme leader refrained from openly criticizing Russia for failing to expand ties.24 Increasingly, however, Tehran appeared concerned by Russian attempts to delay its bilateral obligations in implementing energy projects. The projects involved cooperation with Gazprom, Lukoil and Tatneft, plans to draw out boundaries in the Caspian Sea, and feasibility plans that would enable Iran to export oil and gas to Europe but not by bypassing Russia, including through the proposed Nabucco pipeline project aiming to link Asia to Europe that transpired in 2002. The implications of Russian procrastination in building ties with Tehran were unclear when it came to the issue of advancing Iran’s nuclear industry. Gazprom for example, controlled stocks at Atomstroyexport which was the main contractor for BPP. Moscow also temporarily halted construction of the BPP in 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2009 as the world powers engaged in difficult negotiations with Iran.25 And while Iran remained keen to build long-term partnerships with Russia in the nuclear field, Moscow was inclined to coordinate its policies with Washington after President Dmitriy Medvedev assumed office in 2008–2012.26 The Green movement in Iran in 2009, to contest a presidential race that led to Ahmadinejad’s re-election, brought to the front for Moscow the undesirable prospect of having to work with an unpopular group of Iran’s hardliners. Iran meanwhile refused a deal to send its uranium out of the country in return for receiving enriched uranium rods for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR). This was followed by revelations about Fordow’s enrichment activities in 2010. But Russia agreed to receive 1200 kilograms, nearly 80% of Iran’s declared 3.5% LEU in exchange for further refinement for the TRR.27 In May 2010, Brazil’s President Luiz Lula da Silva tried to receive Russian support for a joint Brazilian-Turkish initiative to build the Tehran Declaration, as a result of which Iran would swap nuclear fuel with Turkey to receive enriched nuclear material. President Medvedev dismissed the initiative by saying that it had a poor chance of success. Russia and the United States would proceed to support Resolution 1929 that would endorse tough sanctions on Iran, and halt the transfer of equipment to Tehran including tanks and warplanes in accordance with the terms of a

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UN Conventional Arms Register. Decrees were also put in place in Moscow to freeze or cancel most weapons contracts with Iran, except for those that did not immediately fall under the sanction regime. Ahmadinejad turned against the Russians and started looking for help from China and Germany to meet Iranian needs for goods and services. Meanwhile, US plans to set up missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic brought Iran back into Russia’s missile umbrella orbit, while Moscow worked with Israel to address the US influence over Israeli-Iranian tensions in the Middle East. Russia would proceed to agree to send the S-300 air defense system to Iran, a deal originally finalized in 2007–2008, but delayed the delivery. At the same time, Russia upheld the UN-backed arms embargo on Iran, banned the entry of 12 Iranian nuclear scientists and officials, and Iranian participation in Russian uranium extraction projects, as well as the transfer of heavy weaponry to Tehran.28 Although Russia promised to commission BPP in August 2010, power generation from the plant was delayed. Russia further insisted on maintaining its other vital partnerships in the Middle East and globally by fully backing measures to contain Iran over its nuclear file, especially as long as Ahmadinejad’s divisive personality and poor management threatened peace. In September, President Medvedev prohibited the sale of the S-300 system to Iran. In November, he met with Ahmadinejad on the sidelines of a summit on the Caspian Sea, to discuss their strained ties. Shortly after, Medvedev participated in a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Lisbon, Portugal, to respond to the challenge of ballistic missile proliferation by unfriendly countries. Although Iran was not identified directly as a threat in the summit’s final declaration, it was clear to Tehran that Russia and the western powers were keen to control the threat of the Iranian missile program.

RUSSIA-IRAN RELATIONS BEFORE, DURING THE NUCLEAR DEAL

AND

AFTER

The sections below are divided into three timeframes to review Russia-Iran ties, i.e. in 2011–2012 (during the pre-nuclear talks), 2013–2016 (during the nuclear talks and the implementation of the nuclear deal), and 2017– 2021 (the period after the agreement).

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Russia-Iran Ties in 2011–2012 By 2011, Russia had lost all hope that reforms could easily shape in Iran under Ahmadinejad. Simultaneously, Moscow was concerned about the consequences of western pressures to corner Iran over its nuclear program, fearing that it might radicalize internal Iranian politics. After opposing new sanctions on Iran, Moscow proceeded to offer a “step-by-step” approach to handling the Iranian nuclear file through the P5+1, which involved limiting sanctions in return for enhanced Iranian cooperation with the IAEA. But Moscow remained dedicated to preventing Iranian proliferation and working out a modus operandi with the West to reach the goal. To this end, Russia entertained the view that maintaining more sanctions could help reorient Iran to fix its problems with the world over its nuclear program.29 Maintaining pragmatic ties, however, proved to be difficult as Moscow and Tehran began a series of discussions to facilitate the delivery of the S-300 missile system, and explore options to engage in the barter of goods and services and expand cooperation in the mining and biotechnology sectors in the face of sanctions. In June 2011, Ahmadinejad joined Russia and China for security talks at the SCO summit in Kazakhstan, but failed to convince either country of his ability to build trust. President Medvedev made a point of not meeting Ahmadinejad for talks, except in the presence of Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. In August, Iran proceeded to sue Russia for damages if it did not deliver the S-300 system.30 Russia dismissed Iran’s plan to sue, citing that the delivery of the contract was subject to UNSC sanctions. Moreover, Russia believed that opening up Eurasian markets to Iranian oil and gas supplies in exchange for the delivery of agricultural and industrial goods and services to Iran was not a sound proposition. Moscow was not fully prepared to allow Iranian energy resources to compete in Russian markets. More importantly, at the diplomatic front, there was very little that bonded Moscow with Tehran in terms of immediate interests. Finally, the reality of harsh sanctions on Iran demanded that Russia remain patient in terms of entertaining its future energy options with Tehran. Following the SCO summit, Iran saw the need to open a new chapter in ties with Russia. The statement it delivered to this end came not from Iran’s beleaguered president but by his Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, a nuclear scientist by training who worked closely with the supreme leader to advance the nuclear talks. Russia may have taken the statement as a shift in Iran’s nuclear policy, especially given Ahmadinejad’s opposition to the idea

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of accommodating the world powers before advancing Iranian enrichment capacity so as to strengthen Tehran’s negotiating position. By the end of 2011, Moscow began showing signs of impatience with the sanction regime, and protested to an IAEA report on Iran’s enrichment program that could delay the completion of BPP, considering immense Russian investments in the power plant. In October, Russia had also voted against a UNSC draft resolution to condemn Syria which was close to Iran, over the unfolding Syrian civil conflict. The moves implied that Moscow-Tehran geopolitical interests might gradually converge. But convergence in Russian-Iranian policy goals did not transpire. Instability in Iranian markets served as a disincentive for Russian companies that would have otherwise moved into Iranian energy markets. Moscow continued to cultivate its partnerships with the West and with the Gulf Arab states by offering options to expand missile defense shields or collective security, while retaining its trade and diplomatic consultation channels open with Tehran. These channels enabled Moscow and Tehran to retain a dialog over a host of issues including terrorism, international crimes, drug trafficking and the conflict in Syria. More importantly, Russia was able to build a dialog that engaged not only Ahmadinejad’s government, but also a host of political, security and military institutions in Iran, and separate its conversations with the Iranian armed forces and its supreme leader from the country’s increasingly unwanted president. In 2012, after President Putin reassumed office, Moscow entertained rebuilding more balanced ties with Iran, given the limited US-Russian partnership through NATO and over the issue of missile defense. In June, Putin and Ahmadinejad met on the sidelines of an SCO summit in Beijing. By this time, Russia understood that Iran could develop nuclear breakout capability, and that it was more important to build a strong nuclear deal that could control the Iranian stockpiles of uranium. To maintain its security influence over Tehran, Russia promised the delivery of missile and satellite systems, and fuel technology and equipment assistance, mindful that its actions should not allow Iran to turn into an indirect security threat to Russian interests in the Middle East. As a result, controlling Iran’s nuclear ambitions while working with the country defined Moscow’s approach to shaping a new chapter of ties with Tehran.

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Russia-Iran Ties in 2013–2016 A reorientation of Russian foreign policy toward balancing its ties between East and West led to the revival of Moscow’s commitment to negotiating a strong nuclear deal with Iran. Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, and its departure from the G-8, pushed Moscow into further engagement with the West through the P5+1 framework. As a result, Tehran tried to maintain a constructive dialog with Moscow in this period. Iran entertained a new policy of prudence under Hassan Rouhani toward its neighbor, highlighted in a series of foreign and national security documents published by Tehran to demand so-called tadbir (prudence) in dealings with Moscow. The documents by and large concluded that Iranian compliance with a non-proliferation regime would strengthen the Russian-western partnership to enforce a nuclear deal that would also be beneficial to Iran. To build a deal, international pressures also mounted on Iran to withdraw the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) military advisers from Syria.31 Tehran sought above all to build a strategic union with Moscow. Such a union, however, was not possible given contrasting security perspectives between Moscow and Tehran.32 Tehran settled for building a roadmap for security with Moscow, to discuss broader security and defense initiatives in the Persian Gulf and in Syria, and reinforce the need for the delivery of Russian weapons and missile systems to help Iran balance against regional and international threats to its interests. Tehran may have also calculated that given tensions between the West and Russia over Crimea, that Moscow would need Iranian markets. Confidently, Tehran then began setting conditions to expand its ties with Moscow, which may have led Putin to cancel a trip to Iran in 2013. In September 2014, Russia publicly acknowledged that it viewed Iran as a natural ally, after embarking on an intense 12-month dialog with Tehran during which Putin and Rouhani met four times to discuss a host of regional files on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Russian energy companies resumed contacts with Iran to build economic and trade agreements potentially worth EUR70 billion. In November, Russia agreed to build two new nuclear reactors for Iran.33 In 2015, following the JCPOA, Moscow and Tehran merged policies over Syria to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power. The value of trade between the two capitals was

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estimated at US$1.2 billion, which Iran deemed insufficient. But Azerbaijan joined Russia and Iran after a trilateral summit in August 2016 to build a railroad to Central Asia. Russian oil companies including Lukoil were also prepared to invest US$40–50 billion in Iran’s oil and gas sector by 2018.34 In September 2015, Russia launched its first airstrikes in Syria. The IRGC Quds Force claimed that it played an instrumental role in convincing Moscow to lead the military operations, even when there was no clear evidence of a comprehensive Russian-Iranian military cooperation in Syria.35 But evidence suggested that the IRGC was encouraged by the Russian move, and increased the Iranian ground force in Syria as Moscow partially drew down its air campaign. Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif would later claim in leaked tapes that the move weakened the Iranian ground forces and their ability to defend the country’s borders, and even implied that it may have been designed by Moscow to mislead Tehran and sabotage the Iranian armed forces.36 In the following years, Russian and Iranian political and military strategies in Syria did not always converge, and IRGC forces suffered frequent losses due to Israeli shelling of Iranian strongholds in Syria while watching Russian-Israeli ties improve as Moscow and Washington brokered a deal on the cessation of hostilities in Syria in February 2016. On the economic front, Russia lacked funds to offer stimulus packages to revive ties with Iran. In November 2015, President Putin traveled to Iran to reinforce the importance of a Moscow-Tehran partnership, even endearing himself to Iran’s leaders with rare historic gifts mindful especially that Rouhani was susceptible to intellectual flattery, a point that transpired in this author’s discussions with a Russian diplomat. The trip marked also a summit meeting of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) in Tehran, enabling Moscow and Tehran to reinforce their critical energy partnerships. Russia proceeded to lift a ban on uranium exports to Iran, to then receive enriched uranium from Tehran. This enabled Iran to meet partial JCPOA requirements to dilute or ship 98% of its enriched uranium.37 In 2016, Moscow delivered the S-300 system to Iran, released loans in the sum of EUR2.2 billion, and promised an additional US$5 billion loan to Tehran, despite Iranian refusal to cap oil production to support higher prices. Russia subsequently was able to use an Iranian airbase in August to carry out bombing missions in Syria.

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Russia-Tehran Ties in 2017–2021 Following the implementation of the JCPOA, Iran marked the event by testing five battalions of the Russian S-300 long-range surface-to-air system in March 2017. The test involved a stimulated ballistic missile attack, and was carried out by the Iranian Air Defense Force.38 Iran would proceed to express interest in buying the more advanced S-400 system, which Russia would deploy to Syria. Meanwhile, within months, the S-300s were fully operationalized. In April, Rouhani traveled to Moscow to boost arms sales to Iran, as Israeli airstrikes on Iranian military facilities in Syria increased, and to facilitate the export of Iranian crude oil to Russia in exchange for the delivery of future products to Iran. Gazprom would step in to consider developing liquified natural gas projects for Iran, and entertained backing the potentially sizeable Peace Pipeline from Iran to India especially if it were redirected through East Asia. Furthermore, Rosneft prepared a roadmap to develop Iran’s oil and gas fields, valued at US$30 billion. Both Rosneft and Gazprom could also attract Chinese investments for Iran’s oil and gas markets.39 In November, Putin traveled to Iran, to discuss ties, and to show his determination to coordinate policies in order to face the sanctions imposed against Russia and Iran by the Trump administration. With the resumption of sanctions on Iran, Tehran pushed for barter trade with Moscow, and the two capitals would hold annual trade talks to continue to cooperate under sanctions.40 Meanwhile, Russia warned that the nuclear deal could fall apart unless the United States and the European Union (EU) countries complied with its terms.41 In August 2018, Russia and Iran joined the other littoral states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to conclude the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea. Tehran expected the convention to facilitate Russia’s ability to assume the role of a smart power by helping balance Iran’s energy ties with the West and in Asia. In September, President Rouhani traveled to Armenia to attend the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) Summit, after Iran joined a free trade agreement (FTA) with the body that came into effect in October. The FTA promised access to markets in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan as well as Russia, and Tehran proceeded to receive preferential treatments on its products to facilitate trade. In 2019, Zarif traveled to Moscow for consultations about the nuclear file. Iran informed Russia of its decision to reduce its commitments to the nuclear deal by proceeding to enrich uranium in Fordow. In response, Russia suspended its nuclear research projects in Iran.42 Russia also

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reassured the world powers that Iran would return to its commitments if sanctions were lifted. When Germany, France and the United Kingdom took steps to refer Iran to the UNSC in December, Moscow blamed Washington for destroying the nuclear deal.43 Russia and Iran maintained trade ties, estimated at US$1.33 billion in the first seven months of 2019, according to the Federal Customs Service of Russia. In addition, the EAEU preferential tariffs allowed Iran to experience 22.5% increase in its exports in the first six months of the year to the Eurasian markets, despite a 10% decline in the value of exports.44 Through a barter arrangement, Iran was also able to receive equipment and agricultural products in exchange for the oil that it had previously sold to Russia, marking a new era of Iranian food dependency on its northern neighbor.45 In November, Iran used the FTA to import and swap wheat from Russia and Kazakhstan, and strengthen the International North-South Transportation Corridors (INSTC) that linked Mumbai to Moscow via Iran and its Chabahar Port.46 To facilitate trade with Moscow, Iran introduced an alternative method of transaction to the European-led Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges that supported trade under sanctions, despite concerns by Tehran that the measure could lead to enhanced Russian scrutiny over internal Iranian financial mechanisms. Moscow and Tehran would extend the Russian financial messaging system to Iran’s Financial Electronic Messaging System to replace the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication known as SWIFT. The new measure promised to protect Russia and Iran against third country sanctions.47 Meanwhile, Iran expanded talks to join SCO as a member, as Russia eased tensions between Tehran and Tajikistan over the issue in light of the latter’s opposition to Iranian membership in the body. In December 2019, Russia reaffirmed its enhanced security cooperation with Iran when the two countries led a naval drill along with China in the Indian Ocean. The drills aimed to enhance war game capacity and coordinate military and safety activities in international waterways. Yet, despite the IRGC view that its ties with Moscow were strategic and an alliance was shaping, given regular joint military meetings, Russia frequently rebuffed the idea and instead encouraged Tehran to join a wider security dialog in the Persian Gulf with its Arab neighbors. For the most part, Russia avoided Iran’s security entanglements with the West or in the Middle East. Above all, Russia aimed to build joint military maneuverability to monitor and control Iranian defense and offense capacities and

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capabilities, while maximizing Iranian contribution to building up Moscow’s security interests in the Persian Gulf. Russian control over energy markets, including through GECF and OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) Plus, i.e. an alliance of crude oil producers to correct markets since 2017, helped in part control Iran, and make Iranian positions conditional to preserving the goals that Moscow aimed to build in the Persian Gulf and toward the West. For example, Moscow maintained that Iran should honor OPEC Plus agreements that limited production to maintain high oil prices, following the nuclear deal, even if Iran was in dire need of oil revenues and exports. To advance its goals, Russia offered alternative trade and security avenues to Iran to work with. For example, Iran, Russia and Turkmenistan expanded trilateral ties to trade electricity along their borders, fight threats from the Islamic State (IS), combat terrorism, and expand cooperation in the Caspian Sea. Iran could not compete with Russia’s or Turkmenistan’s gas exports, given the absence of gas export projects in the section of the Caspian Sea that Tehran controlled.48 With Russia’s approval, however, Iran and Azerbaijan explored joint oil projects in the Caspian.49 Iran concluded a shipping agreement with Kazakhstan to expand port cooperation in the Caspian, and exchanged sea trade experience with the littoral states.50 In September 2021, Iran joined the SCO as a member. More importantly, however, until at least the outbreak of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, Russian energy companies were unwilling to face US sanctions by investing in Iran. Yet, in the same year, Iran and Uzbekistan set up a joint security commission possibly with Moscow’s approval. Russia would also proceed to conclude new energy deals with Iran in 2022. Syria’s gradual stabilization and ability to contain IS militants happened in part through joint Russian, Iranian and Turkish efforts through the Astana Peace Process that started in 2017 to end the Syrian civil war. In mid-2019, Iran said its railroads would connect via Iraq to the Syrian Mediterranean coast once regional stability was restored. The project would enable Iran to gain footing in the Syrian Latakia port close to Russian military and port facilities.51 Russia and Iran also jointly developed plans to expand their influence over the Syrian Mediterranean regional ports of Tartus and Latakia, and explored ideas to build a strategic corridor to link the ports to the Persian Gulf region by land and railway.52 But frictions grew between Russia and Iran over the Syrian Baniyas Port located between Russia’s Hmeimim air base and Tartus. Baniyas’ oil pipelines

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stretching from Iraq to the Mediterranean, which Iran hoped to utilize, were part and parcel of the Russian strategy to control the flow of Iranian oil to the Mediterranean, especially as Iran stepped up its activities to boost its position in Syria with assistance from Hezbollah and through the Fatemiyoun Division and Liwa Zeinabiyoun brigades of Shi’i Afghan and Pakistani militia recruits.53 Disagreeing on their spheres of influence in Syria, Russia and Iran worked to build complementarity on the ground, and address the problem of terrorism in Syria.54 Iran prudently avoided igniting a military competition with Russia on the ground in Syria, despite reported clashes.55 Some clashes were dismissed as tactical, but pointed to efforts by each side to carve out spheres of influence, while accommodating each other’s interests.56 From Tehran’s perspective, it was important to keep Russia on its side, to avoid Iran’s nuclear interests being ignored by Moscow in the course of the nuclear talks through the P4+1. As Moscow expanded its contacts with Washington and Tel Aviv over Syria, the Quds Force confirmed that it had differences with the Rouhani government over the conduct of Iran’s Syrian policy, given the Iranian president’s appeasement policy toward Moscow.57 In return for Rouhani’s efforts, Russia rejected extending the Iran arms embargo, defying a UN mandated ban through October 2020. It further insisted that it was unwilling to comply with US sanctions on the issue of arms sales to Iran.58 Still, Tehran understood that Moscow would not provide it with advanced military needs.59 In fact, Russia and Israel worked jointly to prevent certain arms deals with Iran.60 As Iran moved away from its JCPOA commitments, Russia showed concern about Iran’s latent nuclear weapons capability. Moscow attempted to revive the nuclear deal through talks in Vienna in 2021, right before Iran’s presidential elections. Russian attempts aimed specifically to ease tensions between Tehran and the IAEA over inspection and monitoring mechanisms. To expedite a deal, Moscow also abandoned its earlier calls to build a more comprehensive deal, referred to in Iran as the JCPOA-plus, that would involve security talks between Iran and the world powers.61 In Tehran, meanwhile, politicians spoke of a desire to build a strategic partnership agreement with Moscow. But Zarif turned to criticizing other Iranian politicians for hurting the ties with Russia by previously ignoring the country for the most part in favor of building talks with the West after the finalization of the JCPOA. He insisted that these policies had already harmed Iranian goals of maintaining balanced relations between East and West. Zarif also warned that Tehran could not expect now to receive

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unconditional support from the East in the difficult times ahead to rebuild the nuclear deal. His earlier leaked interview files suggested that Moscow had derailed the possibility of arriving at a nuclear deal back in 2015, feeling ignored by Iran, and concerned if the deal strengthened the Iranian position in the world to the point of disregarding Russian interests. According to those files, months before the conclusion of the JCPOA, Russia had taken the extra step along with France to make additional demands, possibly to delay a deal or weaken the Iranian position, including that Iran should obtain a UNSC agreement to extend the nuclear deal on a bi-annual basis in order to ensure full Iranian compliance with the agreement.62 While Tehran continued to entertain building stronger strategic ties with Russia, it was also clear that the Russian positions at times echoed Israeli concerns about the Iranian nuclear program. Like Israel, Russia specifically aimed to ensure that Iran would not acquire nuclear weapons that could then undermine Russian or Israeli regional power and influence in the Middle East. Not surprisingly, Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, was unable to build a concrete agreement with President Putin when he traveled to Moscow in January 2022, hoping to seal a 25-year strategic deal that would bring about a turning point in Russian-Iranian ties. Instead, Russia and Iran agreed to advance a 20-year roadmap for cooperation, which remained a non-binding endeavor, while a previous 20-year cooperation agreement between the two countries remained in effect through 2026. But the ramping up of sanctions by the United States and Europe against Russia after it dispatched military forces to Ukraine encouraged Moscow to seek so-called logistical corridors through Iran for trade purposes.63 While Tehran welcomed the trade, this latest development threatened to potentially slow down Russian efforts to work with the West to finalize a nuclear deal that would also protect the Iranian nuclear program, if such a deal would align western and Iranian interests against Moscow. This could leave Tehran as well as the West in a state of uncertainty about Moscow’s future actions regarding the nuclear negotiations, depending on how the international tensions over Ukraine unfolded. In the meantime, Russia and Iran pursued cooperation opportunities in the political, economic and military spheres, and to boost mutual efforts to circumvent western sanctions.64 In further discussions between the two countries, they agreed to advance their cooperation to develop and increase production in oil and gas fields, after Tehran submitted a roadmap for

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cooperation in the energy sector to Moscow.65 Other areas of discussion between the two capitals involved cooperation in the agricultural sector, and the building of North–South trade corridors that was first explored in the 1990s, through new transportation services by land, sea and air. Along the way, Iran hoped to encourage Russia to avoid unilateral policies that might exclude its southern neighbor from Moscow’s regional and international dealings. To this end, the volume of trade between Russia and Iran was expected to increase in 2022, as it had in the previous year when it reached US$4 billion in 2021.66 Washington, meanwhile, said it would not let sanctions prevent Moscow from reaping the economic benefits of a nuclear deal with Iran, after Russia was charged with placing the nuclear talks on hold when it sent forces to Ukraine in February 2022, until its demands for trade with Tehran were met. Iran specifically hoped to receive Russian assistance to finalize a nuclear deal and to build nuclear power plants for Tehran per previous discussions between the two countries.

CONCLUSION Russia’s ties with Iran were based first and foremost on expediency, which could occasionally lead to shared strategic visions. But it was by no means a strategic partnership as Russian analysts frequently reminded Iran, and despite frequent Iranian efforts to call it a strategic partnership or to build one.67 Above all, Russia saw its ties with Iran to be convenient to leverage the West, and to build trade and economic partnerships that could grant Russia’s economy competitive advantage. From Iran’s perspective, its ties to Russia could be easily compromised in Moscow’s dealings with the West, or overshadowed by events in Ukraine, including in the handling of the Iranian nuclear program. As a result, Iran offered Russia political and economic incentives or acquiesced to Russian political and economic demands so it would support Tehran’s peaceful nuclear activities. As of the time of this writing, to support a nuclear deal, Russia demanded written US guarantees that it could engage in trade with Iran, despite US sanctions targeting Russia for sending troops to Ukraine in 2022. This signaled to Iran that Russia may be all too willing to trade Iranian interests in return for concessions from the United States. Tehran endorsed Moscow’s position after failing to alter them, despite Iran’s attempts to advance its interests with the West. As a result, Iran did not even seriously pitch its gas markets as an alternative source for global energy security after Europe feared that Russian gas supplies might halt in

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2022. To point to Russia’s importance to Iran in this period, the IRGC criticized Iran’s diplomats for even stating that the country aimed to build balanced ties between West and East in order to salvage the nuclear deal, as it gave Moscow the wrong signal that Tehran was not serious about building stronger relations with its northern neighbor.68 There was no sign that Russia was willing to shift its approach toward becoming more accommodating of Iran, unless Moscow’s interests were prioritized. The trajectory of Russian-Iranian relations in fact revealed several important trends, in which Russian power remained dominant. From a security perspective, Russia and Iran were determined to unify some of their visions for the Persian Gulf and the Middle East which called for expanded regional security cooperation including in the nuclear sphere and reduced US involvement. This suggested that Russia’s and Iran’s extended cooperation to bring peace to Syria, build regional security mechanisms in the Persian Gulf, and expand region-wide cooperation in the nuclear sphere in the Middle East, would continue. But Russia was in a position to take a lead over Iran in these fronts, given Moscow’s better bilateral relations with other countries in the Middle East. In the event of an escalation in US-Iran or US-Russia ties, Russia was thus in a position to assert its regional role in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, by always prioritizing its interests vis-à-vis Tehran. As a world power, Russia was also in a position to play a critical role in handling the Iran nuclear file, by cautioning Tehran to not abandon the principles of non-proliferation or resume a rapid nuclear program. Furthermore, Moscow would assert along with the EU countries that Iran should return to its commitments under a nuclear deal rather than face the prospects of crushing UNSC sanctions. But as a UNSC member state with veto power, Russia could thwart US pressures to further isolate Iran through UN-led sanctions. More sanctions, if put in place, could roll back the achievements made to date by Moscow and Tehran to expand trade in Eurasian markets, in the Caspian Sea and with the SCO member states. While Iran needed this trade more than Russia at least before it sent forces to Ukraine, the conflict in Ukraine also pointed that Moscow would remain fundamentally opposed to more sanctions against itself and possibly Iran. But if tighter sanctions were passed, Moscow and Tehran would be able to trade if they so decided to, aided by an extensive financial and banking system that they put in place. To this end, Russia and Iran even briefly explored forming an anti-sanction coalition with China, Venezuela and Syria.69

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Russia played an equally important role keeping US military threats against Iran muted, especially when Moscow said it would stand by its decision to sell arms to Tehran, and expanded joint Iranian-Russian naval drills. All signs pointed that Moscow and Tehran were determined to expand this military cooperation, especially after Russian forces entered Ukraine. This Russian policy enabled Iran to thwart US pressures and avoid war in the course of the nuclear talks. But the prospects of Iran’s increased dependency on Russia for its military and food security meant that Iranian power was overshadowed by larger Russian interests. When Russian and Iranian interests converged to enhance their mutual security goals, this allowed Iran to function as a relatively stable state despite sanctions. However, if those interests collided when Iran decided to lead its own military and security interests, irrespective of Russian positions, a necessary give and take and goal adjustment always occurred in the dynamics that shaped the Russian-Iranian relations that did not always favor Tehran.

NOTES 1. Discussions in Europe between this author and an Iranian cleric in 2014. 2. For views about how Russia sees Iran, see also Dmitri Trenin and Alexey Malashenko, “Iran: A View from Moscow,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010, https://carnegieendowment.org/files/iran_ view_moscow.pdf. 3. For identity and international relations, see Craig Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 94–130; V. A. Schmidt, “Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse,” Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 11 (June 2008): 303–326. 4. For definition of grand strategy, see Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for US Grand Strategy (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2015); Hal Brands, What Good IS Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Cornell University Press, 2014). 5. “Argument in Parliament Over Confirmation of Recommended Minister of Intelligence by Iran’s Leader,” BBC Farsi, August 22, 2021, https://www. bbc.com/persian/iran-58296510. 6. Kasra Naji, “Iran’s Zarif Criticizes Revolutionary Guards’ Influence in Leaked Tape,” BBC, April 26, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/worldmiddle-east-56889412.

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7. “Ali Mottahari: Russia Has Infiltrated the System of the Islamic Republic and Has Supporters,” Gooya News, August 18, 2021, https:// news.gooya.com/2021/08/post-55029.php; “Ali Mottahari: Russia Has Infiltrated Into Our System and Has Backers,” Ensaf News, Mordad 27, 1400, http://www.ensafnews.com/306186/%D8%B9%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%B7%D9%87%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%DB%8C %D9%87-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85-%D9% 85%D8%A7-%D9%86%D9%81%D9%88%D8%B0-%DA%A9%D8%B1%D8% AF%D9%87-%D9%88-%D8%AD%D8%A7/. 8. For arguments that Russia and Iran align security narratives, see Ghoncheh Tazmnini, “Russian-Iranian Relations: Impact on Persian Gulf Interests,” in Nikolay Kozhanov, ed. Russia’s Relations with the GCC and Iran (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 177–203. 9. For middle power strategies, see Håkan Edström and Jacob Westberg, “The Defense Strategies of Middle Powers: Competing for Security, Influence and Status in an Era of Unipolar Demise,” Comparative Strategy, Volume 39, No. 2 (March 2020): 171–190, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/ 10.1080/01495933.2020.1718992. 10. For theoretical debates, see Giovanni Baldoni, “A Theoretical Analysis of Russian Foreign Policy: Changes Under Vladimir Putin,” E-International Relations, September 10, 2016, https://www.e-ir.info/2016/09/10/atheorical-analysis-of-russian-foreign-policy-changes-under-vladimir-putin/. 11. Dmitri Trenin and Alexey Malashenko, “Iran: A View from Moscow”. 12. For more on Iran’s ideational shift toward Russia, see Mahmood Shoori, “Iran & Russia: From Balance of Power to Identity Analysis,” Iranian Review of Foreign Affairs, Volume 2, No. 2 (Summer 2011): 105–125, https://ciaotest. cc.columbia.edu/journals/irfa/v2i2/f_0023338_19081.pdf. 13. Zohreh Balazadeh, Fahimeh Ghaibi, “Comparative Analysis of Relations Between Iran and Russia Under Mr. Khatami and Mr. Ahmadinejad,” Scientific Quarterly of International Relations Studies, Volume 4, No. 15 (Summer 1390): 35–62, http://prb.iauctb.ac.ir/article_524516.html. 14. Kenneth R. Timmerman, “Fanning the Flames: Guns, Greed and Geopolitics in the Gulf War,” The Iran Brief, 1986–1988, http://www. iran.org/tib/krt/fanning_ch7.htm. 15. “Soviet Union, Supplier of 85% of Iraqi Arms in War with Iran,” DEFA Press, Mehr 29, 1397, https://defapress.ir/fa/news/306384/%D8%B4% D9%88%D8%B1%D9%88%DB%8C-%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C% D9%86-%DA%A9%D9%86%D9%86%D8%AF%D9%87-%DB%B8%DB%B5%D8%AF%D8%B1%D8%B5%D8%AF-%D8%AA%D8%B3%D9%84%DB% 8C%D8%AD%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%82-% D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%AC%D9%86%DA%AF-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8% A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86.

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16. Zohreh Balazadeh and Fahimeh Ghaibi, “Comparative Analysis of Relations Between Iran and Russia Under Mr. Khatami and Mr. Ahmadinejad”. 17. Lionel Beehner, “Russia-Iran Arms Trade,” Council on Foreign Relations, November 1, 2006, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/russia-iran-armstrade; Alexandr V. Nemets, Robert W. Kurz, “The Iranian Space Program and Russian Assistance,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Volume 22 (2009): 87–96, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA549116.pdf. 18. Eric D. Moore, “The Crisis of Cooperation: A Critical Analysis of Russian-Iranian Relations in the Post-Soviet Era” (2012), Dissertations and Theses, Paper 902, https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.902. 19. Lionel Beehner, “Russia-Iran Arms Trade”. 20. “Beginning of the Meeting with Secretary of the Iranian Supreme Council of National Security Hassan Rouhani,” The Kremlin, February 18, 2005, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22833. 21. Vladimir A. Orlov and Alexander Vinnikov, “The Great Guessing Game: Russia and the Iranian Nuclear Issue,” Washington Quarterly, Volume 28, No. 2 (Spring 2005): 49–66, https://www.pircenter.org/media/content/ files/11/13649725070.pdf. 22. Ibid. 23. Alla Kassianova, “Russian Weapons Sales to Iran: Why They Are Unlikely to Stop,” PONARS Policy Memo No. 427, https://csis-website-prod.s3. amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/media/csis/pubs/pm_ 0427.pdf. 24. “Russian and China Vote for Sanctions Resolution Was ‘Caring’,” BBC Farsi, June 14, 2010, https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran/2010/06/ 100614_l03_russia_sanctions. 25. Zohreh Balazadeh, and Fahimeh Ghaibi, “Comparative Analysis of Relations Between Iran and Russia Under Mr. Khatami and Mr. Ahmadinejad”. 26. Kassianova, “Russian Weapons Sales to Iran: Why They Are Unlikely to Stop”. 27. John W. Parker, “Russia and the Iranian Nuclear Program: Replay or Breakthrough?” Institute for National Strategic Studies, Strategic Perspectives, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/stratperspective/inss/ Strategic-Perspectives-9.pdf. 28. “Islamic Republic; Why Did Russia Not Veto Resolution 1929?” Khabar Online, Mehr 3, 1389, https://www.khabaronline.ir/news/94977/% D8%AC%D9%85%D9%87%D9%88%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B3% D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C-%DA%86%D8%B1%D8%A7-%D8% B1%D9%88%D8%B3%DB%8C%D9%87-%D9%82%D8%B7%D8%B9%D9% 86%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%87-1929-%D8%B1%D8%A7-%D9%88%D8%AA %D9%88-%D9%86%DA%A9%D8%B1%D8%AF.

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29. Nikolay Kozhanov, “ Introduction,” in Nikolay Kozhanov ed., Russia’s Relations with the GCC and Iran (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 1–20. 30. Pavel Felgenhauer, “Pro-Iranian Lobby Attempts to Revive Russia’s Sale of S-300 Missiles to Iran,” The Jamestown, July 26, 2012, https://jamestown. org/program/pro-iranian-lobby-attempts-to-revive-russias-sale-of-s-300missiles-to-iran/. 31. John W. Parker, “Russia and the Iranian Nuclear Program: Replay or Breakthrough?” 32. Masoud Rezaee, “Relations Between Iran and Russia After Nuclear Agreement Will Not Turn Strategic,” IRDiplomacy, Tir 20, 1394, http:// www.irdiplomacy.ir/fa/news/1949777/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7% D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%DB%8C%D9%87-%D9%BE%D8%B3-%D8% A7%D8%B2-%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%81%D9%82-%D9%87%D8% B3%D8%AA%D9%87-%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%87% D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%AF%DB%8C-%D9%86%D9%85%DB%8C-%D8% B4%D9%88%D8%AF. 33. Nikolay Kozhanov, “Are the Russians and Iranians Friends?” Fair Observer, January 30, 2015, https://www.fairobserver.com/region/europe/arethe-russians-and-iranians-friends-12812/. 34. Elaheh Koolaee, Hamed Mousavi, Afifeh Abedi, “Fluctuations in Iran-Russia Relations During the Past Four Decades,” Iran and the Casucuses, Volume 24 (2020): 216–232, https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/349243697_Fluctuations_in_Iran-Russia_Relations_During_ the_Past_Four_Decades; Dmitri Trenin, “Russia and Iran: Historic Mistrust and Contemporary Partnership,” Carnegie, August 18, 2016, https://carnegiemoscow.org/2016/08/18/russia-and-iran-historicmistrust-and-contemporary-partnership-pub-64365. 35. For IRGC positions, see Saeed Jaafari, “Testing Zarif Claims on Controversial Audio File; Did Zarif Say the Truth?” Euro News, April 30, 2021, https://per.euronews.com/2021/04/30/verification-of-zarif-swords-in-controversial-leaked-tape. 36. Reza Haghigatnejad, “Qasem Soleimani According to Zarif; Putin’s Commander,” Radio Farda, Ordibehesht 6, 1400, https://www. radiofarda.com/a/rh-qasem-soleimani-s-relationship-with-vladimir-putin/ 31223717.html. 37. Oren Dorell, “Russian President Putin Pays a Visit to Iran Bearing Gifts,” USA Today, November 23, 2015, https://www.usatoday.com/story/ news/world/2015/11/23/russian-president-putin-pays-visit-iranbearing-gifts/76251032/.

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38. France-Stefan Gady, “Iran Test Forces Ballistic Missile Interceptor,” The Diplomat, March 7, 2017, https://thediplomat.com/2017/03/iran-testfires-ballistic-missile-interceptor/. 39. Nikolay Kozhanov, “Russia: Iran’s Ambivalent Partner,” in Azadeh Zamirirad, ed. Forced to Go East? German Institute for International and Security Affairs, April 2020, No. 01, https://www.swp-berlin.org/ publications/products/arbeitspapiere/Working_Paper_FG06_01-2020__ Forced_to_Go_East_Zamirirad.pdf; Najam Abbas, “Russia, Iran Strategize Energy Supplies to South & East Asia,” Anadolu Agency, November 3, 2017, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/energy/analyst/russia-iran-strategizeenergy-supplies-to-south-east-asia/13911. 40. “Russia and Iran Turn to Barter Trade,” Radio Farda, June 19, 2019, https://en.radiofarda.com/a/russian-and-iran-turn-to-barter-trade-/ 30008556.html. 41. “Russia Warns Nuclear Deal in Danger of Falling Apart,” The Times of Israel, December 30, 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/russia-warnsiran-nuclear-deal-in-danger-of-falling-apart/. 42. “Russia Suspends Project with Iran Due to Uranium Enrichment,” Times of Israel, December 5, 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/russiasuspends-project-with-iran-due-to-uranium-enrichment/. 43. “Russia Warns EU Over Crumbling Iran Nuclear Deal,” Euro News, December 30, 2019, https://www.euronews.com/2019/12/30/russiawarns-eu-over-crumbling-iran-nuclear-deal. 44. “Eurasia Agreement Will be Canceled if Not Reach Free Trade,” Fars News Agency, November 10, 2019, https://www.farsnews. com/news/13980819000499/‫ﻣﻮﺍﻓﻘﺖ‬%E2%80%8C-‫ﺗﺠﺎﺭﺕ‬-‫ﺑﻪ‬-‫ﺍﮔﺮ‬-‫ﺍﻭﺭﺍﺳﯿﺎ‬-‫ﻧﺎﻣﻪ‬ ‫ﻣﯽ‬-‫ﻟﻐﻮ‬-‫ﻧﺮﺳﺪ‬-‫ﺁﺯﺍﺩ‬%E2%80%8C‫ﺷﻮ‬. 45. “Iran, Russia Record 24% Growth in Bilateral Trade,” Financial Tribune, September 13, 2019, https://financialtribune.com/articles/domesticeconomy/99838/iran-russia-record-24-growth-in-bilateral-trade. 46. “Iran Commences Eurasian Economic Union Free Trade with Russia & Kazakhstan,” Russia Brief, November 13, 2019, https://www.russiabriefing.com/news/iran-commences-eurasian-economic-union-free-traderussia-kazakhstan.html/. 47. “Banks in Iran, Russia Connected via Non-SWIFT Financial Messaging Service,” Financial Tribune, September 17, 2019, https://financialtribune.com/articles/business-and-markets/99912/banks-in-iran-russiaconnected-via-non-swift-financial-messaging. 48. “Think About Holding Trilateral Summit between Russia-IranTurkmenistan,” IR Diplomacy, Ordibehesht 23, 1398, http://www. irdiplomacy.ir/fa/news/1983408/-‫ﺍﯾﺮﺍﻥ‬-‫ﺭﻭﺳﯿﻪ‬-‫ﺟﺎﻧﺒﻪ‬-‫ﺳﻪ‬-‫ﺍﺟﻼﺱ‬-‫ﺑﺮﮔﺰﺍﺭﯼ‬-‫ﻓﮑﺮ‬-‫ﺑﻪ‬ ‫ﺑﺎﺷﯿﻢ‬-‫ﺗﺮﮐﻤﻨﺴﺘﺎﻥ‬.

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49. “Rouhani: Iran Will Studiously Pursue Oil Exploration and Production in the Caspian Sea,” Fars News Agency, March 1, 2019. https://www.farsnews.com/news/13980912001258/‫ﭘﺮﻭﮊﻩ‬-‫ﺍﯾﺮﺍﻥ‬-‫ﺭﻭﺣﺎﻧﯽ‬%E2%80%8C-‫ﻫﺎﯼ‬ ‫ﺑﺎ‬-‫ﺭﺍ‬-‫ﺧﺰﺭ‬-‫ﺩﺭﯾﺎﯼ‬-‫ﺍﺯ‬-‫ﻧﻔﺖ‬-‫ﺍﺳﺘﺨﺮﺍﺝ‬-‫ﻭ‬-‫ﺍﮐﺘﺸﺎﻑ‬-‫ﻣﺸﺘﺮﮎ‬. 50. “Details of Sea Shipping Agreement between Iran and Kazakhstan,” Fars News Agency, November 12, 2019, https://www.farsnews. com/news/13980821000478/%E2%80%8C-‫ﺗﺠﺎﺭﺕ‬-‫ﮐﺸﺘﯿﺮﺍﻧﯽ‬-‫ﻣﻮﺍﻓﻘﺘﻨﺎﻣﻪ‬-‫ﺟﺰﺋﯿﺎﺕ‬ ‫ﻗﺰﺍﻗﺴﺘﺎﻥ‬-‫ﻭ‬-‫ﺍﯾﺮﺍﻥ‬-‫ﺩﺭﯾﺎﯾﯽ‬. 51. “Iran Rail Network to Connect to Eastern Mediterranean,” Jomhuri Eslmai News Agency, August 19, 2019, https://www.irna. ir/news/83004528/‫ﺷﻮﺩ‬-‫ﻣﯽ‬-‫ﻭﺻﻞ‬-‫ﻣﺪﯾﺘﺮﺍﻧﻪ‬-‫ﺷﺮﻕ‬-‫ﻛﺸﻮﺭﻫﺎﯼ‬-‫ﺑﻪ‬-‫ﺍﯾﺮﺍﻥ‬-‫ﺭﯾﻠﯽ‬-‫ﺷﺒﻜﻪ‬. 52. “Iranian Private Sector Investors Will Rebuild Syria/600 Billion Dollar Syrian Market for Iranian Contractors//Central Bank to Ensure Investments,” ILNA, Mehr 9, 1397, https://www.ilna.news/‫ﺍﻗﺘﺼﺎﺩﯼ‬-‫ﺑﺨﺶ‬-‫ﺑﺎﺯﺍﺭ‬-‫ﮐﻨﻨﺪ‬-‫ﻣﯽ‬-‫ﺑﺎﺯﺳﺎﺯﯼ‬-‫ﺭﺍ‬-‫ﺳﻮﺭﯾﻪ‬-‫ﺍﯾﺮﺍﻧﯽ‬-‫ﺧﺼﻮﺻﯽ‬-‫ﺑﺨﺶ‬-‫ﮔﺬﺍﺭﺍﻥ‬-‫ﺳﺮﻣﺎﯾﻪ‬-705127/4 ‫ﺍﺳﺖ‬-‫ﻣﺮﮐﺰﯼ‬-‫ﺑﺎﻧﮏ‬-‫ﺑﺎ‬-‫ﻫﺎ‬-‫ﮔﺬﺍﺭﯼ‬-‫ﺳﺮﻣﺎﯾﻪ‬-‫ﺗﻀﻤﯿﻦ‬-‫ﺍﯾﺮﺍﻧﯽ‬-‫ﭘﯿﻤﺎﻧﮑﺎﺭﺍﻥ‬-‫ﺑﺮﺍﯼ‬-‫ﺳﻮﺭﯾﻪ‬-‫ﺩﻻﺭﯼ‬-‫ﻣﯿﻠﯿﺎﺭﺩ‬. 53. Maysam Behravesh, Giorgio Cafiero, “Can Russian-Iranian Alignment in Syria Last?” Middle East Institute, October 16, 2019, https://www.mei. edu/publications/can-russian-iranian-alignment-syria-last. 54. Assel Satubaldina, “Kazakh Capital Hosts Latest Round of Astana Process Talks on Syria,” The Astana Times, December 12, 2019, https:// astanatimes.com/2019/12/kazakh-capital-hosts-latest-round-of-astanaprocess-talks-on-syria/. 55. “11 Dead in Syria Clashes Between Russia Troops and Pro-Iran Militias,” Middle East Monitor, April 16, 2019, https://www. middleeastmonitor.com/20190416-11-dead-in-syria-clashes-betweenrussia-troops-and-pro-iran-militias/. 56. Sirwan Kajjo, “Tensions Grow Between Russia, Iran in Syria,” Voice of America, May 27, 2019, https://www.voanews.com/extremism-watch/ tensions-grow-between-russia-iran-syria. 57. “Sardar Gha’ani: Sepah Brought Assad to Tehran/Soleimani and Zarif Are Friends,” Iranian Students’ News Agency, March 6, 2019, https://www. isna.ir/news/97121507964/-‫ﺁﻭﺭﺩ‬-‫ﺗﻬﺮﺍﻥ‬-‫ﺑﻪ‬-‫ﺳﭙﺎﻩ‬-‫ﻗﺪﺱ‬-‫ﻧﯿﺮﻭﯼ‬-‫ﺭﺍ‬-‫ﺍﺳﺪ‬-‫ﻗﺎﺁﻧﯽ‬-‫ﺳﺮﺩﺍﺭ‬ ‫ﻭ‬-‫ﺳﻠﯿﻤﺎﻧﯽ‬. 58. Henry Meyer, “Russia Rejects Extending Iran Arms Embargo, Defying US,” Bloomberg, December 27, 2019, https:// dsm.forecastinternational.com/wordpress/2019/11/20/russia-ready-todiscuss-arms-contracts-with-iran/goo; https://www.bloomberg.com/ news/articles/2019-12-27/russia-rejects-extending-iran-arms-embargodefies-u-s-pressure.

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59. Pyotr Kortunov and Abdolrasool Divsallar, “Russia Unlikely to Stay Neutral if US and Iran Go to War,” The Moscow Times, May 28, 2019, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/05/28/russia-unlikely-tostay-neutral-if-us-and-iran-go-to-war-a65771. 60. “Israel and Russia Coordinate Arms Sale Preventing Deals with Iran,” Middle East Monitor, December 13, 2019, https://www. middleeastmonitor.com/20191213-israel-and-russia-coordinate-armssale-preventing-deals-with-iran/. 61. “Moscow: In Vienna Talks, “JCPOA Plus” Idea Was Abandoned,” Mashreqh News, Ordibehesht 8, 1400, https://newsin.ir/fa/content/ 21142480/%D9%85%D8%B3%DA%A9%D9%88-%D8%AF%D8%B1-% D9%85%D8%B0%D8%A7%DA%A9%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D9%88% DB%8C%D9%86%D8%8C-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%AF%D9%87-%C2%AB %D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%85-%D9%BE%D9%84%D8% A7%D8%B3%C2%BB-%DA%A9%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B1-%DA%AF% D8%B0%D8%A7%D8%B4%D8%AA%D9%87-%D8%B4%D8%AF.html. 62. “Last Report on JCPOA by Foreign Ministry to Parliament’ Criticism of Factional Fighting and “Hurting” Allies,” BBC Farsi, July 12, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran-57803748; “Publication of Audio File of Zarif About Soleimani and Russian Derailing JCPOA,” BBC Farsi, April 25, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran-56878595. 63. “Russia: Given Western Sanctions We Seek Logistical Corridors Through Iran,” Asriran, May 23, 2022, https://www.asriran.com/fa/news/ 841051/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%DB%8C%D9%87-%D8%A8%D8% A7-%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%AC%D9%87-%D8%A8%D9%87-%D8%AA% D8%AD%D8%B1%DB%8C%D9%85%E2%80%8C%D9%87%D8%A7%DB% 8C-%D8%BA%D8%B1%D8%A8-%D8%A8%D9%87-%D8%AF%D9%86% D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84-%DA%A9%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%AF%D9%88% D8%B1%E2%80%8C%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D9%84%D8%AC%D8% B3%D8%AA%DB%8C%DA%A9%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%A7% DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%87%D8%B3%D8%AA%DB%8C %D9%85. 64. “Deputy Foreign Minister of Iran: Countries Under Sanctions Seek Our ‘Sanctions Neutralization Know How’,” BBC Farsi, May 15, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran-61454271. 65. “Iran Ambassador: Military Cooperation with Russia Is Part of Relations Between the Two Countries,” Fars News Agency, Ordibehesht 26, 1401, https://www.farsnews.ir/news/14010226000169/%D8%B3%D9%81% DB%8C%D8%B1-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9% 87%D9%85%DA%A9%D8%A7%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D9%86%D8%B8%D8% A7%D9%85%DB%8C-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B3%DB %8C%D9%87-%D8%A8%D8%AE%D8%B4%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%

4

66.

67.

68.

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D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%AF%D9%88-%DA% A9%D8%B4%D9%88%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA. “Russia Trade Rep in Iran: Bilateral Trade Exchanges Has Seen Unprecedented Increase,” BBC Farsi, May 5, 2022, https://www. bbc.com/persian/business-61330113. For Russian views on the issue, see Habib Hosseini Fard, “‘Strategic Relations’ Between Iran and Russia; Tehran Insists and Moscow Denies,” Radio Farda, Ordibehesht 28, 1400, https://www.radiofarda.com/a/isthe-strategic-relationship-between-iran-and-russia-real-/31261453.html. “Harsh Criticism of Media Close to Sepah About Foreign Minister of Iran Remarks About Russia,” Euro News, January 19, 2022, https://per. euronews.com/2022/01/19/iranian-extremists-criticize-the-foreignminister. “We Lost Caucasus Concession on Path to Vienna/Our Ambassador in Baku Does Not Understand the Region,” Mehr News Agency, Aban 3, 1400, https://www.mehrnews.com/news/5332279/%D8%A7%D9%85% D8%AA%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D9%82%D9%81%D9%82%D8%A7% D8%B2-%D8%B1%D8%A7-%D8%AF%D8%B1%D8%B5%D9%81-%D9% 88%DB%8C%D9%86-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AE%D8%AA%DB%8C% D9%85-%D8%B3%D9%81%DB%8C%D8%B1%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86-% D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%A8%D8%A7%DA%A9%D9%88-%D9%85%D9% 86%D8%B7%D9%82%D9%87-%D8%B1%D8%A7-%D9%86%D9%85%DB% 8C%D8%B4%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AF; “Joint Criticism of China and Russia of Western Country Sanctions,” BBC Farsi, March 23, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/persian/world-56493485.

CHAPTER 5

China and Iran: An Auxiliary Partnership

Relations between China and Iran are shaped in part by their complementary roles when they interact with the world powers. In the course of the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program in the past decade, China viewed Iran as a partner in the Persian Gulf while the world powers competed for influence in the internationally strategic and hydrocarbonrich waterway. Iran looked at China as a benign Asian power rather than a hostile major power. These viewpoints enabled China to help Iran balance its interests in the Persian Gulf against the interests of hostile world powers. China was what I term an ‘auxiliary partner’ for Iran in this respect. Chinese policy choices enabled Iran to uphold the tenuous balance it needed to stabilize and advance its regional and international ties. But despite its increasing influence over Iran, China was not a major participant in driving the balancing act between Iran and other world powers.1 As an auxiliary partner, China was positioned to help Iran confront potential threats from the major powers to contain the Iranian nuclear program through sanctions, military action or sabotage attacks. But Iran’s different identity politics, a distinct mesh of Persian and Islamic cultures, compared to China’s dominant communist and socialist identities undermined the shaping of an alliance between the two countries. From a constructivist point of view, Iran’s Islamic worldview influenced its policy choices toward communist China.2 In other words, the ideological component of Iran’s foreign policy behavior kept communist China at a distance. In fact, I argue that Iran’s unlimited ideational-based aspirations always ensured that the ideological © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Keynoush, The World Powers and Iran, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09249-7_5

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factors influencing its foreign policy remained an ultimate source of inspiration for the country and carried the potential to compromise any new order that China and Iran might have otherwise built in the Persian Gulf, despite the shaping of a new strategic partnership between them based mainly on material factors by 2021.3 Neorealism, and its insistence on separating the pursuit of power and security from ideational forces, impacted Iran’s policy choices toward China. But this did not reject the possibility for Iran to let ideational considerations trump material considerations when it came to managing its future ties with China. According to the scholar F. Gregory Gause, ideologically oriented regimes with limited power could cause a threat to security irrespective of neorealist based shifts in power balance and military capabilities that could not always be primary thoughts but perceptual variables of regime survival.4 Yet, Iran refrained from questioning China’s policies toward the nearly 12 million Uyghurs who are mostly Muslims in Xinjiang. This was because the shared ideational aspects of the Sino-Iranian relationship were tenuous, apart from their common identities as Asian powers keen on being less beholden to US policy preferences. But a level of convergence on this issue between Beijing and Tehran was never the sole reason for their perception of threat from the United States. Those perceptions were formed separately in China and Iran through historic events, leadership perceptions, and regime survival factors, rather than through pure ideational drive.5 Consequently, the Sino-Iranian partnership frequently suffered from under-balancing shaped by a failure to form a strong alliance. Finding the right balance between its ties with the United States of America and Iran remained a challenge for China.6 In response, China opted not to be tied to a balancing approach to reconciling its conflicting international interests. By making balancing less critical or vital to its interests, Beijing pursued multiple paths to building partnerships with both the United States and Iran, often exacerbating contradictions and dualities in the Chinese policy toward both countries. Yet, by avoiding major disruptions that were caused by the tensions in the US-Iran ties, Beijing was able to expand its influence over Tehran.7 Building multipolarity in the nuclear talks between the world powers and Iran was a key goal for China. As an auxiliary partner, Beijing helped Tehran assert its power in relationship to other global powers. China’s hands-off policy in Iran’s domestic affairs boosted Beijing’s role as a reliable but distant protector while Tehran faced an international crisis over its nuclear

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program. In this process, the prospect of Iran’s fallback into operating as a pariah state that developed nuclear weapons capabilities, or its ability to rejoin the international community as a peaceful nation that adhered to the principles of nuclear non-proliferation, was less important to Beijing than the pathways each option presented to engage with Tehran. After all, China had developed a similar approach toward North Korea, a neighbor that it lived and engaged with despite Pyongyang’s nuclear build up. Beijing and Tehran were thus able to explore a range of diverging and converging interests in the course of the nuclear talks in the past decade, shaped by staggered levels of progress. This approach ensured the continuity of the Sino-Iranian partnership, which was based on a desire to avoid major risks while leaving room for error. Ultimately, Iran’s penchant to develop its nuclear program intensified the energy security sub-regionalization patterns in the Persian Gulf. In turn, this enabled China and Iran to work on building mutually beneficial energy and market security policies, while encouraging regionalism and promoting partnership through joint membership in Eurasian institutions.8

OVERVIEW

OF

CHINA-IRAN RELATIONS

Relations between China and Iran were formalized after the two states concluded a friendship pact in Rome in June 1920, leading to a request by Beijing for Tehran’s assistance to fight a famine. Three years earlier in 1917, while Russia continued to protect Iran’s interests in China, Iran’s Ambassador to the United States, Mehdi Khan Gharaghozloo, advised Tehran to establish ties with China because if the “benefits of such a relationship did not exceed within a few years the advantages of ties with the United States, it would certainly not lead to a loss either.”9 Iran lost British protection granted to Iranian citizens in China, but felt the new friendship pact with Beijing mattered as it expanded its scientific, technical, commercial and cultural exchanges with China. In 1921, Iran asked France to protect the interests of its citizens in China. Beijing expressed interest in opening an embassy in Tehran and was the more proactive partner in this new partnership given Iran’s wider interests with the West. Sino-Iranian ties improved after Chairman Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. In the following years, the PRC and Iran concluded multiple agreements, and Maoism emerged as a political trend inside Iran by the mid-1960s.10

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Maoism also shaped China’s understanding of Iran in the 1970s. Chairman Mao Zedong categorized countries into the first world (major powers), the second world (countries that could align with China), and the non-aligned third world. Iran’s closer ties with Russia and the United States, along with Iran’s rich energy resources, may have placed it in the league of second world partners for China. While Beijing-Tehran relations remained a sub-factor of China’s larger relations with the United States and the tensions between the two over Taiwan, China saw Iran as a country that had one foot in the pro-Taiwan western camp, and another firmly grounded in the East. China’s diplomatic relations with Iran were finally formalized in 1975, after President Richard M. Nixon’s policy of appeasement toward China gave the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the green light to reach out to Beijing. Over the following years, Iran took note of China’s rising status as a modestly benign world power capable of challenging the bipolar global order, by potentially containing the expansion of communist Russia’s sphere of influence while remaining keen on avoiding the trap holes facing the United States when it frequently overthrew foreign regimes that it did not like. Iran’s negative vision about China as a communist country did not rapidly transform after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. In fact, Iran’s new revolutionary leaders were keen to silence Iranian followers of Marxist-Maoist political trends. The Iranian revolution also overlapped with China’s communist leader Deng Xiaoping’s articulation in 1978 of a no ideology foreign policy and a toning down of the Chinese revolutionary outlook on the world. As a result, Beijing was unwilling to invest time to sway revolutionary Iran over, as China sought better relations with the so-called first world and was keener to build what Henry Kissinger termed a “tacit alliance” with the United States. But Beijing discovered a new path to engage with Iran after the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979. No longer in the western camp, Iran was now available to pursue better ties in Asia, despite its stated policy of “neither West, nor East” espoused by the founder of the revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Wartime defense needs during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) forced Tehran to purchase Chinese military equipment, in the tune of some US $1.8 billion although China sold nearly US$5 billion in arms to Iraq as well.11 China and Iran concluded a number of technical, cultural, and commercial agreements in this period, but Beijing was careful not to supply extremely advanced weapons to Tehran mindful that tipping the conflict in Iran’s favor could upset the United States and Russia, both of which

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preferred to support Iraq. In the post-war era, Iran’s drive to end its isolation on the world stage meant seeking other regional and international partners besides China. Yet, Beijing gradually turned into a somewhat reliable partner for Tehran, in part given the latter’s inability to forge stronger bonds with other world powers. This led to the conclusion of the first inter-parliamentary friendship agreement between China and Iran to work on expanding relations, in May 1990. The rapid growth of the Chinese-Iranian partnership came about in the 1990s, when Iran’s regional tensions with Iraq and its other Arab neighbors subsided. China turned into a major importer of Iranian oil and an investor in the development of Iran’s infrastructure. In addition, China gave assistance to develop Iran’s nuclear industry through 1992. Cooperation agreements in the field between the two countries led to the delivery of additional material until 1995, but China agreed in consultations with the United States not to sell nuclear plants or start new areas of nuclear cooperation with Iran in 1997. Beijing also strongly supported the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the need for Iran to adhere to it. But between 1997 and 2010, Chinese firms delivered advanced industrial technologies to Iran despite US sanctions against 89 Chinese entities. The United States concluded that some Chinese supplies were used to advance Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, including high pressure gauges and carbon fiber for centrifuge production. Chinese authorities, however, had not directly authorized these transfers according to US government sources.12 What is clear is that although China facilitated Iran’s military buildup, and its nuclear program, it did not export arms to Iran at levels that the United States did to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Arab states of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. But China assisted Iran as it embarked on advancing its indigenous military-industrial capabilities after the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Tehran’s military modernization efforts offered a new market to Beijing and an opportunity to gain a stronger security foothold in the Persian Gulf. Chinese design and technology thus helped Iran build short-range and long-range missiles, advance its naval defense and offense capabilities, and develop its civilian nuclear program. It was done in the spirit of bilateral relations, and hoping to secure Chinese access to lucrative Iranian markets. On the nuclear front, China hoped to sell peaceful nuclear technologies if Iran would recognize that as a middle power, it would be costly to challenge the world powers by pursuing weaponization.

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Meanwhile, completely different worldviews between the Chinese and Iranians about religion played a role in keeping the two culturally apart. China was concerned about Iran’s Islamic identity if it were to cause unrest in the Middle East. Iran did not appreciate China’s communist ideology which rejected the fundamental belief in one God. But given the lack of an overlap of immediate interests between China and Iran on these cultural/ideological fronts, the two countries were often able to easily pursue issue-based interests without fear of an immediate clash, and mindful that the shared Asian culture between them was enough to make their interactions easier. More importantly, the predominant driving force that shaped Chinese-Iranian interactions was strangely the absence of a major pre-defining narrative in recent memory that shaped the ties between the two nations, ideologically, culturally or politically. As a result, relations between Beijing and Tehran were blessed by the absence of tensions over issues that usually broke or reframed the ties between other states, such as historic, ideological or political differences. Sino-Iranian relations were instead shaped by day-to-day pragmatic considerations at the bilateral, regional and international levels. But China’s main preoccupation with Iran was over its nuclear program. Beijing refused to see Iran’s nuclear program as a direct threat and remained critical of western double standards in promoting a non-proliferation regime while ignoring proliferation by their allies. But even in its immediate neighborhood, China saw the nuclear programs of countries such as India, Pakistan and Israel as defense-oriented projects aiming for deterrence rather than for actual offensive use. Moreover, Chinese scientists that helped Iran develop its nuclear program in the 1990s saw Tehran lacking expertise to enrich low grade uranium at the time.13 By keeping in line with Mao Zedong’s idea that China was a leader of the Third World and hence should not be aligned with superpowers, Beijing upheld the provisions of the nuclear regime that called for sharing expertise with the developing world. These ideational values combined with geopolitical interests in the material realm including Chinese need for Iran’s energy supplies reframed Beijing’s approach toward Tehran, and the two capitals maintained that the Iranian nuclear crisis was used by the United States to enhance its foothold in the Middle East. The imposition of US sanctions on China, viewed as a scheme to control the growth of the Chinese economy, fueled Beijing’s drive to work with Tehran. In

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comparison, the Iranian nuclear threat was far less challenging to China. Consequently, while US sanctions disrupted Chinese and Iranian strategic calculations, they ultimately brought them closer.14 When the Document of Iran’s Prospect in 1404 Horizon was issued by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2003, it pointed that Iran’s pivot to the East was at the heart of its new international outlook, by anticipating that the United States would remain hostile and unpredictable.15 Subsequently, Iran insisted on remaining an energy hub for China between 2003 and 2011 when Chinese Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in Iran reached US$7.8 million to then increase to US$615.6 million, as a result of a number of very ambitious projects mainly in the energy sector.16 In 2005, Iran was admitted as an Observer in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Eurasian political, economic and security alliance headquartered in Beijing and established in 2001. It also joined the China-led Asia Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO), which helped develop Iran’s ballistic and satellite technologies. China generally declined that it was a major arms supplier to Iran in the decade after 1995, but it reportedly supplied Iran with arms valued at US$664 between 2002 and 2009. China may have also supplied Iran with nuclear laser technologies used to enrich uranium, although Iran ceased using the technology in 2003 but built future sites where laser isotope separation could take place. Other Chinese supplies included zirconium tube for nuclear engineering purposes, and nuclear reactors including the Tokamak nuclear fusion reactor, delivered in the 1990s. Although Iran eventually turned to Russia to develop the Arak heavy water nuclear facility, it received materials for enrichment in the facility from China as well.17 Yet, during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency in 2005–2013, Tehran failed to bring Beijing on board to fully support the Iranian nuclear program. Since 2006, China had started to vote in favor of measures by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to refer the Iranian nuclear program to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), despite Chinese statements supporting Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities in such international forums, and efforts to link resolutions against Iran to the country’s political tensions with the United States. Iran and China’s main offshore oil producer, China National Offshore Oil and Gas Company (CNOOC Ltd), subsequently finalized an eight-year agreement worth US$16 billion to develop Iran’s second largest gas field known as the North Pars, with an estimated 48 trillion cubic feet

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of gas, and construct liquified natural gas (LNG) facilities, in order to then export the gas to China. According to Iranian sources, Tehran and CNOOC also finalized discussions to build a US$100 billion 25-year contract along with the China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) to produce and export LNG in late 2004.18 But in 2006–2007, China reached out to other energy supply hubs, and it tilted toward securing better partnerships with Iran’s Arab neighbors, which diminished the possibility of a strong Sino-Iranian strategic partnership. To reassert the importance of this partnership, however, Ahmadinejad participated in the SCO summit meetings in 2008–2009 and welcomed political consultations with Beijing over the Middle East. By the end of Ahmadinejad’s presidency in 2013, the Chinese remained engaged in developing some of Iran’s energy fields and infrastructure, including in the operation of eight new energy deals. To defend its position, and avoid US sanctions on Iranian or Chinese energy companies including Sinopec, China reasoned that Iran’s energy and nuclear policies were separate issues, and that Beijing needed access to global energy sources.19 Meanwhile, enamored by the Chinese defiance toward the United States, Iran under Ahmadinejad insisted on following Beijing’s political model for nation building. But in conversations with this author, American advisers to President Barack Obama found the idea ludicrous given that Iran was far behind in terms of its development compared to China both politically and materially. However, what US policy makers failed to grasp back then and still do was the drive behind Iran’s aspirational power to emulate the Chinese development model. Iran’s leaders expected delays in reaching their lofty development goals, but they never questioned their aspirations and invested steadily in building up the country’s nuclear capacity to reverse US policy calculations toward Tehran. Meanwhile, China’s tight-knit leadership structure complied with Iran’s desire to concentrate real power in a few figures including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to make the country less susceptible to sudden policy shocks, maintain political stability and to seek China’s development help.20 In February 2010, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) signed a contract worth US$4.7 billion to develop Phase 11 of the South Pars gas field in Iran, mindful that the implementation of the project along with other energy commitments in the country could be delayed due to international tensions. The project allowed Beijing to insist on its positions with regards to the need to engage with Iran’s energy markets, and

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leverage the CNPC deal to gain US concessions over the issue of sanctions. In return, China agreed to participate in the P5+1 in March, hoping to encourage the nuclear dialog between the United States and Iran. But it did so with a reservation, that of accepting fewer measures than the West to sanction Iran. This reservation may have delayed the passing of Resolution 1929 by the UNSC in June 2010 as China aimed to secure the flow of trade and commerce based on prior agreements between Tehran and Beijing. The first closed door meeting of the five world powers and Iran, meanwhile, took place in New York on April 14, 2010. Following the meeting, the United States called for an arms embargo on Iran, the monitoring of Iranian energy and international financial transactions, and seizure of vessels carrying Iranian smuggled goods and operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).21 The US positions threatened to harm China’s economic interests as Iran’s major foreign investor by 2010. By the end of the year, a tight sanctions regime was in place to contain the scope of Iran’s nuclear program. Disappointed but defiant, and as if to assert the significance of the Sino-Iranian ties, shortly after the breakdown of the Brazilian-Turkish backed Tehran Declaration that was designed to resolve the nuclear impasse with Iran in October 2010, Tehran decided to open its airspace to Chinese warplanes to conduct the joint Anatolian Eagle military drill with Ankara.

RELATIONS BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER THE NUCLEAR DEAL The sections below are divided into three timeframes to review China-Iran ties, i.e., in 2011–2012 (during the pre-nuclear talks), 2013–2016 (during the nuclear talks and the implementation of the nuclear deal) and 2017– 2021 (the period after the agreement). China-Iran Ties in 2011–2012 Wavering Chinese support for the Iranian nuclear program followed by frequent IAEA inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites, which revealed activities that the country had not reported, exposed Beijing’s dilemmas dealing with both Iran and the United States in 2011–2012. Chinese efforts to retain a say in the nuclear talks with Iran and engage with its markets, while

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aiming to challenge US unilateralism, appeared to confuse its ties with Washington. Meanwhile, the engagement with China was essential to Iran in the context of the talks with the world powers, if Tehran could preserve its nuclear program and protect its economy with help from Beijing despite US sanctions. President Ahmadinejad approached China with caution, mindful that it was always helpful to have a superpower on Iran’s side. But Tehran did not proclaim a strong “look to the East” policy at the time, and viewed China simply as a country willing to do business regardless of the US-led sanctions regime. In fact, like all of Iran’s previous revolutionary leaders, Ahmadinejad was keen to maintain a neutral non-aligned policy when possible toward both the West and the East, if he were to uphold his just world order views which granted Iran its rightful position as an emerging, independent and strong middle power. But his fixation with addressing what he termed the “paradigms of injustice” in world politics imposed by the powerful western countries on Iran meant that he had to keep a door open to the influences of Asian countries like China. The competition that Ahmadinejad’s lukewarm approach entailed between Beijing and Tehran, however, was detrimental to the tacit understanding between the two capitals of remaining non-confrontational as substitute balancers to face US pressures. Since 2006, while China had agreed to three previous rounds of UN sanctions on Iran, it was keen to ensure that its Iran policy would not destroy future engagements with Tehran. But despite a fundamental opposition to sanctions as a principle of its foreign policy and its ideational logic of opposing western pressures, China would proceed to work with the world powers to contain Iran’s nuclear activities. Still, Beijing saw the frequent tensions in the nuclear talks with Iran as an opportunity for a new partnership to emerge with Tehran. This partnership slowly shaped by filling the gap in outlook between the two capitals over Iran’s hesitation to embrace an Asian outlook in its foreign policy, and over China’s concerns about Iran’s potentially disruptive role in the Middle East. In 2011, however, the US Congress targeted Iran’s Central Bank. China helped briefly shield Iran’s financial system by remaining the country’s main economic partner in this period. In May, Beijing and Tehran signed a industrial and mining agreement. Through October, bilateral trade between the two countries increased to US$39 billion. But China was simultaneously invested in the US energy industry, and it was keen to protect those markets. Moreover, CNOOC was listed as a

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restricted or scrutinized company in some business circles in the United States, and its deals with Iran often failed to fully materialize under sanctions. Consequently in 2012, China cut back its investments in Iran, by pulling out of the offshore South Pars gas field, and the financing of a natural gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan.22 Still, Iran’s growing isolation and its need for gasoline inevitably pushed the country toward accepting a bigger role for China in Iranian markets. China subsequently flooded those markets with cheap products, leading to mounting criticism of Ahmadinejad inside Iran for his soft approach toward China. China-Iran Ties in 2013–2016 In 2013, Iran’s incoming President Hassan Rouhani stated that Ahmadinejad’s confrontational foreign policy toward the West was to blame for China’s growing market presence in Iran. The statement harmed Iran’s foreign policy toward China as Rouhani opted to focus on fixing ties with the West.23 As a result, China remained concerned by the potential expansion of a western-led global order including Iran following the conclusion of a nuclear deal.24 But President Xi Jinping announced China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative in 2013, including a Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road in which Iran could be a partner. Simultaneously, China urged for voluntary sanctions against Iran, and for Tehran to remain compliant with the NPT in order to be able to sell oil to help expand the OBOR. Figures suggested that some 35–47% of Iran’s oil exports in 2012 and 2013 respectively went to China, and Iran became the second largest oil exporter among the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).25 Of concern to Iran, however, was the comparative advantage of this energy partnership with China which had also concluded similar energy partnerships to expand the OBOR with the Gulf Arab states. The maritime and land based OBOR projects, helping North-South corridors between the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, could only be realized in the absence of Gulf tensions. While Iran wanted Gulf tensions to subside, it was unwilling to abandon its security interests in the vital waterway which involved containing the security partnerships between the United States and the Gulf Arab states. Moreover, sanctions on Iran in this period secured China’s role as a major interlocutor for the region, despite the fact that Chinese investments and trade in Iran were not as forthcoming.

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Signs of China’s desire to develop its ties with Iran from merely a trade to a security partner began to emerge in this period. President Jinping aimed to secure energy corridors with Iran irrespective of the outcome of the nuclear talks, in order to ensure diverse energy supplies and substantial growth in the Chinese economy. To that end, China agreed to allocate US $35 billion in financing and loans to Iran’s economy.26 Back in Iran, calls to diversify trade partners were on the rise, and the country remained focused on sealing a deal with the West. Still, Beijing’s desire to prepare for contingencies in the event of the breakdown of the nuclear talks called for keeping Tehran close. In September 2013, President Jinping and President Rouhani met in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to decide on concrete measures to advance the Sino-Iranian relations in the commercial and security arenas, and to encourage Chinese competition in Iran’s energy markets. While the lifting of sanctions was desirable, the two leaders remained flexible to work together even if some sanctions were to remain in place. This had the advantage for Beijing of cutting out other potential rivals that were less keen to operate under sanctions in reaching Iran’s markets. Iran still believed that it had to test China’s commitment to its markets given that in the course of the nuclear talks which finally led to the conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, the United States was encouraging China to impose sanctions on Iran. China responded to the US call by attempting to uphold the structure, legal frameworks and overall trends shaping the nuclear talks, which meant observing the sanctions regime against Iran.27 In response, Iran terminated a US$2.5 billion deal with CNPC in April 2014, citing delays in the delivery of a 2009 contract to develop the Azadeghan oil field. To keep Iran engaged, Beijing maintained a security dialog with the country, which contributed to the gradual convergence of their strategic interests. In September 2014, two Chinese warships arrived at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas to conduct anti-piracy and search and rescue naval drills. The warships were part of the Chinese navy’s patrol fleet in the Gulf of Aden, signaling Beijing’s interest to secure its energy exports through safe navigation in the Persian Gulf and Bab-el-Mandeb. In October, Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari met with Admiral Wu Shengli in Beijing, to exchange views on military technology and training. China meanwhile expected that its relations with Iran would improve under Rouhani who was seen as a less polarizing figure compared to Ahmadinejad. As a result, Beijing emphasized the need to pursue an

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economically-driven policy with Tehran, but it combined economic and naval activities with Iran to signal a willingness to build evolving strategic goals in a post-nuclear deal era. Through these steps, China was able to secure bilateral trade with Iran in the tune of US$51.9 billion in 2014.28 In addition, China signaled that Iran could become a member of the SCO if sanctions against the country were lifted and began offering Tehran signs of further commercial engagements through the organization. The union between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa under BRICS also increased the attraction for SCO markets for Iran. All five countries were on the list of Iran’s main trading partners. China, meanwhile, backed the JCPOA in an effort to re-shift Iranian cooperation paradigms toward Chinese markets rather than toward other major countries’ markets. To this end, Beijing forwarded ideas about building comprehensive strategic partnerships with Iran that risked verging toward grand ideational rather than fully implementable goals. Yet, its actions advanced the idea of China’s inevitable rise as a major world power, and it kept the Iranians engaged as the strategic components of a partnership between Beijing and Tehran were slowly shaping. In 2015, the China Development Bank (CDP) agreed to fund the Silk Road high-speed railway from Urumqi in the Xinjiang region to the Iranian cities of Mashad and Tehran, before continuing to Turkey and Bulgaria. The railway would meet part of Beijing’s plan for US$2.5 trillion trade annually traveling overland between China and Europe. The Iranian-backed Press TV agency hailed the plan for using local currencies in trade instead of the US dollar.29 Simultaneously, the China Railway Engineering Corporation began construction of the first high-speed national railway project in Iran to link Tehran to Qom and Esfahan. In January 2016, President Jinping offered Iran financial help to build the train system during his visit to Tehran. A month later, a freight train from China arrived in Tehran after a 14-day journey, some 30 days shorter than the time it would take to carry goods via maritime routes from Shanghai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in the Persian Gulf.30 President Jinping also announced that Iran was China’s biggest strategic partner in the region. But the volume of bilateral trade between Tehran and Beijing dropped to US$31.2 billion in 2016, from US$38.8 billion a year before.31 That was because the standard trade agreements with Iran represented aspects of the Sino-Iranian ties that made the partnership challenging for Tehran. For example, Beijing and Iran discussed building a long-term US $600 billion investment agreement in 2016 which did not materialize.

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These developments grabbed the attention of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who designated Iran’s parliament speaker Ali Larijani to advance talks with Beijing toward building a longer-term strategic partnership. Viewing Larijani as a so-called para-factional figurehead in Iran’s highly polarized factional politics, Ayatollah Khamenei entrusted the house speaker to step in to reassure the Chinese of the longevity of any deal that would be made. Larijani’s talks with Beijing focused on advancing industrial-scale projects in the mining and energy sectors. But both Larijani and his Chinese counterparts felt they were left lurching by Rouhani’s government. In response, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif insisted that he recommended Larijani to lead the talks with China, and that the main task of building a strategic partnership was done by the foreign ministry.32 Still, Rouhani was criticized for sacrificing Iran’s ties with China. Chinese companies were asked to leave oil projects after the finalization of the JCPOA, according to reports by Iran’s hardliners loyal to the supreme leader. Rouhani wanted to attract western investors, and his Vice President, Eshaq Jahangiri, dismissed China’s initiative to offer Iran an advance EUR 50 billion investment to secure Iranian markets post-JCPOA. The offer in euros was made mindful that with the prospect of Donald J. Trump’s victory in the presidential race, the flow of investments into Iran in US dollars could be curtailed by sanctions. The hardliners in Iran reportedly stepped in to inform the Chinese not to wait longer for Rouhani’s embrace of Beijing’s investments. This led to the breakdown of efforts by China to invest more in Iran’s energy markets in this period and to retreat with guarantees of receiving Iranian oil at discounted prices until a better opportunity came about.33 Trying to reach Iran’s petrochemical markets was also crucial, and at the peak of Trump era sanctions, China stayed in the country to invest in North Azadeghan, South Azadeghan and Yadavaran fields. Once again, Rouhani’s government did not pay attention to these initiatives, and preferred to attract western investments including by Dutch companies expressing interest. This forced the Chinese out far quicker from South Azadeghan, only two years after signing an agreement to develop the field. It also made Beijing doubtful about the need to invest in Iran, unless it could secure strong guarantees of cooperation. Tehran’s lukewarm reception of China only shifted under Trump’s maximum pressure policy, and after the Dutch company Shell collected data on Iran’s energy fields but pulled out of investing in the country. The hardliners charged that Iran may have lost some US$20 billion investment

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opportunities by China in this period, given the pull out of Chinese banks and insurance companies from Iran’s energy transactions. They also bitterly criticized Rouhani for ignoring the fact that China had successfully delivered Phase 1 of Yadavaran’s development plans, and when it should have received contracts for Phase 2, it was sidestepped by Tehran.34 Rouhani’s government responded by blaming China for following US sanctions and pulling out of Iranian markets. But a number of Chinese companies reportedly may have continued operating in Iran, such as Sinopec, even under sanctions, helping Iran produce oil from its western Karoun fields. As a result, Larijani was instructed by the supreme leader to continue the talks with China even after he stepped down from office as Iran’s parliament speaker in May 2020, helping advance the discussions with Beijing to include a long-term 25-year deal potentially worth US$450 billion to build roads, railways, transportation systems and a number of confidential projects that were not publicly discussed by either side. The discussions further helped ensure Iran’s inclusion in the OBOR, and the Silk Road projects, by increasing Chinese investments and Iranian capacity to absorb the investments through various projects in a host of other fields such as port and agricultural development.35 Beijing-Tehran Ties in 2017–2021 China kept Iran engaged through a fledgling security partnership that the Europeans could not offer, such as carrying out joint military drills and sending destroyers to Iran in June 2017 when a US and Qatari naval exercise took place in the Gulf waters. In 2017–2021, China and Iran also held several rounds of defense talks, aiming to exchange experience and training between their respective armed forces to ensure security in geographic locations where they shared economic or geopolitical interests. But Sinopec only offered to finalize a US$3 billion contract to rebuild the Abadan Oil Refinery in Iran in January 2017, down from its agreement to offer twice more the sum for Iranian refinery projects back in 2009. The Trump administration’s policy of increasing pressures on China and Iran shifted this paradigm. Later in 2017, Beijing and Tehran concluded a US$1.5 billion deal to build an electric grid into the Tehran-Mashad railroad, with assistance from the state-owned enterprise China National Machinery Import and Export Corporation, to cut travel time by half, and carry 10 million tons of cargo per year. The project helped Iran meet some of the goals of its sixth five-year development plan (2017–2022) to electrify

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all railroads by 2025. Overall, Chinese investments in Iran reached US $35 billion in financing and loans to support the Iranian economy. Deals involved a credit line of US$10 billion by the state-owned and formerly known China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC) or CITIC Group Corporation Ltd., a US$15 billion project with the China Development Bank, and another US$10 billion letter of credit, to build transport routes between China, Asia, Europe and Africa. In 2018, the China Railway Construction Corp signed a US$845 million railway deal to connect Tehran to the towns of Hamedan and Sanandaj.36 In the energy sector, China joined two consortiums with Western companies to develop the Azadeghan and Yadavaran fields in South Pars following the JCPOA. When Total announced that it could not obtain US sanctions exemptions to operate in Iran, CNPC agreed to buy US$1 billion of Total shares in South Pars.37 China further understood that its military engagement with Iran could provide access to Iranian ports, and increase Tehran’s commitment to keeping the Strait of Hormuz safe for international navigation and energy trade. The Strait offered China access to the Persian Gulf’s hydrocarbon resources and accelerated the formation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Given the continuity of the Sino-Iranian relationship, Beijing and Tehran built their partnership by working with other influential regional actors such as Russia. Beijing promised to use the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) set up to improve trade with Tehran and to facilitate the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) devised by Moscow to serve as an alternative to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), in order to trade with Iran under renewed US sanctions. As a result, trade between China and Iran carried with it the potential to improve despite sanctions when they were re-imposed on Iran by the Trump administration in May 2018. By August, the pattern of the Sino-Iranian trade showed a steady growth of 10% in the first six months of the year.38 But in late 2018, under the pressure of sanctions, Beijing suspended the South Pars project and halted energy investments in Iran. Iran was thus excluded from OBOR and projects to expand CPEC in which Iranian oil re-export terminals could be useful. This came as Iran was trying to attract investments for the Chabahar Port as an alternative to the Gwadar City Port in Pakistan that was designed to launch CPEC. Furthermore, Beijing blocked Iranian access to Chinese markets. Finally, China imposed banking restrictions on Iran’s non-oil trade sector including liquefied gas products,

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petrochemicals and minerals. Tehran faced the option of improving the capacity of the National Iranian Gas Company, or to privatize its gas sector, as China tried to secure gas routes through Afghanistan and sideline Iran in projects such as the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India Gas Pipeline. Given these challenges, Tehran attempted to comply with the rules of the Financial Action Task Force, an inter-governmental body that sets standards for international banking, as a catalyst for improved trade with Beijing.39 Iran also worked hard to become a full member of the SCO, which it did in September 2021, by insisting that the organization should adopt a non-political approach in order to trade irrespective of sanctions. Through these steps, Iran aimed also to facilitate integration into OBOR and the Silk Road project, while connecting Tehran to Eurasian markets. Next, Iran acceded to the South East Asia Union Treaty of Amity and Cooperation at the 51st annual Foreign Ministerial Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in August 2018. Tehran also argued that China could use Iran’s cultural influence in Far East Asia, and its Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, to stabilize future conflicts with Muslims in the region.40 Sino-Iranian trade, meanwhile, continued to show a steady ten-fold increase from US$5.5 billion in 2003 to the projected figure of US$55 billion in 2018.41 In the meantime, China and Iran saw their military cooperation as a modest means to counterbalance the dominant US security role in the Persian Gulf.42 Brigadier Mohammad Hussein Bagheri, General Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, confirmed after the defense ministers of China and Iran met in 2018, that Tehran was prepared to exchange experience to fight naval, aerial, and other threats as both countries faced common challenges from other major powers and terrorist groups.43 In December 2018, the arrest and detention in Canada of Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou on charges of violating the sanctions pushed Beijing and Tehran to build even closer military contacts despite scaling back their energy cooperation.44 In December 2019, China and Iran began joint naval drills along with Russia to expand maritime cooperation in the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean, following several attacks in the summer on international vessels in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman which Iran was thought to have carried out. In 2019–2021, a Chinese delegation visited the Arak heavy water reactor to help Iran re-design it for full commissioning as a light water reactor, as part of the JCPOA framework of agreement. Beijing meanwhile

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expressed deep concern over sabotage attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities including in Natanz, which Israel was believed to have carried out. China would also assist Iran in converting its Fordow site into a research reactor, per agreements by the United States to waive some sanctions to help Tehran retain a nuclear program if it agreed to comply with the JCPOA. In addition, China hoped that by supporting the US measure, and soft sanctions, it could still build a strong partnership with Iran in the nuclear arena. On March 27, 2021, China and Iran held a signing ceremony of a 25-year energy, economic and security cooperation agreement. The strategic agreement arrived on the heels of a meeting on the sidelines of a conference in Doha, Qatar in November 2019, in which this author informed participants that without Iran building new Asian partnerships, it was unlikely that it could develop its energy fields given the lack of long-term political appetite or strategic and financial incentives in the West for Iran’s re-entry into global energy markets. It was also launched months before the Group of Seven (G7) decided collectively to take action to prevent growing Chinese global influence. The agreement also overlapped with the sanctioning of Chinese enterprises by the West over trade imbalances and the expansion of the Chinese economy. Iran’s Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani called the agreement a symbol of “active resistance” against western powers, and the breakdown of US maximum pressure policy on Iran. The agreement encompassed cooperation in all economic fields and included investments in the oil and gas sector and transportation networks, respectively, followed by collaboration in electronic industries and the advancement of Iran’s indigenous science-based companies known as danesh bonyans. According to the final text of the draft agreement, energy cooperation involved all sectors including production, transportation, refining and the security of production of petrochemicals, renewables, and non-military nuclear power. It further involved projects to develop Chabahar through preferential trade and commercial policies, and investments in small refineries in the eastern, southern and western parts of Iran.45 Within Iran, the agreement was seen for the mixed blessing that it was. On one hand, it enabled Iranian participation in an emerging world order with China at its center. On other hand, Tehran understood that consolidating commercial gains that ensued from the agreement remained an

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up-hill battle, given the Chinese approach to dominating markets. Yet, Tehran opted to see China as a friend in times of need.46 Finally, the agreement raised concerns inside Iran about clauses that could contain information designed in vague terms to offer more benefits to one side, which Tehran hoped to reverse by keeping in mind the need to extract maximum financial benefits from every section of the deal. Labeled The Plan for Comprehensive Cooperation Between the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran, this non-binding document according to the Foreign Ministry of Iran, underscored measures to build a wide spectrum of areas of cooperation, while avoiding the handover of rights over Iranian lands, mines or energy resources to China.47 Apart from the obvious attempts to undermine the US pressure policy on both China and Iran, the deal was likely to include provisions to develop the energy sector if China was able to help Iran develop its vast untapped oil resources not only in the South Pars, and the Persian Gulf, but deep in the northern Zagros mountains where maps of reserves were held by American companies active in the field prior to Iran’s revolution. The scope of China’s strategic agreement with Iran could carry unknown security clauses as well, including in military, and intelligence fields, according to sources in Iran.48 Furthermore, China could turn into a major arms exporter to Iran, but the extent of Chinse military assistance remained concealed amidst concerns by the US Department of Treasury that Chinese entities could help Iran procure more advanced defense technologies.49 In the Middle East, China sought to use this agreement as an incentive to advance a five-point plan for security, mutual respect, equity and justice, nuclear non-proliferation and accelerated development cooperation.50 China’s 14th Five-Year Plan and 2035 long-term development goals further meant that the country was more willing to actively participate in the diversification of the Iranian economy. During the signing ceremony of the strategic agreement, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi confirmed that irrespective of international and regional changes, “China will unswervingly maintain its friendly policies toward Iran.”51 The conclusion of the agreement even before a US decision to rejoin the JCPOA was reached, or to lift sanctions, also meant that Beijing and Tehran had enough confidence to move forward with or without the United States on board. China’s conclusion of the deal, less so because of Iran’s desire and more so as a result of China’s own interests, suggested that most elements of the agreement involved concessions to Beijing. In return for these concessions,

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Beijing reaffirmed the agreement’s importance. Former Chinese ambassador to Iran, Hua Liming, called the agreement and Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s trip to Iran a momentous change that arrived given fundamental changes in the “China-US relations.” Liming’s statement pointed that China’s mindfulness of US sensitivities toward Iran would no longer hinder Chinese outreach to Tehran, given that the era of unbridled cooperation between Washington and Beijing was over.52 But since China’s security was not directly tied to Iran’s security, this reality afforded Beijing the opportunity to work with other world powers to both support and contain Iran when necessary over its nuclear activities. As a result, China’s pursuit of world power politics dominated its relations with Iran. For its part, Iran remained content with this reality, as long as China did not play a spoiler role in the nuclear talks and offered needed investments. China and Iran were actively involved in ensuring their cooperation, and Beijing’s veto power in the UNSC continued to work in Iran’s favor as long as Tehran enabled Beijing’s growing influence. But China’s conservative approach to security also clashed with Iran’s robust outlook on its own security, pushing Tehran to involve China deeper in Iranian engagements in the Persian Gulf and with the World powers, mindful of Beijing’s growing need for fossil fuels, nearly 32% of global consumption by 2050. By March 2021, an official meeting between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and China’s Director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Yang Jiechi in Anchorage, Alaska, promised to address some tensions between Washington and Beijing that could also converge their interests over Iran, if the two capitals were able to revive some 120 areas of cooperation that they had identified in their last Strategic and Economic Dialog in 2016. However, China continued to have reservations about the extra-territorial impact of US sanctions, given the harsh tone adopted by the United States in reminding China that it was never a good idea to bet against US interests.53 The exchange was also a stark reminder of the possibility of a renewed Cold War era like tension between East and West, in which Iran would be caught in the middle. It further promised to strengthen the Chinese-Iranian partnership, after the United States proceeded in early 2022 to place 33 Chinese entities working on military end-user technologies and pharmaceuticals on its “unverified list” that toughens shipments from US exporters. Beijing would subsequently demand the removal of all sanctions on Iran and lead another naval drill with Tehran and

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Moscow. This was despite the fact that Washington insisted on having joint goals with Beijing when it came to containing Tehran’s nuclear program, while also expressing concern about the new strategic partnership between China and Iran.54

CONCLUSION China’s policies toward Iran were driven mainly by Beijing’s domestic calculations in which its relations with Tehran remained a footnote as long as it helped assert Chinese power internationally. Even the strategic partnership documents that Beijing signed with Iran were not a clear indication that China would be willing to call Iran an ally given contentious Iranian politics at home and in its international ties. Beijing’s attempts to maintain a low profile and never claim leadership in the nuclear talks with Iran reassured the latter that it should not expect a sudden shift in policy tone or approach by China. As a closed country, Iran appreciated the Chinese approach as long as investments were forthcoming to help improve the Iranian economy and integrate it with other regional economies and encourage mutually complementary energy policies in the Persian Gulf region. China and Iran also explored alternative security paths to developing relations despite US-led sanctions. This implied that regardless of the outcome of the nuclear talks with Iran, China and Iran would seek to maintain their partnership. As of the time of this writing, it was too early to conclude without reservations that the partnership between China and Iran would readily lead to a new regional order in the Persian Gulf. Both countries possessed limitless aspirations, which interfered with how they set out to influence regional events. In many respects, their cultural revolutions also carried mixed results, leading to lengthy periods of international isolation followed by a desire by the two countries to continue and consolidate their revolutionary paths. In this respect, Chairman Mao’s concept of a “continuous revolution” and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s delineation of the progression of different phases or steps of Iran’s revolution meant that China and Iran could not easily part with the ideational components of their foreign policy behavior. Those components all too frequently led both China and Iran to retreat inward to boost their economies and power capabilities, while observing their partnership only as a necessary means to build economic leverage in order to face the capitalist western world.

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Furthermore, Iran’s aspirational power primarily aimed to assert its role as a middle power in its immediate neighborhood in the Persian Gulf and in the Middle East. In this respect, Iran’s regional security interests clashed with China’s desire to secure a foothold as mainly an economic partner for the region. China’s and Iran’s definition of what it meant to merge powers, in order to rethink diplomacy and even build a new regional order, therefor only sometimes overlapped. The two countries were united in protecting their vital interests in the face of global pressures, and specifically western pressures. Rebuilding the regional order to their liking, however, was a major task that could materialize or fail just like any other world order. It would also require revisiting Beijing-Tehran energy relations, offering frequent windows of opportunity for further talks, and reducing the liabilities for mutual engagement regionally and internationally. If the partnership was to remain cordial and unhindered, prioritizing business was a linchpin for success of these ties. Otherwise, Chinese diversification of its energy sources and Iran’s vulnerability to western pressures could prevent the full materialization of a new order. Consequently, Chinese-Iranian interests in the nuclear realm best overlapped when Beijing was reluctant to support punitive measures against Tehran including through sanctions. In this process, it helped that neither China nor Iran belonged to any western security pact. By buffering tensions between Iran and the West, Beijing was able to remain a somewhat steady partner for Tehran. Iran welcomed having China as a partner to help strengthen the Iranian positions in negotiating deals with the West. This in turn served to enhance Iran’s security and advance its interests in the Persian Gulf. But this transactional relationship between Beijing and Tehran was a far call from building the type of order that was required to stabilize the Middle East through constructive engagement with Iran. Expecting that China could build a new order would likely evade, bewilder and disappoint Iran unless it was able to first rise as a strong and reliable middle power willing to engage with the region, stabilize the Persian Gulf, and abandon limitless ideational goals. Along this path, Iran could also seek improved relations with the United States, which meant that Beijing-Tehran ties would then serve as a hindrance. China could influence Iran’s decision to not enhance ties with the United States, but without working with Washington, Beijing would have limited influence over the Iranian decisions on the issue.

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Ultimately, Iran did not necessarily view China as a benevolent partner, but an indispensable auxiliary one. Tehran’s harboring of deep suspicions about the role that the world powers played in international politics did not exclude having concerns about China’s goals in the international arena. Yet, China could potentially turn into one of two major arms suppliers to Iran, along with Russia, and aim to secure its investments in Iran which could then mean rejecting US pressures to manage the Beijing-Tehran partnership. This would empower Iran to balance its international ties including with the United States. China, meanwhile, was keen to preserve energy markets in its quest to prepare for security contingencies with Iran. But there was no guarantee that economic ties between China and Iran would lead to the strengthening of their strategic and security ties in the international realm, unless Beijing-Tehran ties could guarantee the long-term advancement of the Iranian security and nuclear program.

NOTES 1. For balancing roles, see Michael Sheehan, “The Place of the Balancer in Balance of Power Theory,” Review of International Studies, Volume 15, No. 2 (1989): 123–124. 2. For identity and international relations, see Michael L. Barnett, “Constructivism,” The Oxford Handbook of International Security, March 2018. 3. See also Sulagna Basu, “The False Dichotomy of the Material-Ideational Debate in IR Theory,” E-International Relations, November 21, 2019, https://www.e-ir.info/2019/11/21/the-false-dichotomy-of-thematerial-ideational-debate-in-ir-theory/. 4. F. Gregory Gause III, “Balancing What? Threat Perception and Alliance Choice in the Gulf,” Security Studies, Volume 13 (2) (December 2003): 273–305. 5. For identity and international relations, see Craig Parsons, How to Map Arguments in Political Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 94–130; V. A. Schmidt, “Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse,” Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 11 (June 2008): 303–326. 6. For information on identity and balancing, see Mark Haas, “Ideological Polarity and Balancing in Great Power Politics,” Security Studies, Volume 23, No. 4 (2014): 715–753. 7. For China’s balancing policies, see Carrie Liu Currier, Manochehr Dorraj, “In Arms We Trust: The Economic and Strategic Factors Motivating China-Iran Relations,” Journal of Chinese Political Science, Volume 15 (2010): 49–69.

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8. See F. Gregory Gause III, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Matteo Legrenzi, The GCC and the International Relations of the Gulf: Diplomacy, Security and Economic Coordination in a Changing Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Diana Panke and Sören Stapel, “Exploring Overlapping Regionalism,” Journal of International Relations and Development, Volume 21, No. 3 (2018): 635–662. 9. “Exhibit of Historic Documents of Relations Between Iran and China in Presence of Foreign Ministers of Two Countries,” Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), Farvardeen 1400, https://ipis. ir/portal/subjectview/633470/%D9%86%D9%85%D8%A7%DB%8C% D8%B4%DA%AF%D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%86%D8%A7% D8%AF-%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%AE%DB%8C-%D8% B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8% A7%D9%86-%D9%88-%DA%86%DB%8C%D9%86-%D8%A8%D8%A7-% D8%AD%D8%B6%D9%88%D8%B1-%D9%88%D8%B2%D8%B1%D8%A7% DB%8C-%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B1-%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8% B1%D8%AC%D9%87-%D8%AF%D9%88-%DA%A9%D8%B4%D9%88% D8%B1. 10. Ibid. 11. Hossein Bastani, “Untold Stories of Ties Between Iran and China; From War Period to Time of Sanctions,” BBC Farsi, April 10, 2020, https:// www.bbc.com/persian/iran-features-52243300. 12. John W. Garver, “Is China Playing a Dual Game in Iran?” The Washington Quarterly (Winter 2011): 75–88, https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws. com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/publication/twq11wintergarver.pdf. 13. International Crisis Group, “The Iran Nuclear Issue: The View from Beijing,” Crisis Group Asia Briefing No. 100, February 17, 2010, https:// d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront.net/b100-the-iran-nuclear-issue-the-view-frombeijing.pdf. 14. Zhao Hong, “China’s Dilemma on Iran: Between Energy Security and a Responsible Rising Power,” Journal of Contemporary China, Volume 23, No. 87 (2014): 410; Michael D. Swaine, “Beijing’s Tightrope Walk on Iran,” China Leadership Monitor, No. 33, June 28, 2010, https://carnegieendowment.org/files/CLM33MS.pdf. 15. http://farsi.khamenei.ir/message-content?id=9034. 16. See Hong, “China’s Dilemma on Iran: Between Energy Security and a Responsible Rising Power”. 17. John W. Garver, “China’s Iran Policy,” Testimony before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission on “China’s Current and Emerging Foreign Policy Priorities,” April 13, 2011, https://www. uscc.gov/sites/default/files/4.13.11Garver.pdf; see also “Trend Indicator

5

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

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Value of Arms Exports from China, 2005-2009,” http://www.sipri.org; John W. Garver, China & Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 57–94. “Iran and China’s CNOOC Sign $16 Billion Gas Deal,” Rigzone, December 20, 2006, https://www.rigzone.com/news/oil_gas/a/39363/iran_and_ chinas_cnooc_sign_16_billion_gas_deal/. Garver, “China’s Iran Policy;” “Trend Indicator Value of Arms Exports from China, 2005-2009;” Garver, “China & Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World”. Garver, “China’s Iran Policies”. See Liu Dong, “UNSC Draws Up Iran Sanctions,” Global Times, April 16, 2010; Javier Blas, Carola Hoyos, and Daniel Dombey, “Beijing Supplies Petrol to Iran,” Financial Times, September 22, 2009. Scott W. Harold and Alireza Nader, “China and Iran: Economic, Political and Military Relations,” RAND Occasional Paper, 2012, https://www. rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP351.html. “Eastern Puzzle-1|A Narrative About Strategic Cooperation Between China and Iran in Confronting US Sanctions in Tenth Government,” Fars News Agency, Mordad 4, 1400, https://www.farsnews.ir/news/ 14000504000379/%D9%85%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8% B4%D8%B1%D9%82%DB%8C-%7C-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%DB%8C %D8%AA%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D9%87%D9%85%DA%A9%D8% A7%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%B1%D8%A7% D8%AA%DA%98%DB%8C%DA%A9-%DA%86%DB%8C%D9%86-%D8% A8%D8%A7-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%AF% D8%B1-%D8%AA%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%84-%D8%A8%D8%A7. “China Warns Iran Again on Nuclear Aims,” Reuters, March 5, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-iran-nuclear/china-warns-iranagain-on-nuclear-aims-idUSTRE82505Y20120306. http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/irn/ show/all/2013/. “China Provides $10 Billion Credit Line to Iran,” The New Arab, September 16, 2017, https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2017/ 9/16/china-provides-10-billion-credit-line-to-iran. Garver, “China & Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World”. United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database, see the interactive graph available at https://comtrade.un.org/labs/BIS-trade-in-goods/? reporter=156&partner=364&year=2016. David Rogers, “China Proposes High-Speed Rail Link Direct to Tehran,” Global Construction Review, November 24, 2015, https:// www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/china-proposes-high-speedr8a8i8l-link-direct/.

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30. “China to Help Iran Build High-Speed Rail as Part of ‘One Belt, One Road’ Strategy,” South China Morning Post, January 24, 2016, https:// www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/1904757/ china-help-iran-build-high-speed-rail-part-one-belt-one; “First Freight Train from China Arrives in Iran in ‘Silk Road’ Boost: Media,” Reuters, February 16, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-iranrailway/first-freight-train-from-china-arrives-in-iran-in-silk-road-boostmedia-idUSKCN0VP0W8. 31. “China-Iran Trade at $31.2b in 2016,” Tehran Times, February 4, 2017, https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/410775/China-Iran-trade-at-312b-in-2016. 32. “Untolds About Ali Larijani’s Role in Iran and China Cooperation Agreement and Details of this Agreement,” Ali Larijani Information Staff, Farvardeen 8, 1400, https://www.larijani.ir/Larijani/fa/Content/6658/ %D9%86%D8%A7%DA%AF%D9%81%D8%AA%D9%87-%D9%87%D8% A7%DB%8C%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D9%86%D9%82%D8%B4-% D8%B9%D9%84%DB%8C-%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%AC %D8%A7%D9%86%DB%8C-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%B3%D9%86%D8% AF-%D9%87%D9%85%DA%A9%D8%A7%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%A7%DB %8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%88-%DA%86%DB%8C%D9%86-% D9%88-%D8%AC%D8%B2%D8%A6%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8% A7%DB%8C%D9%86-%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%81%D9%82. 33. “Eastern Puzzle-3|How the Rouhani Government Burnt Biggest Opportunity to Deepen Ties with China Over the JCPOA?” Fars News Agency, Mordad 9, 1400, https://www.farsnews.ir/news/ 14000509000265/%D9%85%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8% B4%D8%B1%D9%82%DB%8C-3%7C-%DA%86%DA%AF%D9%88%D9% 86%D9%87-%D8%AF%D9%88%D9%84%D8%AA-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8% AD%D8%A7%D9%86%DB%8C-%D8%A8%D8%B2%D8%B1%DA%AF% D8%AA%D8%B1%DB%8C%D9%86-%D9%81%D8%B1%D8%B5%D8%AA%D8%AA%D8%B9%D9%85%DB%8C%D9%82-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8% A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%DA%86%DB%8C%D9%86-% D8%B1%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D9%87. 34. “Eastern Puzzle-2| Strategic Error of Rouhani Government in Engaging with China/How Iran and China Ties Were Harmed?” Fars News Agency, Mordad 6, 1400, https://www.farsnews.ir/news/14000505000712/% D9%85%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%B4%D8%B1%D9%82% DB%8C-2%7C-%D8%AE%D8%B7%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B3% D8%AA%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA%DA%98%DB%8C%DA%A9-%D8%AF %D9%88%D9%84%D8%AA-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%AD%D8%A7%D9% 86%DB%8C-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%85% D9%84-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%DA%86%DB%8C%D9%86%DB%8C%E2% 80%8C%D9%87%D8%A7-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B7.

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35. “Untolds About Ali Larijani’s Role in Iran and China Cooperation Agreement and Details of this Agreement”. 36. Li Tianyang, “Belt and Road Initiative Expands China-Iran Cooperation,” China Daily, January 25, 2019, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/ 201901/25/WS5c4aa81da3106c65c34e6912.html. 37. “Report: Russia, China Companies Prepare to Replace Europeans in Iran,” Middle East Monitor, May 30, 2018, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/ 20180530-report-russia-china-companies-prepare-to-replace-europeans-iniran/. 38. “Iran-China Trade Up 10 Percent in 6 Months on Year,” Tehran Times, August 12, 2018, https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/426413/IranChina-trade-up-10-in-6-months-on-year. 39. “Vague Future of Economic Ties Between Iran and the Southeast Asian Countries Under the Shadow of Sanctions,” IRDiplomacy, December 30, 2018, http://www.irdiplomacy.ir/fa/news/1980846/-‫ﺭﻭﺍﺑﻂ‬-‫ﻣﺒﻬﻢ‬-‫ﺁﯾﻨﺪﻩ‬ ‫ﻫﺎ‬-‫ﺗﺤﺮﯾﻢ‬-‫ﺳﺎﯾﻪ‬-‫ﺩﺭ‬-‫ﺁﺳﯿﺎ‬-‫ﺷﺮﻕ‬-‫ﺟﻨﻮﺏ‬-‫ﮐﺸﻮﺭﻫﺎﯼ‬-‫ﻭ‬-‫ﺍﯾﺮﺍﻥ‬-‫ﺍﻗﺘﺼﺎﺩﯼ‬. 40. Willem van Kemenade, “China vs. the Western Campaign for Iran Sanctions,” The Washington Quarterly, Volume 33, No. 3 (July 2010): 103. 41. Zhang Zhihao, “China and Iran to Expand Military Cooperation,” China Daily, December 12, 2017, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201712/ 12/WS5a2fcd9da3108bc8c672a1ae.html. 42. “Iran, China to Prevent US’ Regional Presence: Leader’s Adviser,” Tasnim News Agency, September 30, 2018, https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/ news/2018/09/30/1840712/iran-china-to-prevent-us-regionalpresence-leader-s-adviser. 43. “Iran and China Hold ‘Joint Commission for Military Cooperation,’” Tasnim News Agency, Aban 24, 1395, https://www.tasnimnews.com/fa/ news/1395/08/24/1240430/%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7% D9%86-%D9%88-%DA%86%DB%8C%D9%86-%DA%A9%D9%85%DB%8C %D8%B3%DB%8C%D9%88%D9%86-%D9%85%D8%B4%D8%AA%D8% B1%DA%A9-%D9%87%D9%85%DA%A9%D8%A7%D8%B1%DB%8C-% D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C%D8%AA%D8%B4%DA%A9%DB%8C%D9%84-%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8% AF%D9%86%D8%AF. 44. “Iranian Army Commander, Chinese Military Delegation Meet in Tehran,” Tasnim News Agency, June 3, 2018, https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/ news/2018/07/03/1767239/iranian-army-commander-chinesemilitary-delegation-meet-in-tehran. 45. “Final Draft of Comprehensive Cooperation (25 Years) Between Iran and China,” Secretariat of High Modalities for Strategic Cooperation Between Iran and China, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Khordad 1399, https:// cdn.naftonline.ir/images/docs/files/000023/nf00023410-1.pdf.

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46. Shi Jiangtao, “China’s 25-Year Deal with Iran Marks ‘Momentous’ Change as Ties with US Sour, Says Former Ambassador,” South China Morning Post, March 28, 2021, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/ article/3127346/chinas-25-year-deal-iran-marks-momentous-changeties-us-sour. 47. Mustafa Shahi, “We Must Strive to Utilize to the Maximum the Cooperation Document Between China and Iran,” IRDiplomacy, Ordibehesht 29, 1400, http://www.irdiplomacy.ir/fa/news/2002639/% D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9% 81%D8%A7%D8%AF%D9%87-%D8%AD%D8%AF%D8%A7%DA%A9% D8%AB%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%B3%D9%86%D8% AF-%D9%87%D9%85%DA%A9%D8%A7%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D8%A7%DB %8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%88-%DA%86%DB%8C%D9%86-% D8%AA%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B4-%DA%A9%D9%86%DB%8C%D9%85. 48. “An Expert in the Know: Principle of Iran and China Agreement is Military, Security and Espionage,” RFI, April 3, 2021, https://www.rfi.fr/ fa/%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86/20210403-%DB%8C% DA%A9-%DA%A9%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%B4%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%A2%DA%AF%D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%A7%D8%B5%D9%84-%D8% AA%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%81%D9%82-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8% A7%D9%86-%D9%88-%DA%86%DB%8C%D9%86-%D9%86%D8%B8% D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%86%DB%8C%D8%AA% DB%8C-%D9%88-%D8%AC%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B3%DB% 8C-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA. 49. https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/sm0088. aspx. 50. Chen Weiqing, “China, Saudi Arabia to Cooperate in New Ways,” Arab News, March 25, 2021, https://www.arabnews.com/node/1831976. 51. Jiangtao, “China’s 25-Year Deal with Iran Marks ‘Momentous’ Change as Ties with US Sour, Says Former Ambassador”. 52. Ibid. 53. Thomas Wright, “The US and China Finally Get Real With Each Other,” Brookings, March 22, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-fromchaos/2021/03/22/the-us-and-china-finally-get-real-with-each-other/. 54. “US: Washington and Beijing Have Joint Interests in Relation to Iran,” BBC Farsi, March 31, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran56598171.

CHAPTER 6

India and Iran: A Fractured Partnership

To mark the first visit to India in a decade by an Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani pointedly decided to land in the south-central city of Hyderabad in February 2018. Soon after landing, he addressed a Friday Prayer gathering at the Mecca Masjid, and signaled Iran’s desire to engage with Hyderabad’s large business community of Muslims that includes people of Iranian descent. Rouhani methodically selected his next move, a tour of the Indo-Islamic Qutub Shahi Tombs at Golconda. The Qutub Shahi dynasty (1512 AD–1687 AD) were patrons of the Persianate Shii culture and originated from Hamedan, in northwestern Iran, as well as from Turkmen lands that were part of the Persian Empire. The Iranian president’s trip to Hyderabad achieved its goals, by enabling Rouhani to hail the prominence of the region’s Muslim communities and the Parsees, i.e., a group with a Persian Zoroastrian heritage, and to emphasize Iran’s demand that India should overcome business challenges that had to date dampened the New Delhi-Tehran bilateral ties. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi patiently waited to receive President Rouhani in New Delhi, aiming to re-gain Iran’s trust to boost bilateral trade. In New Delhi, Rouhani addressed the Observer Research Foundation and remarked that countries that made a promise to Iran should fulfill them. The statement was a bitter reminder that New Delhi failed to fulfill its contractual obligations to Tehran. The two capitals subsequently issued a joint statement, showcasing nine new © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Keynoush, The World Powers and Iran, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09249-7_6

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agreements between them. By the end of Rouhani’s visit, Indian officials seemed to agree that promises made to Iran should be matched with delivery.1 Rouhani, however, remained uneasy about India’s lukewarm commitments to building relations. Despite the strategic waterway between India and Iran, i.e., the Indian Ocean which leads directly to the Sea of Oman and the Persian Gulf, New Delhi and Tehran were at best distant and aloof partners. The frequent tensions between the United States of America and Iran often forced New Delhi to struggle to boost its with Tehran, including in the period before, during, and after the finalization of the Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Faced with this seemingly insurmountable challenge, India remained modestly accommodating toward Iran and its efforts to protect its peaceful nuclear program. India took additional measures to convince the United States of the merits of this approach. In return, Tehran offered trade incentives to engage New Delhi, and leveraged India’s Parsee and Muslim communities to foster the relations and pressure New Delhi to accommodate Iran’s interests. Although this modest partnership offered options to facilitate the bilateral ties, New Delhi and Tehran viewed each other as unreliable partners. Yet, their partnership sustained because they depended on each other to build a multipolar world in which their say would matter. However, shifting geopolitical priorities barred the formation of a strong partnership, including India’s desire to strengthen its ties with the United States and Israel as part and parcel of New Delhi’s quest to assert its regional status as an Asian power. Nonetheless, there were limits to India’s ability to sustain a partnership with Iran while also sidelining it to reach out to other major powers. Even as an important Asian power, India could not afford to remain indifferent to Iran. As a major regional middle power, Iran could afford to ignore New Delhi’s interests mindful that those interests would not harm Iran’s interests unless they directly led to instability in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. This joint need for stability in the two waterways allowed Tehran to ask New Delhi to discourage US policies to contain even the peaceful aspects of the Iranian nuclear program. The idea that a major Asian power such as India could buffer the tensions between Washington and Tehran meant that New Delhi remained committed to the principles of global citizenship which aimed to pose no threat either to Iran or to other major powers. Yet, India’s buffer role also enabled Tehran to insist on its nuclear positions in its dealings with both New

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Delhi and Washington.2 Simultaneously, India’s buffer role enabled it to leverage Washington and Tehran. This served Tehran, if New Delhi could encourage Washington’s mindfulness of Iran’s nuclear interests. Moreover, the soft balancing tactic exercised by both New Delhi and Tehran in this process, designed to reject dominance in the world order, aimed to strengthen multipolarity in the face of US unilateralism.3 New Delhi maximized its unique buffer status by negotiating favorable economic deals with Iran. But India achieved limited progress, and it pursued more cooperative relations with the United States.4 Moreover, India’s emerging nuclear power status since the 1990s which led to a rapprochement with the United States also compromised the New Delhi-Tehran ties. Yet, since India harbored deep reservations about close US-Pakistani security ties, New Delhi constantly cultivated relations with Tehran. This encouraged New Delhi and Tehran to remain flexible when facing constraints in their partnership, as did the prospects of an uncertain nonpolar world in the event of a US retreat from its major global status.5 Given the complex factors that shaped the India-Iran ties, the balancing act that New Delhi aimed to preserve between its interests with the United States and Iran was delicate if not overwhelming. India’s prominent status as an Asian power allowed it to dictate the terms of its relations with Iran. But the dynamic nature of security in the Persian Gulf, in which Iran was a player, demanded accommodating Tehran’s ‘Looking East’ policies to build partnerships in Asia. Consequently, India worked with Iran over issues such as maritime security, the Chabahar Port project, energy and stability in Afghanistan. The ensuing strategic value of New Delhi’s influence over Tehran served to counterbalance Pakistan’s threat to both capitals. Islamabad challenged India’s access to land routes to Afghanistan, and the Chabahar Port project addressed the problem by enabling Indian trade with Central Asia via Iran’s maritime, land and railway routes. An evolving IndianIranian security axis also countered the US security axis in the Persian Gulf region. This helped India obtain a prominent peacemaking role in this region, considered an important part of the ‘Southern Asia’ strategic zone that New Delhi identified as an immediate geopolitical theater. It further enabled New Delhi to address potential marginalization or containment by competing geopolitical forces. These included regional efforts to bypass India in the China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) project, and in the East-West Corridor linking Central Asia to Europe.6

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Still, Iran expected very little from its ties with India given the latter’s indispensable partnership with the United States and Israel. In addition, a 2019 motion in India’s parliament to revoke the special status or autonomy of Kashmir under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution suggested to Iran that India’s Islamic credentials were secondary considerations compared to India’s broader concerns to control potential threats from Muslims in Kashmir, a community that Iran believed was vulnerable. Doing business with Iran remained at the bottom of India’s immediate interests as well, more so given New Delhi’s preoccupation with maintaining stronger ties with Russia while keeping China’s rise under control. Reluctantly, Tehran thus came to recognize that its ties with New Delhi would remain complicated, unreliable and mutually distrustful.

Overview of India-Iran Relations The continuity of the historic ties between India and Iran was disrupted by the British who colonized the former and controlled the latter’s foreign policy for most of the period between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. The state of constant apprehension which dominated India’s contacts with Iran was also a consequence of complex twentieth-century regional security calculations played out in the larger sphere of the Indian Ocean. Once adjacent neighbors before India’s partition in 1947, the two countries’ worldviews drifted apart as they lost land and maritime borders, and found that they had fewer shared forums through which they could engage. Still, Iran backed India’s independence from Britain in August 1947. In March 1950, India and Iran signed a Treaty of Friendship which consolidated their diplomatic ties.7 But their relations deteriorated as a result of the Cold War. As a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961, India aimed to avoid a formal alliance with major powers while leaning favorably toward the Soviet Union and China. As a member of the Baghdad Pact launched to connect the US geographic spheres of influence in the Middle East in 1955, Iran engaged closely with the West. Yet, Iran proceeded to support India during the SinoIndia War in late 1962, given the loss of Indian territory to communist China. But in 1964, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey signed a new pact to establish the Regional Cooperation for Development. When India attacked Pakistan after it instigated an insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir in 1965, Iran focused on helping Pakistan preserve it sovereignty and territorial

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integrity through moral and material support. Furthermore, Iran was obligated to help Pakistan under the terms of the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) which replaced the Baghdad Pact, and committed members including Tehran and Islamabad to mutual cooperation and protection. To fix its strained ties with India, Tehran agreed to sign a joint cooperation agreement with New Delhi to expand trade. But when India intervened in the Bangladesh Liberation Movement in 1971, in the course of the Indo-Pakistani War, Iran’s apprehensions about India’s regional aspirations grew. The war led the United States and Russia to contemplate the use of force to respectively intimidate and back India. This challenged Iran’s aspirations to replace the world powers as a major balancer in Asia. Furthermore, given that Pakistan was dismembered in the course of the war, it threatened to bring India and its communist backers in Moscow and Beijing closer to Iran’s borders. In 1974, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi made a point of traveling to Tehran to reassure Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi that India would not dismember Pakistan after Bangladesh declared independence two years earlier.8 Gandhi’s trip ensured the trade between New Delhi and Tehran which rapidly increased due to Iran’s windfall oil revenues in the early to mid-1970s. It may have also instilled in the Shah the idea that possessing nuclear weapons had merits, just as India was embarking on a path to publicize its nuclear capabilities. Emboldened by the thaw in ties with India which arrived when Iran was at odds with the world powers over the rising price of oil, the Shah also began advancing his policy to project Iranian power in the Indian Ocean. New Delhi and Tehran subsequently signed a US$630 million agreement for the development of the Kudremukh iron ore project. In 1975, the symbolic Iranian-Indian Nuclear Cooperation Treaty was signed, a year after India’s first nuclear test occurred. Although India promoted the test as a stabilizing force in the subcontinent under the code name Operation Smiling Buddha, in February 1978, the Shah traveled to India to promote disarmament even as he quietly entertained building nuclear weapons. But his efforts to advance a meaningful nuclear cooperation regime with India stalled. Doubting the Shah’s proclamations of seeking only a peaceful nuclear program, the United States reinforced the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to ensure Iran’s compliance as a member. India, however, did not join the NPT and actively advanced its nuclear program.

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The Shah’s nuclear program was nearly dismantled as foreign powers left Iran’s markets after the revolution in 1979. New Delhi, however, dispatched a goodwill delegation to Tehran.9 India opted to engage with Iran even as the country’s new government made attempts to export its ideology, publicly took positions to defend Kashmir, and compared the situation of Muslims in India with the dispossessed rights of the Palestinians.10 But diverging policies dampened relations between New Delhi and Tehran, despite the fact that Iran joined the NAM. Specifically, India was cautious not to provoke the United States by drawing too close to Iran, a position which annoyed Tehran. In August 1982, Iran’s then Parliament Speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani traveled to India and met with Prime Minister Gandhi at Parliament House in New Delhi. Pointedly, he did not take part in India’s Independence Day celebrations, which offended Gandhi who refused to thank the lower-level Iranian delegation present in the celebrations for their participation.11 However, since Iran needed India’s supply of technical assistance to operate Russian military equipment during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) and to supply other military equipment, the Indo-Iran Joint Commission was set up to promote trade in July 1983. An ensuing agreement stipulated that either party had the right to ban or restrict its terms if it had to protect the national interest, to enable India to easily withdraw from future commercial projects in Iran.12 By the 1990s, Central Asia emerged as an important regional corridor, which encouraged India’s outreach to Iran to build railway connections for trade purposes. In return, India agreed to sell a nuclear reactor to Iran despite US pressures to cancel the deal in 1991.13 The destruction by Hindu nationalists of the Babri Masjid stalled India’s outreach to Iran in December 1992, but New Delhi assured Tehran that this was an isolated incident. The two countries then discussed building a gas pipeline. In April 1995, Rafsanjani paid a presidential visit to India to hold talks with Prime Minister Pamulaparti Venkata Narashima Rao. India and Iran issued a joint statement reiterating their conviction that sustained dialog could lead to the resolution of their outstanding differences, and maintained that terrorism was an impediment to the realization of this process.14 Iran was mainly concerned by Israel’s supply of weapons and antiterrorism intelligence and technologies to India after the two normalized relations in 1992. India’s outward pro-Arab sentiments and defense of Palestinian rights made Tehran more cautious, because it believed that

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New Delhi was attempting to conceal the extent of its collaboration with Tel Aviv. Yet, Iran chose not to view India as more than a fringe Asian power incapable of altering Tehran’s geopolitical calculations. But Tehran was unable to ignore New Delhi for long after the latter conducted underground nuclear explosions in May 1998, followed by a nuclear test by Pakistan. Although India’s actions led to US sanctions, it shifted Iran’s perception about the commitment of world powers to the NPT regime. Iran recognized that US desire to contain China may have enabled New Delhi to develop nuclear weapons without a great deal of international scrutiny. Furthermore, Pakistan and India challenged the international system through nuclear weaponization and encouraged US compliance in the process, a point that was not lost to Iran as it contemplated the direction of its own nuclear program. In response to these developments, Tehran engaged India’s nuclear scientists to advance the Iranian nuclear and heavy water technologies. But to encourage non-proliferation, Tehran argued that the NPT could only succeed if India joined it by destroying its stockpile of nuclear weapons. It further hoped that India would abide by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which Iran had signed but delayed ratifying.15 Iran had other concerns about India’s non-commitment to the principles of non-proliferation which in turn triggered Tehran’s drive to acquire nuclear capabilities. Russia was Iran’s only neighbor that had tested nuclear bombs. Given the fact that India was in Iran’s immediate regional security sphere, concerns about the Indian nuclear and ballistic missile program began shaping Iran’s security and defense calculations as it embarked on producing nuclear fuel and developing its missile capabilities. More critically, Russia helped India’s nuclear program more than it rendered support to the Iranian nuclear program, pointing to discrimination by the major powers in how they treated India and Iran.16 But from India’s perspective, Iran was on the brink of jeopardizing the future of established non-proliferation regimes including the 1987 Missile Technology Control Regime of which India was a member, and the 1974 Nuclear Suppliers Group of which neither India nor Iran were part of. India felt equally threatened by Iran’s potential nuclear ambitions, and any threat to the security of the Persian Gulf region and the Indian Ocean that it would entail. Ultimately, the expanding nuclear programs of India and Pakistan combined with rising anti- Shii al-Qaeda-led acts of terrorism in the

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subcontinent forced Tehran to recalibrate its strategic conception about its own nuclear program. Al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden declared that Muslims should have their own nuclear weapons, by which he probably meant Sunni Muslim nations, which raised more concerns in Iran about the possibility of being attacked by extremist Sunni or Hindu groups possessing those weapons. In addition, Iran recognized that nuclear weaponization by India or Pakistan carried mutually deterrent purposes to effectively bring their conflict over Kashmir to a near standstill. Tehran further calculated that if the India and Pakistan credible minimum deterrence policy worked over Kashmir, nuclear deterrence could also carry the capability for countries to strike while preserving the possibility of conventional war. The rational that nuclear weapons could deter enemy plots without needing to be used thus began shaping inside Iran.17 Subsequent attempts to address the rise of Sunni-led Islamic extremist movements in Central Asia helped connect New Delhi’s and Tehran’s security and commercial interests. India’s “Look East” policy led Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to reach out to the Middle East, and consolidate interests with Tehran between 1998 and 2004.18 In 2001, India and Iran signed an agreement to expand trade and economic cooperation.19 In March 2003, they led a naval exercise as the United States launched a coalition to invade Iraq, followed by discussions to enable New Delhi to supply some of Tehran’s defense needs. In April, President Mohammad Khatami traveled to India and took part in its Republic Day. Khatami emphasized the common cultural heritage between India and Iran, and promoted his Dialog Among Civilizations initiative in which the East could play a more prominent role. The New Delhi Declaration issued on the occasion of his visit outlined a vision for strategic partnership, conscious of the vast potential to expand cooperation in the political, economic, transport, maritime, energy, science, trade, agriculture and technology fields. By extension, it also endorsed technologies for peaceful nuclear programs, and reaffirmed the solid belief held by New Delhi and Tehran in the need to build pluralism in international relations. The two capitals launched a Ministerial-level Joint Commission and a Joint Business Council to develop Chabahar and its Shahid Beheshti Port, and a road to Afghanistan where they insisted on containing the Taliban. They then worked on operationalizing North-South transit arrangements in which Russia would play a critical role, and reiterated a commitment to fight terrorism. New Delhi and Tehran further vowed to explore

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complementarities in the energy sector, given India’s position as one of the world’s largest oil consumers, and investments in upstream and downstream activities in the oil sector and liquified/natural gas and transport, and Iran awarded the Farsi Oil exploration block to an Indian consortium.20 Iran also hoped to gain India’s support to ease tensions with the United States. But in 2005, the separation of India’s military and civilian nuclear capacity through an agreement with the United States safeguarded New Delhi’s nuclear status, and expanded its nuclear cooperation with Washington. In September, India supported an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution condemning the Iranian nuclear program. India maintained that its vote helped ease international concerns over Tehran’s proliferation program. In 2006, India voted against Iran at an IAEA meeting that referred the Iranian nuclear file to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). By then, suspicions were growing in India about Iran’s likely interest to develop nuclear weapons, especially in light of Tehran’s latest collaboration with Pakistan’s and China’s nuclear scientists.21 Iran took India’s vote as meaning that the latter county was after new trade bargains, given that New Delhi repeatedly supported a peaceful Iranian nuclear program. But New Delhi was concerned about Iran’s rising security challenge, and it allowed Israeli intelligence gathering satellite systems to operate on Indian territory. In response, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad requested a transit stop to India on his way to Sri Lanka in April 2008. According to cable releases, he warned Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi that world events were changing in Iran’s favor. The warning aimed to encourage India to engage with Iran rather than attempt to enforce a strict international sanctions regime that could dismantle the Iranian nuclear program. Singh, who had previously rejected requests to visit Tehran or for Ahmadinejad to visit New Delhi, had also reluctantly accepted to host the Iranian president only to appease the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) party’s domestic Left and Muslim constituencies, to assert the independence of India’s foreign policy from the United States. As a result, New Delhi proceeded to support future resolutions by the UNSC against Iran. When discussions with Ahmadinejad focused on the US$7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline (IPI), also known as the Peace Pipeline, Singh conditioned it

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to commercial and economic viability, assured gas supplies and geopolitical security. A year earlier, New Delhi had boycotted trilateral meetings on the Peace Pipeline.22 Ahmadinejad’s brief stop in India served as a reminder that the country had failed to fulfill many of its promises, including building a civilian research nuclear reactor for the Iranians in the 1990s. In fact, as it turned out, it seemed that Washington and New Delhi wanted to work together to encourage Tehran to halt its nuclear enrichment activities. The 2008 United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act, and the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act, aiming to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons capabilities and to boost the NPT Safeguards Agreement of which India is a part strengthened the bilateral ties between Washington and New Delhi, and ended India’s backing of the Iranian nuclear program. In exchange, the United States agreed to work with India to expand its civil nuclear capacity. New Delhi, however, remained concerned by sanctions if they derailed trade options with Tehran, and supported sanctions strictly against the Iranian nuclear program. In this way, India could support US measures to contain Iran’s nuclear activities, while keeping Iranian markets open to Indian investors. As a result, new Delhi signaled to Tehran that it was keen to revive a 2005 agreement to import five million tons of liquified natural gas (LNG) by 2009, over a 25-year period. It further agreed to hold fresh talks with Pakistan to revive the IPI. India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) had already held talks with Iran to develop the country’s oil and gas fields on terms highly favorable to New Delhi, including through a US$5 billion investment in Farzad-B in the southern Farsi Field which then increased to a US$11 billion offer. By 2010, the Oil and Natural Gas Corp Videsh Ltd (OVL), the oversees investment arm of ONGC, which had helped discover the offshore Farzad-B, revised the initial agreement and offered to produce 60% of the available gas reserves. In exchange for this reduced offer, which Ahmadinejad reluctantly agreed to, Iran received India’s offer for an initial pledge of US$100 million to develop Chabahar.23

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India-Iran Relations Before, During and After the Nuclear Deal The sections below are divided into three timeframes to review IndiaIran ties, i.e., in 2011–2012 (during the pre-nuclear talks), 2013–2016 (during the nuclear talks and the implementation of the nuclear deal), and 2017–2021 (the period after the agreement). India-Iran Ties in 2011–2012 The signing of a Road Map to Strategic Cooperation between India and Iran was designed to ensure energy cooperation between the two states, along with the development of the Chabahar Fahranj-Bam railway and Marine Oil Tanking Terminal, and trade with Afghanistan. The salience of securing sea routes was a primary concern in boosting these trade ties, and India and Iran continued to coordinate their maritime policies through the Indian Ocean Rim Association set up in 1997. In 2012, however, OVL halted the development of Farzad-B in response to US sanctions. New Delhi and Tehran did not just disagree over the terms of the initial 2008 OVL agreement. Specifically, they were unable to facilitate payments to implement the deal, despite exploring numerous options that involved financial transactions between the Reserve Bank of India and the Asian Clearing Union based in Iran, and payments in euros or rupees. Consequently, Iran turned into India’s seventh supplier of crude oil by 2012–2013. In February 2012, Iran was implicated in attacks on Israeli diplomats in India. The attacks were seen as an Iranian response to its faltering ties with New Delhi. In response, New Delhi said little by way of public comments to condemn the Iranian nuclear file, mindful not to escalate tensions with Tehran. But India remained quietly concerned that Iran would discount the non-proliferation regime, and pose a new threat to New Delhi’s security and energy interests in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Yet, in the absence of a clear strategy by India to address Iran’s nuclear challenge, New Delhi inadvertently gave weight to arguments presented by groups inside Iran that supported building advanced nuclear technologies in order to increase the country’s bargaining capacity with India. While there was no major public tension between India and Iran over these issues, they adversely affected the trade between the two countries as well as their bargaining position vis-à-vis the United States.

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In August 2012, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Tehran to attend a NAM summit. By then, New Delhi had decided to expand its energy ties with Iran’s Gulf Arab neighbors. As a result, Iran lost influence over India’s energy and foreign policy choices in this period. Yet, Singh’s Left party supporters in the Indian National Congress (INC)led ruling coalition viewed Iran as a key country in their efforts to challenge US influence over New Delhi, and they maintained that accommodating Tehran could help ease domestic public opinion by India’s Muslims against his party.24 A month after Singh’s trip, India’s Prime Minister faced a walk out of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition by some Left party members, threatening INC status as the ruling party. The walk out had little to do with Iran, but its timing pointedly reminded India’s politicians of the careful balancing act required to build a proactive foreign policy agenda toward Iran that was in line with India’s party interests. India-Iran Ties in 2013–2016 By 2013–2014, India was the third largest consumer of energy in the world, but importing only six percent of its crude oil from Iran. India’s energy needs pivoted its attention back toward Iranian oil markets, the need to stabilize those markets, and seek a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear challenge. But by 2014, Iran re-listed Farzad-B to enable foreign companies to invest in the field, thereby creating competition for India. To address this handicap, in 2015, India and Iran signed an MoU to expand the Chabahar Port. The port development project aimed to serve as a parallel trade business route along with Pakistan’s Gwadar Port that was managed with a joint investment of US$248 million as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, with the possibility of US$750 million additional investments. Known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), this project further helped expand China’s presence in the Indian Ocean. Of concern to India was the fact that Iran retained investment interests in Gwadar to boost refining capacity for its oil. Meanwhile, although India and Iran could engage through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to protect their port interests, India faced delays in developing Chabahar which could sideline its interests along South-North trade corridors connecting the Indian Ocean through the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf to Central Asia. More importantly, the transit routes

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were vital to India’s territorial connectivity to Central Asia while bypassing Pakistan, and to India’s plans to connect to Russia and from there to Europe if the North-South Transport Corridor were to expand. The delays in expanding trade ties with Iran meant that the Gulf Arab states remained more vital trade partners for New Delhi. Alienating its financially powerful Gulf partners was not part of India’s outreach policy to Iran in this period. Moreover, India’s large Sunni Muslim community, not to mention its large number of expatriate workers in the Gulf Arab states, meant that it would retain far more important commercial contacts with Iran’s rival Arab neighbors. Yet, declining US influence in the Middle East and its stated goals of withdrawing military intervention in the Gulf region revitalized New Delhi’s Iran outreach policy. By spreading its interests across the Persian Gulf, India was thus driven to remain mindful about US policy interests to contain Iran’s nuclear program while ensuring economic growth through regional partnerships with both Iran and its Arab neighbors. As a result of these careful calculations, the volume of trade between India and Iran reached almost US$13.13 billion in 2014–2015. India imported US$8.95 billion worth of goods, and exported US$4.7 billion to Iran.25 However, Iran’s oil exports to India halted in March 2015. In response, India’s Secretary of Commerce Rajeev Kher and Finance Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi visited Iran in April and July respectively. In May, India’s Minister of Transport and Shipping Shri Nitin Gadkari visited Iran to sign the MoU highlighting the terms of India’s participation in the Chabahar Port. Members of the Tata Group, a large global conglomerate with prominent billionaires from India’s Parsee community, also traveled to Iran. This was followed by visits to Iran by other Indian business associations and companies through October. In December, the 18th India-Iran Joint Commission meeting was held to boost trade, and to facilitate visas for diplomatic and official visits.26 Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Iran in May 2016, shortly before the launch of the JCPOA, along with multiple other visits by Indian officials that year, led to the signing of the India-Afghanistan-Iran trilateral agreement to officially establish the International Transport and Transit Corridor (also known as the Chabahar Agreement) and the International North South Corridor (INSTC), linking India to Eurasia. India made additional pledges to invest up to US$20 billion to help diversify Iran’s industrial sector. In the same year, Iran Ports and Maritime Organization (PMO) and Indian Ports Global Limited (IPGL) signed a lease

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contract, handing over two terminals and five berths at Shahid Beheshti in Chabahahr, giving India an 18-month operational right in the port, which would lead to expanded port capacity to enable the transit of shipment, the handling of bulk cargo and the docking of dozens of vessels. Simultaneously, New Delhi and Tehran explored modalities to transfer funds for Chabahar, avoid double taxations, and facilitate other trade and banking arrangements. Partly a result of improved ties, Iran was able to turn into India’s second supplier of crude oil in 2016. India, meanwhile, continued to support the implementation of the JCPOA. In May, the Indian Railway Construction Limited (IRCON) and the Iranian Construction and Development of Transportation Infrastructures Company (CDTIC) signed an MoU to develop transportation through the Chabahar-Zahedan railway line through India’s investment in the tune of US$1.6 billion, but progress on the project was slow because Iran failed to see a full implementation of the nuclear deal due to multiple other sanctions imposed by the United States that discouraged trade with Tehran.27 As a result, Prime Minister Modi’s Link West policy to strengthen relations in the Persian Gulf led to New Delhi sidelining Iran, as India sought stronger energy partnerships with US allies in the region. The share of energy supplied to India’s oil markets also increased significantly when countries such as Russia and the United States, along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, stepped in to support New Delhi’s trade needs, enabling India to reverse its energy dependence on Iran and diversify its oil supply sources. India would soon reveal that in this period, its naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav was taken in Chabahar, on alleged charges of gathering information on Baluchi separatists in the area, and handed over to Pakistan, although Tehran initially dismissed the story as a rumor. The story, however, served to show increased disagreements and tensions between New Delhi and Tehran. India also watched Iran make efforts to cement ties with larger trade partners such as the French Total and the China National Petroleum Corporation in order to develop Iranian oil and gas fields, while attempting to conclude talks to finalize the Farzad-B project with New Delhi. As a result, India went into Iran half-hearted, unwilling to place its bets on a country that could pivot toward India’s other Asian rivals such as China, especially as Iran tried to attract Chinese investments in a refinery in Chabahar and a free trade zone. Subsequently, the value of

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India’s exports to Iran declined as Washington failed to ensure ease of trade with Iran, from US$4.9 billion in 2013–2014, to $2,379 billion in 2016–2017.28 India-Iran Ties in 2017–2021 As US efforts to compromise the JCPOA intensified under the Trump administration, Iran attempted to improve its engagement with China and Pakistan, in part to encourage competition with India for Iranian markets in the hope to re-attract Indian investments and engage in barter trade with New Delhi. Iran also tried to receive a higher bid from India to develop the Farzad-B agreement in exchange for Iranian commitment to buy the gas from the field. The PMO-IPGL Phase 1 Project was inaugurated in December 2017, and the port operationalized in 2018. A year earlier, India sent Iran wheat through Chabahar, with plans to use the port for the export of more Indian agricultural products in 2018–2019. By 2020, India’s funding for the port development projects reached US$14 million. But Iran was unsatisfied by the low volume of India’s investment, and asked New Delhi to increase the port’s capacity and enable the Afghanistan Ghazanfar Bank to open and operate a branch in India to facilitate financial interactions for trade purposes with Iran.29 Tehran, however, suspected that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was pressured in this period by the United States to block waterflows to Iran from the Kamal Khan Dam on the Helmand River. The measure could stall progress on Chabahar, given that Kamal Khan could offer alternative ports to India. As a result, Tehran believed that New Delhi was behind the plan as well, and was merging its commercial interests with the United States to extract minerals from Afghanistan. That meant that Chabahar carried less value financially for Afghanistan as well as India in the immediate future compared to investments being made in Kamal Khan to develop a trade port around it in Nirouz. President Ghani, meanwhile, argued that Iran should give Afghanistan oil for the water from the Helmand. But Tehran asserted that the Kamal Khan Dam was tampered with as early as in the 1950s, in violation of Article Eight of the 1973 Helmand River Water Treaty preventing the waste of the water that Iran depended on. To sweeten the deal for Kabul to commit to the Chabahar Port Project, Iran offered a new agreement based on an understanding of granting Iran a share of the Helmand River flow in exchange for Iran granting Afghanistan access to international waterways

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via its southern Gulf ports of Bandar Abbas and Chabahar. But bitterly, Iranian officials argued that had the country concluded a Chabahar deal with China instead of India and Afghanistan, the port would be running in full capacity much sooner. In fact, only after Beijing and Tehran spoke of concluding a 25-year strategic deal in 2021, India stepped in to offer some additional equipment and services in order to retain its share of the Chabahar port.30 Subsequent sanctions on Iran re-imposed by the Trump administration, and the country’s difficult bureaucracy and attempts to renegotiate deals or break them off, made India’s private sector reluctant to invest in Iran’s automobile, mining, and iron and steel industries and to handle payments with Iran through the State Bank of India. India withdrew from Farzad-B, although in exchange, New Delhi twice received US waivers (or Significant Reductions Exceptions) to purchase oil from Iran for a limited time. Iran remained India’s third largest supplier of crude oil, while trying to offer freight discounts on its oil and credits if Indian refineries increased purchases. But the oil waiver ended in May 2019, forcing New Delhi to halt oil imports from Iran, which had already dropped from a peak of US$13 billion in 2018–2019 to nearly US$2.8 billion through the 2019– 2020 fiscal year, at which time the United States demanded that India halt imports.31 According to reports, US Ambassador to the UN Nimrata Nikki Haley even informed Indian officials that unless they drastically reduced energy imports from Iran by November 2019, their country would face sanctions. India took the ultimatum as an insult that ran counter to its desire.32 In response, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) questioned lowering imports of oil from Iran, while the INC criticized New Delhi for giving in to US demands. In response, New Delhi attempted to accommodate some concerns by the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen about ties with the US and appease the Indian community of Muslims based mainly in Hyderabad for attempts to isolate Iran. Yet India began working more closely with the Trump administration to formulate policies on Iran. Along this path, Washington offered opportunities to New Delhi to keep Iran engaged over Chabahar, which aimed partly to contain the Chinese influence over Iran and across Central Asia. In addition, Chabahar helped landlocked Afghanistan reach ports in Iran’s southern shores, which the United States wanted as a means to improve the Afghan economy and help stabilize the country. As a result, to the extent that the Chabahar project advanced US goals, Washington was

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willing to grant New Delhi an opportunity to invest in it. At its height, Indian investment pledges to Chabahar if it extended to Afghanistan were US$500 million, but sanctions reduced India’s allocations to approximately US$5.9 million in 2019–2020, down from US$20 million in 2018–2019, and back up again to US$13 million in 2020–2021.33 Quietly, Iran feared that India and the United States were collaborating to control the pace of developments in Chabahar, and forcing Tehran to comply. In response, Iran introduced plans to develop Chabahar through indigenous-based human and capital resources, which did not fully materialize given sanctions. In 2018, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif confirmed that the Chabahar Port Project would remain open to investments from India, as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan and China. He also promised to ink plans to link the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea via Russia.34 Meanwhile, India was busy expanding its own significant ties with China, thus ignoring Iranian attempts to fuel rivalry between Beijing and New Delhi for Iran’s markets. A year later, Zarif attended the Raisina Dialog in India, met with India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, and joined events with India’s business community to share his views about the need for Tehran and New Delhi to collaborate in a post-western world order. But since the United States halted offering extensions to enable India to purchase Iranian oil in April 2019, although New Delhi and Tehran held further talks to develop Farzad-B, Zarif’s message did not go far. Iran also hoped that India would continue to buy some of its oil at discounted prices, and pay in its local currency, which did not fully transpire. As a result, Tehran lost hope in India’s investments and decided to move forward with the Chabahar project without New Delhi on board. The Zahedan Railway Project linked to Chabahar, for example, which was meant to be carried out without the participation of India’s railway company, dropped India although Iran denied it. Yet, Tehran proceeded to replace the deal it had made with India with an MoU with a local Iranian company that was able to implement the project. The project would also link to Sarakhs and the border with Turkmenistan. Nonetheless, Afghanistan’s instability, and concerns about the Taliban, forced India and Iran to reengage, and expand inter-Afghan talks as well as contacts among Afghanistan’s regional neighbors. These engagements moved forward, despite ongoing Iranian concerns that New Delhi would continually walk a tight rope trying to balance US congressional pressures

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over India-Iran ties, and pressures from Israel to challenge Tehran-New Delhi relations.35 Iran also showed concern about US warships including the USS Arlington in the Persian Gulf, if it were to endanger Iranian navigation in the Indian Ocean. As a result, Tehran insisted in talks with New Delhi on the need to rid the region of foreign naval and military presence, which further complicated New Delhi’s strategic engagements with Washington. In addition, President Rouhani advanced ideas to secure the Strait of Hormuz through a new peace plan that would guarantee safe navigation between the region and the Indian Ocean. To address some of Tehran’s grievances, India’s External Affairs Minister Shri Subrahmanyam Jaishankar traveled to Iran in December 2019. India along with members of its large Shii community also donated to Iran’s Flood Victims in May.36 On January 3, 2020, the US assassination of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Suleimani galvanized India’s majority population of Shi’a communities in the Chiktan district in Ladakh, with protestors expressing solidarity with Iran. The Kashmiri Shi’a communities held other protests during Friday prayers in the Budgam district, and the central Uttar Pradesh state of India. These developments once again served to highlight the importance of New Delhi’s outreach to Tehran, in order to appease India’s Muslim communities. In fact, India’s Shii population remained a source of constant tension. A largely apolitical community, segments of the population remained sympathetic to Iran. In the city of Kargil in the conflict-prone region of Jammu and Kashmir, Indian scholars and clerics received seminary education in Iran, helped run the Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust, as well as educational and welfare organizations linked to the Ladakh region’s majority Muslim and Shii populations. Meanwhile, the Majlis-e-Ulema-e-Hind held rallies denouncing US policies to contain Iran and its nuclear program.37 In September 2020, Defense Minister Rajnat Singh went to Tehran to discuss defense issues, and a broader dialog between India and Iran over the security of the Persian Gulf, in response to rising tensions in the waterway since 2018 after Iran threatened to disrupt energy flows if sanctions were not lifted. IRCON and the Iranian Construction and Development of Transportation Infrastructures Company (CDTIC) also signed an MoU in September for the development of the Chabahar-Zahedan railway project, which remained un-operational.

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In February 2021, Iran’s Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami traveled to Bangalore to take part in the opening of the Aero India 2021 and the first Conclave of Defense Ministers of the Indian Ocean Region, using the time to discuss Afghanistan and joint military and security initiatives on a number of regional files. Iran, meanwhile, expanded its naval presence in the northern part of the Indian Ocean. New Delhi and Tehran further discussed selling advanced weapons to Iran. India then invited the Islamic Republic of Iran Railway to take part in India’s Maritime Summit in March 2021, to expand maritimerail transport projects through international corridors, as Iran attempted to expand North-South and East-West corridors via rail and consult with India, Azerbaijan, Russia, Afghanistan and Turkey. The event’s third day was marked as Chabahar Day, during which participants discussed key port projects linking to the Indian Ocean ports in which New Delhi shared joint ventures. Several ideas that were explored involved facilitating transit corridors between these Indian Ocean ports and Central Asia and the Caucuses, increasing investments in the Shahid Beheshti Port, linking the North-South corridor to the northern Iranian city of Rasht on the Caspian Sea and from there to Astara on Iran’s border with Azerbaijan. Prior to the event, Iran also held bilateral talks with India given the latter’s high capacity to develop dry ports and inland container depots. India expressed interest using this capacity to logistically develop the Chabahar Port’s capacity, while Iran designated three backup logistic ports in the event that the expansion of Chabahar was stalled again by India, and to link those ports to Iran’s railway system to connect to Zahedan, Mirjaveh and Shamtigh. The route, once developed, represented one of cheapest and fastest corridors linking the Persian Gulf countries and India to the North Corridors, and would in effect invite more trade.38 However, it also carried military and maritime capacities, designed to increase Iran’s naval power, which led to disagreements with New Delhi over the control and management of port piers. On July 7, 2021, Jaishankar visited Iran to deliver President Ebrahim Raisi a personal message from Prime Minister Modi emphasizing the continuity of ties. Jaishankar met with both Zarif and Raisi to discuss regional and international issues, the nuclear talks, Afghanistan, the North-South Transport Corridor and Chabahar. By the end of the visit, it appeared that India and Iran retained overlapping interests that were stronger than their diverging points of views. President Raisi also invited Prime Minister Modi to his swearing in ceremony in August 2021.

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However, Tehran’s ties with New Delhi had already suffered setbacks. In July, Iran had told India to step aside from the Chabahar Port project, and the Chabahar-Zahedan railway project specifically, due to financing delays by New Delhi given the lack of progress in the nuclear talks. The notice came four years after the signing of the railway line agreement during Modi’s visit to Iran which also committed US$80 million to Chabahar, and to extend Chabahar-Zahedan to the border with Afghanistan, a 628 km railway in need of US$400 million that was paid by the Iran National Development Bank. Iran’s longest railway line was also expected to regulate security of transport, and expand geostrategic cooperation between New Delhi and Tehran. Iran expected to complete the railway by July 2021, and the first 150 km became operational, while the second 150 km neared completion. A third 300 km line would connect Nikshahr to Iranshahr and to Khash in southeastern Iran’s Province of Sistan and Baluchistan.39 India’s potentially marginal role in Afghanistan compared to Iran, and Iran’s desire to work with China to secure Afghan markets further pushed India aside, despite a mutual desire by Tehran and New Delhi to counter extremism and terrorism in Central Asia, in the subcontinent, Pakistan, Kashmir and the Indian Ocean in countries such as Sri Lanka as ISIS forces emerged in the region. Likewise, India’s efforts to expand cooperation with the United States in Afghanistan marginalized Iran. But the flurry of regional discussions after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 meant that the country carried potential to turn into a focal point of future Iran-India ties, especially given Tehran’s call for hosting a permanent regional secretariat to address the issues in Afghanistan.40 Yet, by the end of 2021, it was clear that India’s quest for major security guarantees in the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and domestically against extremist groups including some of its pro-Iranian Muslims meant that New Delhi was constantly in search of partners other than Tehran. In fact, under the leadership of its Hindu nationalist government, India saw Israel as an important trade and security partner as soon as signs emerged that the JCPOA was unlikely to be fully implemented in 2017. The thawing of ties between the Gulf Arab States and Israel further helped tilt India toward supporting the normalization of Arab-Israeli ties. Finally, Israel remained India’s main weapons supplier, and a partner in counterterrorism which helped control extremism in India, and which also meant that Tehran had to search for new modalities to converge its goals in the Indian Ocean with new Delhi’s interests.

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Conclusion India was supportive of Iranian efforts to seek security guarantees from the world for advancing a peaceful nuclear program if it served to stabilize the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Given US-Iran tensions, India hoped the two would settle on an effective non-proliferation regime by reviving the JCPOA. In the absence of normalized ties between Washington and Tehran, New Delhi learned to settle for less, by constantly adjusting its positions to modestly accommodate Iran in the face of its hostilities with the United States. Iran’s military ambitions resonated with India’s own military projections as a major Asian power, and the two countries showed interest to jointly secure vital international waterways and fight terrorism by Muslim extremists. But frequent pressures by the United States brought on India to isolate Iran presented challenges on these fronts. To the extent that the India-Iran relationship was independent of external pressures, it stabilized the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, and in a manner, and even inadvertently, advanced US balancing goals to contain the rise of China and Russia as major players in the waterways. In the process, India and Iran tried to continually rise as regional powers and acquire more advanced technological and military capabilities, while expanding trade and commercial opportunities. But the hurdles they faced, including Iran’s inability to overcome tensions with the United States, disrupted the region-wide balancing influence that a solid IndiaIran partnership could have offered. Both New Delhi and Tehran were aware of this, as a result of which, they continued to build ties with other neighbors in the region, and seek opportunities to converge their security and commercial interests when they could. But this was a far cry from having strategic relations, as much as New Delhi or Tehran may have wanted to. Meanwhile, the inability by major powers to influence world events at all times pushed New Delhi and Tehran to contend with the possibility of an emerging nonpolar world, which confused their relations and their impact on regional and global events. Along the way, as the dominant rising power in this game, India led policies toward Iran as it struggled to encourage New Delhi to comply with its demands. This constant tension between India and Iran implied that the two were unlikely allies in their mutual quest to obtain major power status, but occasional partners in addressing the security issues that emerged in a regional context.

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Notes 1. DP Srivastava, “Rouhani’s Visit Reflects the Many Dimensions to IndiaIran Ties,” Hindustan Times, February 21, 2018, https://www.hindus tantimes.com/opinion/rouhani-s-visit-reflects-the-many-dimensions-toindia-iran-ties/story-ZYyfcYZtnH9lXpMwcLfcNL.html. 2. For the varying roles of middle powers see Eduard Jordaan, “The Concept of a Middle Power in International Relations: Distinguishing Between Emerging and Traditional Middle Powers,” South African Journal of Political Studies, Volume 30, No. 1 (2003): 165–181, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/025893403 2000147282?journalCode=cpsa20; for varying definitions of regional powers as it pertains to India see Bhabani Sen Gupta, “Waiting for India: India’s Role As a Regional Power,” Journal of International Affairs, Volume 29, No. 2, Power in the Third World (Fall 1975): 171–184, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24356681. 3. For soft balancing, see T.V. Paul, “Soft Balancing in the Age of US Primacy,” International Security, Volume 30, No. 1 (Summer 2005): 46–71, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137458. 4. See also Mohammad Soltaninejad, “Iran-India Relations: The Unified Strategic Partnership,” India Quarterly, Volume 73, No. 1 (March 2017): 21–35, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48505529. 5. See Richard N. Haass, “The Age of Nonpolarity,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/ 2008-05-03/age-nonpolarity. 6. Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, “The United States, India and Iran: Managing A Delicate Balance,” Center on International Cooperation, February 2016, https://cic.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/sidhu_iran_india_final_1.pdf. 7. “Treaty of Friendship,” Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, March 5, 1950, https://mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents.htm?dtl/ 19494/Treaty+of+Friendship. 8. Mohammed Ayoob, “Keeping Friends Close,” The Hindu, July 30, 2018, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/keeping-friendsclose/article24547361.ece. 9. Farah Naaz, “Indo-Iranian Relations 1947–2000,” Institute for Defense and Strategic Analysis Publication, January 2001, https://ciaotest.cc.col umbia.edu/olj/sa/sa_jan01naf01.html. 10. C. Christine Fair, “Indo-Iranian Relations: Prospects for Bilateral Cooperation Post-9–11,” Woodrow Wilson Center, Asia Program Special Report, No. 120, April 2004, 8–10, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/ files/media/documents/publication/asia_rpt_120rev.pdf. 11. “Memoirs of Hashemi Rafsanjani of Visit to India,” Roozegar Nou, Tir 1391, http://sedayeroshangari.blogfa.com/post/360.

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12. Ministry of External Affairs India, April 10, 2001, retrieved from https://www.mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents.htm?dtl/7510/Agreem ent+On+Trade+And+Economic+Cooperation+Between+The+Govern ment+Of+The+islamic+republic+Of+Iran+And+The+Government+Of+ The+Republic+Of+India. 13. “Memoirs of Hashemi Rafsanjani of Visit to India”; Naaz, “Indo-Iranian Relations 1947–2000”. 14. Darshan Singh, “Appraisal of Iran’s President, Rafsanjani’s Visit to India in April 1995,” India Quarterly, Volume 51, No. 2/3 (April-September 1995): 119–128, https://www.jstor.org/stable/45072665. 15. Mostafa Delavar Pouraghdam, “Comparison of Nuclearization of Iran, India and Pakistan,” Hawzah Net, Khordad 25, 1387, https:// hawzah.net/fa/Magazine/View/3814/6256/68065/%D9%85%D9% 82%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B3%D9%87-%D8%AA%D8%B7%D8%A8% DB%8C%D9%82%DB%8C-%D9%81%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB%8C%D9% 86%D8%AF-%D9%87%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%87-%D8%A7%DB%8C-% D8%B4%D8%AF%D9%86-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8% B1%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%8C-%D9%87%D9%86%D8%AF-%D9%88-% D9%BE%D8%A7%DA%A9%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%86; Naaz, “Indo-Iranian Relations 1947–2000”. 16. Delavar Pouraghdam, “Comparison of Nuclearization of Iran, India and Pakistan”; Naaz, “Indo-Iranian Relations 1947–2000”. 17. See Seyyed Mohammad Kazem Sajadpour, “Nuclear Rivalry Between India and Pakistan and Its Consequences on the National Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, Volume 14, No. 4, Series 54 (Winter 1390): 228. 18. Fair, “Indo-Iranian Relations”. 19. Ministry of External Affairs India. 20. The Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Iran, “The New Delhi Declaration,” Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, January 25, 2003, file:///Users/Banafsheh/Downloads/4000913905409.pdf. https://www.mea.gov.in/other.htm?dtl/20182/The+Republic+of+ India+and+th&quantity=1. 21. Alistair Scrutton, “Iranian President Arrives in India for Energy Talks,” Reuters, April 30, 2008, https://www.livemint.com/Politics/ncpiDd8Co oD19CP8TbR4zO/Iranian-president-arrives-in-India-for-energy-talks. html; Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, “The United States, India and Iran: Managing A Delicate Balance,” Center on International Cooperation, February 2016, https://cic.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/sidhu_iran_i ndia_final_1.pdf.

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22. “Menon Says Ahmadinejad Played to Masses During India Visit,” NDTV , December 17, 2010, https://www.ndtv.com/wikileak/wikileaks-menonsays-ahmadinejad-played-to-masses-during-india-visit-442267; “Iran’s Ahmadinejad to Visit India,” The Hindu, March 21, 2011, https://www. thehindu.com/news/the-india-cables/the-cables/149884-Irans-Ahmadi nejad-to-visit-India/article14955335.ece. 23. Alistair Scrutton, “Ahmadinejad to Visit India to Deepen Energy Ties,” Reuters, April 23, 2008, https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia33198120080423. 24. See P. R. Kumaraswamy, “India’s Persian Problems,” Center for Contemporary Conflict, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi= 10.1.1.614.6113&rep=rep1&type=pdf. 25. Embassy of India, Iran, January 2016, https://www.mea.gov.in/Portal/ ForeignRelation/Iran_11_01_2016.pdf. 26. Ibid. 27. Meena Singh Roy, “India’s Chabahar Dilemma,” Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, July 31, 2020, https://idsa.in/ids acomments/india-chabahar-dilemma-mroy-310720. 28. Srivastava, “Rouhani’s Visit Reflects the Many Dimensions to India-Iran Ties”. 29. Singh Roy, “India’s Chabahar Dilemma”. 30. “India and America Have Shut Off Hirmand Water to Sistan,” Tahririeh, Farvardin 8, 1400, https://www.tahririeh.com/news/9126/%D9%87% D9%86%D8%AF-%D9%88-%D8%A2%D9%85%D8%B1%DB%8C%DA% A9%D8%A7-%D8%A2%D8%A8-%D9%87%DB%8C%D8%B1%D9%85% D9%86%D8%AF-%D8%B1%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8%B1-%D8%B1%D9% 88%DB%8C-%D8%B3%DB%8C%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%86-% D8%A8%D8%B3%D8%AA%D9%87-%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AF; “Transboundary Water Disputes Between Afghanistan and Iran,” Climate Diplomacy, https://climate-diplomacy.org/case-studies/transboundarywater-disputes-between-afghanistan-and-iran. 31. Singh Roy, “India’s Chabahar Dilemma”. 32. Ayoob, “Keeping Friends Close”. 33. Md. Muddassir Quamar, “China-Iran Comprehensive Strategic Partnership: Likely Challenges for India,” Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, April 30, 2021, https://idsa.in/issuebrief/chinairan-strategic-partnership-quamar-priya-300421#footnote21_86lh6qb. 34. Economic Times, April 11, 2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes. com/news/defence/indias-grip-on-strategic-port-loosens-as-iran-turnsto-china/articleshow/63710053.cms. 35. “Godratollah Behboudinejad, “Raisi and Challenges of Removing Bitterness in Ties Between Iran and India,” IRDiplomacy, Tir 27, 1400,

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http://www.irdiplomacy.ir/fa/news/2004115/%D8%B1%D8%A6%DB% 8C%D8%B3%DB%8C-%D9%88-%DA%86%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4-% D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%B1%D9%81%D8%B9-%D8%AA%D9%84% D8%AE%DB%8C-%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8% A7%D8%A8%D8%B7-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-% D9%88-%D9%87%D9%86%D8%AF. Tehran Times, May 17, 2019, retrieved from https://www.tehrantimes. com/news/435991/Indian-Shias-donate-715-000-to-Iran-s-flood-vic tims. M. Hasan, February 7, 2006, Hindustan Times, retrieved from https:// www.hindustantimes.com/india/shia-clerics-divided-over-iran-issue/ story-wvpeKD09UpzYFEKSyfTPCL.html. “Interest of Regional Countries to Open Chabahar-Zahedan Railline,” Mehr News Agency, Esfand 16, 1399, https://www.mehrnews.com/ news/5162767/%D8%B9%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%82%D9%87-%D9%85% D9%86%D8%AF%DB%8C-%DA%A9%D8%B4%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%87% D8%A7%DB%8C-%D9%85%D9%86%D8%B7%D9%82%D9%87-%D8%A8% D9%87-%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AF%D8%A7% D8%B2%DB%8C-%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%A2%D9%87%D9% 86-%DA%86%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%B2%D8% A7%D9%87%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%86. “First Part of Chabahar-Zahedan Rail Line to Open in Two Months, Ending Laying Rails By End of Current Month,” ILNA, May 22, 2021, https://www.ilna.news/%D8%A8%D8%AE%D8%B4-%D8%A7%D9%82% D8%AA%D8%B5%D8%A7%D8%AF%DB%8C-4/1079727-%D9%82%D8% B7%D8%B9%D9%87-%D8%A7%D9%88%D9%84-%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9% 87-%D8%A2%D9%87%D9%86-%DA%86%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%87%D8% A7%D8%B1-%D8%B2%D8%A7%D9%87%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%86-%DA% A9%D9%85%D8%AA%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%AF%D9%88-% D9%85%D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%AF%DB%8C%DA%AF%D8%B1-%D8% A7%D9%81%D8%AA%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%AD-%D9%85%DB%8C-% D8%B4%D9%88%D8%AF-%D9%BE%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%A7%D9% 86-%D8%B1%DB%8C%D9%84-%DA%AF%D8%B0%D8%A7%D8%B1% DB%8C-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%AC%D8% A7%D8%B1%DB%8C. Maryam Ahmadpour, “Iran’s Status in Resolving Afghanistan Puzzle for India,” Tehran International Institute, Tir 19, 1400, https://tisri.org/? id=n7dd49a5.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

The nuclear talks enabled Iran to reshuffle international relations, by showing that even as a collective entity, that the world powers were unable to uphold the nuclear non-proliferation regime. By engaging in talks, Iran was able to reach its desired goal to lead the world powers to accept the reality that the country would not abandon even questionable aspects of its nuclear program and activities. Moreover, Iran’s Asia pivot, combined with the support that it received from the Asian powers through their commitment to non-intervention in Iranian affairs, challenged the strength of the transatlantic bond between the United States and the United Kingdom, France and Germany (EU3), in their combined attempts to dictate the fate of the Iranian nuclear program. Iran recognized the limits of its power compared to the world powers, given its weaker status as a middle power. But to compensate for the country’s limited material power in comparison with the world powers that it engaged with in the nuclear talks, Iran employed ideational power in order to advance its nuclear program. Simultaneously, Iran acquired material power by avoiding irrationality in dealings with the world powers. Iran challenged the world powers, but it kept them engaged, while patiently building up its trade ties despite sanctions with willing international partners and advancing its nuclear capabilities under the world’s watchful gaze. Iran’s rational choices to entertain the world powers remained the essence of its foreign © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Keynoush, The World Powers and Iran, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09249-7_7

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policy conduct. By engaging with the world powers, Iran aimed to bring about needed outcomes or patterns of behavior even if the world powers disagreed with the choices that Iran made to advance its nuclear program. This encouraged the world powers to engage with Iran as a rational choice, mindful that Iranian rationalism dictated that it would avoid behaving arbitrarily. This reality consistently tied Iran to realist perceptions of the reason of state, i.e. to build power to uphold security, which made engaging with Tehran more predictable even as it enhanced its nuclear capabilities and despite the ideological overtones that motivated Tehran’s foreign policy conduct. Given this context, Iran’s nuclear policy did not rapidly shift in favor of developing nuclear weapons for deterrence purposes against a real or perceived existential threat. Instead, Iran accumulated material and ideational power by degrees to help serve as a deterrence against threats. Meanwhile, rather, its critique of nuclear weapons focused on rejecting the preferred nuclear status of the world powers, to build a case that it needed to be a strong state with access to advanced nuclear technology, all while upholding the humanist aspect of the debate by calling for sanctions on Iran to end. Given its frequent tensions and disagreements with the world powers, Iran recognized that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or any nuclear deal could not guarantee its security. Hence, Iran adopted strategies to maximize the deterrent capacity of the nuclear talks, by insisting that it would remain open to such talks and frequently breaking the deadlines that it set to end the talks. Yet, Tehran offered no definition of what its deterrent preferences were in the course of these talks, although the lack of full implementation of the JCPOA suggested that building up its nuclear technology for deterrent purposes played a vital role in Iranian strategic thinking. More importantly, Iran infused the idea that non-engagement with it could make the country more isolated and force it to justify accumulating ideational power. This polemic was combined with reinforced messages that Iran was strong and capable to lead a long-term transformation from being a non-nuclear state to becoming a state capable of altering global calculations on the issue of its nuclear power, all while carrying on with the nuclear talks. To balance against real or potential threats posed by major powers, Iran seemingly embraced elements of chaos theory that emanated from its constant disagreements with the other parties to the nuclear talks.

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Structural realist theories and game theory paradigms thus became part and parcel of a larger stage on which Iran led its interactions with the world powers. Broadening the conversation with Iran in these contexts challenged the world powers’ desire to remain non-inclusive of Iran in protecting their own nuclear club. In this chaotic process of building a conversation, the issue of Iran possessing nuclear capabilities was not the only problem, as that could be addressed through strong and cohesive monitoring and safeguards deals through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It was the difficulty to trust Iran that made its conversations with the world powers challenging and unstable, and offered Tehran the opportunity to advance its nuclear threshold capacity. While the framework of the nuclear talks helped impose world power authority on the issue of nuclear weapons and thus avoid anarchy, the fact that the talks were noncooperative, despite aiming to build cooperation, meant that they challenged the extreme authority of the world powers in their interactions with a middle power such as Iran. In the absence of a unified authority in the form of the world power bloc to advance a singular nuclear debate, discussions with the world powers on the acceptable levels of Iran’s nuclear advancements remained fluid. To avoid zero-sum or negative-sum games, the nuclear negotiations attempted to build an equilibrium between Iranian demands and world power goals regarding Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Moving in this direction forced Iran as well as the world powers to lay out the terms of their noncooperative positions on the issue, and express a desire to win or lose while holding on to their positions, thus enabling a modeling of the nuclear talks that signaled that success could only be achieved if the world powers and Iran accepted each other’s negotiating and material skills and contributions to avoid full chaos while remaining independent decision-makers in the nuclear realm. In this context, building strategic logic into Iran’s interactions with the world powers required examining these actors partly in the Hobbesian space and partly through the prisms of realist and neorealist theories. Predicting an optimal outcome to formalize world power relations with Iran in the nuclear realm, that fluctuated between cooperation and noncooperation, was still necessary to shape international politics and its impact on security. Understanding the nuances of Iran’s policy preferences also offered a mode of engagement that could partially contribute to building and retaining interactional structures even within a Hobbesian space.

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As a result, the strategies that emanated around the negotiating table led to a combination of options in handling the Iranian nuclear crisis, as each chapter in this book outlined. In this midst, Iran’s unlimited aspirations caused undercurrents of unease in its world power interactions, and made those world powers partially unequipped to deal with Tehran given their inability to predict a future order resulting from the prevailing power imbalances over Iran’s nuclear activities. Assertiveness and policy inertia simultaneously dominated world power interactions with Iran, and offered Tehran more opportunity to exhaust the world powers and enhance Iranian nuclear capabilities. Great power politics toward middle powers was not always straightforward when it came to managing the Iranian nuclear threat. When facing hostile countries such as Iran, the major powers resorted to tactics designed to tire Iranian power and its economy. But facing a formidable opponent like Iran, which found ways to adapt to pressure, diminished the unanimity of world powers to act firmly. This fed into Iran’s frenzy to promote the so-called Soleimani doctrine, named after the Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani who was killed by US troops in Iraq in January 2020, and which emphasized resistance to world power pressures by reverse engineering their policies or strategies to contain Iran. This reverse engineering involved a host of tactics and policies to circumvent sanctions, offer incentives to trade with Iran despite sanctions, expand Iranian regional and global influence and build new global strategic partnerships. Tehran specifically said that it aimed to shape a Great Iranian empire through its actions, in order to outsmart the major powers, by advancing its indigenous capabilities including in the nuclear realm and neutralizing sanctions.1 With public opinion disfavoring the absence of leadership in the United States and in other countries at the nuclear talks with Iran, Tehran also hung on to the hope that it had more options to challenge the world powers, by de-legitimizing what it believed to be their unjust authority in dictating to Iran the course of its nuclear program. In the end, the nuclear talks turned out to be not just about Iran’s grievances toward the world powers’ double standards, which enabled them to possess nuclear weapons while denying it to an aspiring middle power like Iran. Nor were the talks simply about the inability of the world powers to uphold the JCPOA. In fact, the most fundamental problem in Iran’s interactions with the world powers in 2011–2021 stemmed from its failure to develop a vision

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to transform its experiences with major powers to build a framework agreement that could definitively ensure its long-term compliance once and for all with the goals of nuclear non-proliferation. Not surprisingly, as of the time of this writing, Tehran continued to use odd narratives to direct the course of the nuclear talks, by suggesting at times that it might make hard choices that it would ordinarily not want to in order to revive a nuclear deal and have sanctions lifted. Later in 2022, Tehran said it could build a nuclear bomb. These narratives further implied that Iran remained unable to build an alternative long-term constructive dialog with the world powers based on mutual trust and it refused to see eye-to-eye with these powers. By romanticizing the Iranian right to possess a nuclear program, while developing the program at a rapid pace while negotiating, Tehran methodically also undermined the goal of nuclear non-proliferation and the trust needed to make a deal that could stand the test of time. Tehran explained its actions as a corrective for what it perceived to be an irrational exuberance displayed by the world powers to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear program. Paradoxically, Tehran’s limited vision led to stronger counter-reactions by the world powers, and it failed to build institutional momentum at the national and international levels to safeguard Iranian interests that guaranteed economic growth and market stability. Iran’s intransigence, and pressures on Tehran to negotiate a wider deal that addressed its influence in the Middle East and ballistic missile program, forced Iranian officials to express doubt that any nuclear deal could stand the test of time.2 A return to the JCPOA by Iran could even potentially place the country, according to its leaders, in a compromised state with respect to its future security, if the deal forced Iran to dismantle its deterrent capabilities without leading to a strong security framework or treaty for mutual cooperation with the world powers. By not trusting that the final outcome to the nuclear talks would lead to the full and permanent revival of the JCPOA, an agreement which Tehran’s hardliners had previously criticized as falling short of expectations, Iran’s leaders attempted to further stress that a next deal would not dominate the Iranian approach to upholding its security. Iran’s elite defended this position across party lines, despite the many other political differences among them. The gradual synchronization of the Iranian elite position brought to light the deep-seated mistrust that Tehran had toward the world powers. In late 2021, Tasnim News Agency linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) vowed that Iran would continue

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resisting world power domination, with or without a deal.3 This meant that whether or not the IRGC were to be delisted under US laws as a foreign terrorist organization, a key point in the nuclear talks in Vienna, it would not be consequential to the organization’s activities in the Middle East and beyond. After significant pressure was brought on Iran by the world powers to conclude a deal or else face potential military or sabotage attacks, tentative progress to conclude the talks was made by the end of 2021. Other options including snap back mechanisms to restore sanctions on Iran to force a suspension of its nuclear enrichment and reprocessing activities in the event of its non-compliance to a deal remained an important part of the negotiations. But the option remained somewhat irrelevant in threatening Iran simply because in its view the world powers had no choice but to insist on these minimum demands to building an agreement, in the absence of any other fallback plan on their part. Iran, however, believed that it was adopting a maximalist approach in the talks, by always retaining alternative plans to advance its nuclear program, strengthen its Asia pivot policy and expand its regional influence in the event of the breakdown of the nuclear talks. By the end of an eighth round of talks in Vienna held in early January 2022, the world powers and Iran adopted a more positive and promising tone about the progress being made over Tehran’s two draft proposals, although they remained apprehensive about outcomes. Clearly, the JCPOA was not negotiated in a vacuum but against the backdrop of major concerns over whether the deal could prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons, or whether Iran might eventually develop breakout capability to possess those weapons but have a stabilizing influence on the world stage. The United States believed that the failure to build a nuclear agreement would grant Iran weeks before it could assemble a nuclear bomb. In this context, realist views of a bipolar world leading to stable regional or world systems that had previously dominated policies justifying the nuclear status of world powers could not readily apply to the case of Iran’s nuclear file. Those views failed to account for Iran’s ideational power which drove its unlimited aspirations to be a major power, and to influence the Middle East and global politics. Moreover, they fell short of offering a contemplatable scenario of a balanced nuclear military power in

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the Middle East, inclusive of Iran, more so because the region was inherently not stable and lacked multilateral region-wide non-proliferation regimes. Against this backdrop, the world powers had long concluded that Iran’s rapid proliferation, given that it was ideationally an unpredictable regime, could only cause more instability and had to be stopped. This securitized approach dominated Iranian thinking over the outcome of its nuclear program. But while de-securitizing the Iranian nuclear program seemed to offer the only path forward, in order to build mutual trust, it was not achievable either. Dozens of countries had previously gone down the path of acquiring nuclear weapons but abandoned their weapons drive, trusting that it could be the best course of action from a security and material perspective. Since Iran was unlikely to readily follow these paths, given its ideational drive and desire to build material security, desecuritization in the context of the Iran nuclear talks could happen only if the world powers engaged with Tehran to the point that it could see itself rejoining the global community. That would have meant engaging with Iran along the lines of its ideational and material power, accepting the country for what it was, and defining new relationships with Tehran, which at the time of this writing had not transpired in the United States, although other world powers were more inclined to do so. These were ideas already embraced by the Copenhagen School that leaned toward de-securitization as a shift away from an emergency mode toward regular politics and bargaining processes to contain potentially threatening nuclear activities by countries, outlined by Lene Hansen in 2012.4 But applying this school to debates about Iran’s nuclear program presented untested territory if the JCPOA failed to normalize relations between the West and Iran. Even after it was finalized in 2015, the JCPOA failed to build international security and remained a failed deal in terms of security theory, although the United States committed to upholding it under the Obama administration. The global consensus then, as now, was that Iran’s nuclear file challenged the nuclear nonproliferation regime and efforts to move toward nuclear disarmament. The reasons for the challenge that Iran’s nuclear file posed were multilayered, as this book explained. Firstly, Tehran found it unethical that world powers that possess nuclear weapons should link Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology to the larger goals of nuclear non-proliferation. Secondly, linking nuclear disarmament to non-proliferation goals was unethical from Iran’s point of view as long as the world powers continued

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to hold on to nuclear weapons for military deterrence purposes. As a result, pushing Iran to adhere to disarmament with no or little progress on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation on a global scale undermined Iran’s security as well as its sense of identity and position on the world stage as it attempted to build a strong nuclear program, and tipped Iran’s anti-western ideational goals toward asserting roles that rejected world power domination on issues of nuclear weaponization and security. Hence, resistance to world power demands remained in Iran’s view its only option that could open new pathways to maximizing its strategic impact on the world stage, rather than succumbing to pressures by those powers as weaker countries like Iraq or Libya did before descending into crises in 2003 and 2011, respectively. Iraq agreed to tighter international scrutiny of its security by the world powers and international organizations before it was invaded by the United States, and Libya agreed to abandon its nuclear program before being attacked by the western powers. Unlike these countries, Iran was keen not only to maintain a strong nuclear program but to stabilize conflicts in the Middle East based on its rules of engagement, i.e., by pursing a resistance path toward world powers rather than by engaging with them fully, because that seemed the only logical position to take. In this process, Iran was unwilling to open the nuclear talks to discussions about how to scale back its role in the Middle East. Instead, it was eager not to remain a passive observer of events in the region, even if it had to make some compromises in the process of the nuclear talks to contain the scale of its nuclear activities. Taken in this light, Iran saw itself as what I term an ‘avant-garde’ revolution that reframed the world as it presently stood, dominated by the will of the world powers to one willing to compromise with middle powers that rejected the notion that having a comprehensive security deal with the West was necessary. Such a deal, from Tehran’s standpoint, was doomed to lead to disaster, if Iran as a country had to continually adjust its material power and ideational goals to shaping needed exchanges that it would have in the future with the world powers.5 To be an avant-garde revolutionary state also implied that irrespective of a nuclear deal, Iran should assert its nuclear positions by keeping world powers in a constant reactive mode rather than a proactive mode that could potentially enable them to threaten Tehran with military invasion. It was on this path alone that revolutionary Iran believed that it could follow its motto that to become a strong state it had to always keep the world powers at arm’s length. It was also only by being a strong state,

7

CONCLUSION

179

based on Tehran’s thinking, that Iran had the best guarantee to influence the Middle East, rid the region of world power domination, rationalize the Iranian resistance model and build up support for its logic that it had to stay prepared to challenge the world powers when its security was at stake.

Notes 1. “Amir Abdollahian Narrative of US Failure in Trilateral Talk with Iran Led by Commander Soleimani,” Tasnim News Agency, Dei 17, 1399, https:// www.tasnimnews.com/fa/news/1399/10/17/2427684/%D8%B1%D9% 88%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8% B9%D8%A8%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%84%D9%87%DB%8C%D8% A7%D9%86-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%B4%DA%A9%D8%B3%D8%AA-%D8% A2%D9%85%D8%B1%DB%8C%DA%A9%D8%A7-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D9% 85%D8%B0%D8%A7%DA%A9%D8%B1%D9%87-%D8%B3%D9%87-%D8% AC%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%A8%D9%87-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%B9%D8% B1%D8%A7%D9%82-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D9%87%D8%AF%D8%A7%DB% 8C%D8%AA-%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%B3%D9% 84%DB%8C%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86%DB%8C; “Mohsen Rezaee Vows About the Shaping of Great Iranian Empire,” Gooya News, December 9, 2020, https://news.gooya.com/2020/12/post-46288.php. 2. “Expression of Pessimism by Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Over Possibility of Reviving JCPOA,” BBC Farsi, November 3, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran-59048272. 3. “Europe and Vienna Talks; Maximum Expectations, Minimal Commitment,” Tasnim News Agency, Azar 13, 1400, https://www.tasnimnews. com/fa/news/1400/09/13/2619516/%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%88%D9% BE%D8%A7-%D9%88-%D9%85%D8%B0%D8%A7%DA%A9%D8%B1%D8% A7%D8%AA-%D9%88%DB%8C%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AA%D8% B8%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%AD%D8%AF%D8%A7%DA% A9%D8%AB%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D9%BE%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%A8% D9%86%D8%AF%DB%8C-%D8%AD%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%82%D9%84% DB%8C. 4. See Lene Hansen, “Reconstructing Desecuritisation: The NormativePolitical in the Copenhagen School and Directions for How to Apply It,” Review of International Studies, Volume 38, No. 3 (July 2012): 525–546; see also Martin Beck, “An International Relations Perspective on the Iran Nuclear Deal,” E-International Relations, August

180

B. KEYNOUSH

2018, https://www.e-ir.info/2018/08/08/an-international-relations-per spective-on-the-iran-nuclear-deal/. 5. “11 Reasons for US Enmity with Iran, in Conversation with Ebrahim Motaghi,” Tasnim News Agency, Aban 13, 1398, https://www.tasnim news.com/fa/news/1398/08/13/2133467/11-%D8%AF%D9%84%DB% 8C%D9%84-%D8%AF%D8%B4%D9%85%D9%86%DB%8C-%D8%A2%D9% 85%D8%B1%DB%8C%DA%A9%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8%A7%DB% 8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86.

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Index

A Asia Pivot policy Asia, 147 Chabahar Port, 147 China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR), 147 East-West Corridor, 147 Indian Ocean, 146 Sea of Oman, 146 Southern Asia strategic zone, 147 C Central Asia Afghanistan, 161 Afghanistan Ghazanfar Bank, 159 Astara, 163 Azerbaijan, 100, 163 Caspian Sea, 163 Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), 101 free trade agreement (FTA), 101 Helmand River, 159 Helmand River Water Treaty, 159 inter-Afghan talks, 161

Kamal Khan Dam, 159 Kyrgyzstan, 101, 128 Nabucco, 95 Turkmenistan, 101, 161 Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-PakistanIndia Gas Pipeline, 133 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), 149 Chabahar Astara, 163 auxiliary partner, 117, 119 Bandar Abbas, 160 Caspian Sea, 163 Chabahar Day, 163 Chabahar Fahranj-Bam railway, 155 Chabahar Port, 102, 133, 147, 156, 157, 159–161, 163, 164 Chabahar-Zahedan railway, 158, 162, 164 China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR), 147

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 B. Keynoush, The World Powers and Iran, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09249-7

187

188

INDEX

Construction and Development of Transportation Infrastructures Company (CDTIC), 158, 162 International North South Corridor (INSTC), 157 International North-South Transportation Corridors (INSTC), 102 Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline (IPI), 153 Iran Ports and Maritime Organization (PMO), 157 Marine Oil Tanking Terminal, 155 maritime, 147, 163 Mirjaveh, 163 North-South transit arrangements, 152 railway, 155, 158, 161, 162, 164 Sarakhs, 161 Shahid Beheshti Port, 152, 163 Shamtigh, 163 Sistan and Baluchistan, 164 China Ali Larijani, 130 Asia Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO), 123 Association of Southeast Asian Nations, 133 Azadeghan, 128, 132 Beijing, 118–127, 129–134, 136–139 Chairman Mao Zedong, 120 China Development Bank (CDP), 129, 132 China National Offshore Oil and Gas Company (CNOOC Ltd), 124 China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), 125, 158 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), 132, 156

China Railway Construction Corp, 132 China Railway Engineering Corporation, 129 China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR), 127, 147 Chinese Foreign Direct Investments (FDI), 123 communist China, 118, 148 Eurasian institutions, 119 Gwadar City Port, 133 Hua Liming, 136 known China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC), 132 look to the East, 126 Marxist-Maoist, 120 Meng Wanzhou, 134 North Azadeghan, 130 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 127 People’s Republic of China, 3, 120, 135 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), 123 Sino-Iranian partnership, 118, 119 South Azadeghan, 130, 131 South Pars, 132, 133, 135 South Pars gas field, 125, 127 tacit alliance, 120 Tehran-Mashad railroad, 132 The Plan for Comprehensive Cooperation Between the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran, 135 Urumqi, 129 Wang Yi, 136 Wu Shengli BRICS, 129 Xi Jinping, 127 Xinjiang, 118, 129, 133

INDEX

Yadavaran, 130–132 China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) 21st -Century Maritime Silk Road, 127 Chabahar Port, 133, 147 East-West Corridor, 147 Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline (IPI), 153 North-South transit arrangements, 152 Shahid Beheshti Port, 152, 163 Silk Road Economic Belt, 127 COVID-19, 71

D Diplomacy, 27, 42, 89, 138 Foreign Ministry, 29 manteq-e diplomacy, 27

E Elteghati idea, 21 European Union (EU) E3, 10, 54, 59, 62 EU3, 10, 14, 41, 54, 74 EU+3, 54 EU-Iran partnership, 67 Europe, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 73, 75 European External Action Service’s Iran Task Force, 66 European Security Strategy, 59 EU Strategy Against Proliferation of WMD, 59 Ferrovie dello Stato, 67 Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), 69 Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), 68 Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), 59

189

Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), 63

F Financial Action Task Force (FATF), 38, 69, 72, 133 France Emmanuel Macron, 67 Eurodif, 57 Franco-Iranian relations, 66 François Holland, 65 François Mitterrand, 57 French Republic, 3 Guadeloupe Conference, 56, 57 Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, 56

G Germany Antje Leendertse, 68 Federal Republic of Germany, 9 Helga Schmid, 61 Joschka Fischer, 61 Kraftwerk Union AG, 57

I Ideology, 91, 120, 122, 150 ideational power, 1, 87, 91, 171, 172, 176 unlimited aspirations, 7 Imperialism estekbar, 27 estekbar setizi, 27 paradigms of injustice, 126 India All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, 160 Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 152 Babri Masjid, 150 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 160

190

INDEX

Budgam district, 162 Chabahar Port, 133, 147, 156, 157, 159–161, 163, 164 Chiktan district, 162 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), 156 Farzad-B project, 158 Friday Prayer, 145, 162 Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act, 154 Hyderabad, 145, 160 Indian National Congress (INC), 156 Indian Ocean, 102, 134, 146, 148, 149, 151, 155, 156, 162–165 Indian Ocean Rim Association, 155 Indian Ports Global Limited (IPGL), 157 India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), 154 Indira Gandhi, 149 Indo-Iran Joint Commission, 150 Indo-Islamic Qutub Shahi Tombs, 145 Indo-Pakistani War, 149 International North South Corridor (INSTC), 157 Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline (IPI), 153 Jammu and Kashmir, 148, 162 Kashmir, 148, 150, 152, 164 Kashmiri Shites, 162 Kudremukh iron ore project, 149 Kulbhushan Jadhav, 158 Ladakh, 162 Majlis-e-Ulema-e-Hind, 162 Mecca Masjid, 145 Missile Technology Control Regime, 151 Narendra Modi, 145 New Delhi, 14, 145–161, 165

Nuclear Suppliers Group, 151 Observer Research Foundation, 145 Oil and Natural Gas Corp Videsh Ltd (OVL), 154 Operation Smiling Buddha, 149 Pamulaparti Venkata Narashima Rao, 150 Parsee, 145, 146, 157 Qutub Shahi dynasty, 145 Raisina Dialog, 161 Rajeev Kher, 157 Rajiv Mehrishi, 157 Rajnat Singh, 162 Republic Day, 152 Shri Nitin Gadkari, 157 Shri Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, 162 Southern Asia strategic zone, 147 State Bank of India, 160 the Republic of India, 3 Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-PakistanIndia Gas Pipeline, 133 United Progressive Alliance (UPA), 153, 156 United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act, 154 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 9, 12, 13, 24–26, 31, 33, 37, 39, 40, 44, 58, 60, 63, 64, 66, 72, 94, 97, 98, 104, 123, 126, 153, 173 Board of Governors, 11, 71 Director General, 11, 76 International system balancing act, 117, 147, 156 big powers, 5, 7 BRICS, 129 chaos theory, 172 classical realism, 6 Copenhagen School, 177

INDEX

counter-balancing, 7 de-securitization, 177 economic liberalism, 6 emerging disorder, 22 equilibrium, 173 external balancing, 20 global powers, 5, 8, 119 Hobbesian, 56, 173 ideational power, 1, 87, 91, 171, 172, 176 internal balancing, 20 look to the East, 126 major powers, 3, 5 material power, 1, 58, 87, 171, 177, 178 middle power, 5, 6, 122 multipolar world system, 14 negative-sum, 173 neither West, nor East, 85, 120 neo-realism, 4, 5, 20, 118 paradigms of injustice, 126 rationality, 4 realism, 4 securitized approach, 177 soft power, 67 Soleimani doctrine, 174 Structural realist, 173 sub-regionalization, 119 systemic balancing constraint, 8 tacit alliance, 120 third world, 120, 122 unilateral world order, 22 world powers, 1–4, 22, 30, 117, 171, 175 zero-sum, 173 Iran Abbas Araghchi, 30, 64, 68 Alaeddin Boroujerdi, 95 Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 18, 150 Ali Akbar Salehi, 28, 98 Ali Asqar Khaji, 28

191

Ali Bagheri Kani, 74 Ali Mottahari, 88 Ali Shamkhani, 134 Atomic Energy Agency, 9, 23 Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, 21 ballistic missile, 13, 36, 42, 72, 92, 175 danesh bonyans , 135 Ebrahim Raisi, 18, 21, 40, 73, 87, 105, 163 Eshaq Jahangiri, 130 Esmaeel Khateeb, 87 Gholam Hossein Hadad Adel, 41 Habibollah Sayyari, 129 Hassan Rouhani, 18, 19, 21, 24, 59, 64, 94, 99, 127, 145 Hesamuldin Ashna, 29 Hussein Amirabdollahian, 43 Hussein Fereidoon, 24 Iranian Air Defense Force, 101 Iranian Contemporary Historic Studies (IICHS), 1 Iranian unlimited aspirations, 5, 7, 8, 21, 22, 55, 174 Islamic Republic of Iran, 1, 9, 135, 163 Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), 35, 61, 65, 99, 125, 175 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 18, 21, 60, 123, 153 Mahmoud Alavi, 39 Majid Takht-Ravanchi, 68 Mashad, 129 Mehdi Khan Gharaghozloo, 119 Mohammad Javad Zarif, 19, 29, 70, 87, 130, 161 Mohammad Khatami, 58, 92, 152 Mohammad Mokhber Dezfuli, 43 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, 1, 23, 57, 120, 149

192

INDEX

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Mahabadi, 38 National Iranian Gas Company, 133 National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), 66 neither West, nor East, 85, 120 paradigms of injustice, 126 Parchin, 63, 64 Peace Pipeline, 101, 153, 154 Qasim Suleimani, 162 Qom, 25, 85, 129 Saeed Jalili, 18, 33 Shapour Bakhtiar, 23 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 9, 18, 24, 60, 74, 123, 124 Supreme National Security Council, 29, 59, 60, 70, 94 tadbir (prudence), 99 Tehran, 2–4, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 17–21, 24, 28, 31, 32, 36, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 54, 55, 61, 69, 74, 89, 92, 93, 98, 99, 105, 126, 133, 148, 149, 156, 164, 179 the Shah, 1, 23, 57, 120, 149 Iran-Iraq War, 23, 88, 91, 121, 150 Iraq Baghdad, 38, 88, 91, 92 Kata’ib Hezbollah, 38 Kirkuk, 38 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Ahmad Vahidi, 38 Hossein Bagheri, 40 Qasim Soleimani, 174 Quds Force, 19, 35, 76, 100 Saeed Mohammad, 18 Soleimani doctrine, 174 Islamic State (IS), 103

J Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), 2, 17, 54, 86, 128, 146, 172 Adoption Day, 11 Implementation Day, 11, 33 Joint Commission, 12, 40, 43, 66, 76 Panel of Experts, 25

L Liquified natural gas (LNG), 101, 124, 154

M Mahdi Imam Mahdi, 21 Imam Zaman, 21 Mammut Industrial Group and Mammut Diesel, 42 Middle East Baghdad, 91, 92, 148 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 20, 63, 121 Iraq, 30 Israel, 3, 20, 58 Libya, 30, 178 Palestinian, 150 Syria, 30

N Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 148, 150, 156 Non-proliferation Additional Protocol (AP), 9, 59, 94 nuclear non-proliferation regime, 2, 177 Nuclear Suppliers Group, 151 Operation Smiling Buddha, 149

INDEX

Pamulaparti Venkata Narashima Rao, 150 Possible Military Dimensions (PMDs), 11, 58 safeguards, 94, 154 Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), 3 United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act, 154 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 96, 98 Nuclear Adoption Day, 11 Arak, 9, 60, 123 Arak nuclear facility, 24 Argentina, 23 Austria, 56, 89 Brazil, 23, 62 Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant (BPP), 57, 92 calandria, 33 Dispute Resolution Mechanism (DRM), 69 enriched uranium, 23, 33, 39, 57, 60, 62, 66, 74 enrichment, 2, 10, 24, 28, 33, 37, 38, 54, 59, 89, 93, 154, 176 Esfahan Nuclear Reactor, 9, 60 Fordow, 39, 70, 102 heavy water, 33, 123, 151 Implementation Day, 11, 33 Iranian nuclear program, 2, 8, 9, 13, 19, 23, 29, 31, 54, 56, 61, 63, 65, 71, 74, 85–89, 105, 106, 117, 123, 126, 146, 151, 153, 154, 171, 172, 177 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), 2, 40, 128, 172 Joint Plan of Action, 31, 65 Karaj nuclear facility, 72

193

light-water reactors (LWRs), 60 low-enriched uranium (LEU), 10 Natanz, 9, 24, 54 Natanz nuclear facility, 24 North Korea, 23, 119 nuclear agreement, 10, 11, 14, 30, 32, 57, 64, 70, 71, 176 nuclear club, 173 nuclear deal, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 18–23, 30, 32–38, 40, 42, 44, 55, 62, 64, 65, 68–70, 74, 76, 86, 97–99, 101–107, 125, 127, 129, 146, 155, 158, 172, 175, 178 nuclear industry, 2–4, 27, 86, 92, 95, 121 nuclear negotiations, 8, 9, 14, 19, 22, 28, 29, 106, 173 nuclear negotiators, 42, 65 nuclear talks, 9, 10, 13, 14, 18, 19, 26–30, 33, 37–45, 54, 59, 61–66, 74–77, 86, 94, 97, 98, 104, 106, 108, 119, 125, 126, 128, 136, 137, 155, 163, 164, 171–178 nuclear weaponization, 151, 152, 178 P4+1, 12, 40, 43 P5+1, 10, 26, 28, 31, 65, 97, 125 Pakistan, 23, 122, 151, 152 snap back (mechanism), 13, 41, 176 South Africa, 23 Tehran Nuclear Research Reactor, 23, 57, 62 uranium, 11, 25, 31, 37, 57, 60, 62, 72, 89, 96, 102 uranium conversion, 9, 60 Vienna, 13, 38, 40, 42, 44, 75, 77, 176 Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), 13, 61

194

INDEX

P Persian Gulf Gulf, 10, 20, 22, 34, 37, 55, 63, 64, 86, 90, 99, 103, 104, 107, 117–119, 122, 128, 129, 131–134, 136–139, 146, 147, 151, 155–158, 161–165 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 20, 63, 121 Persian Empire, 145 Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, 20 Strait of Hormuz, 132, 162 Power big power, 5–7, 89 ideational power, 1, 87, 91, 171, 172, 176 major power, 3, 5–8, 10, 14, 24, 41, 89, 90, 117, 120, 134, 146, 148, 151, 165, 172, 174–176 material power, 1, 58, 87, 171, 177, 178 middle power, 4–7, 21, 88, 90, 122, 126, 138, 139, 146, 171, 174, 178 world power, 1–4, 8–10, 12, 13, 18, 22, 27, 44, 60, 85, 86, 89, 95, 104, 107, 117, 120, 125, 126, 136, 149, 171–178

R Resistance, 65, 134, 174, 178, 179 resistance policy (mogavemati), 37, 38 Russia Astana Peace Process, 103 Atomstroyexport, 95 Baniyas Port, 104

Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant (BPP), 57, 92 Chechen War, 92 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 90 CPSU Congress, 91 Czech Republic, 96 D Mendeleyev University of Chemical Technology, 93 Dmitriy Medvedev, 95 Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF), 100 Gazprom, 95, 101 Gore-Chernomyrdin, 93 Hmeimim air base, 104 Latakia, 103, 104 Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, 90 Levan Dzhagaryan, 88 Lukoil, 95, 100 Ministry for Atomic Energy of the Russian Federation (MinAtom), 93 Moscow, 85–95, 97, 98, 100, 103, 105, 108 Nabucco, 95 Poland, 96 Rosobornoexport, 94 Russian Federation, 3 S-200 air defense, 92 S-300 air defense missiles, 35 S-300 system, 96, 97, 100 Sukhoi, 94 System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), 132 Tartus, 104 Tatneft, 95 Treaty on the Basic Elements of Relations and the Principles of Cooperation, 93 Zarubezhatomenergostroi, 92

INDEX

S Sanctions arms embargo, 96, 104, 125 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), 13, 36 oppressive (zalemaneh), 27 US sanctions, 13, 32, 34, 68, 103, 104, 121, 123, 124, 126, 131–133, 137, 151, 155 Shii, 145, 162 Kashmiri Shites, 162 Majlis-e-Ulema-e-Hind, 162 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 9, 18, 24, 60, 74, 123, 124 fatwa, 9, 24, 39 ‘heroic softening’ (gardesh-e ghahremananeh), 27 U United Kingdom Britain, 3, 63 David Cameron, 65 Great Britain, 3 Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 3 Margaret Thatcher, 57 Satanic Verses , 58 Simon Shercliff, 88 Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, 88 United Nations (UN) Chapter VII, 10, 11, 59, 61, 72 Conventional Arms Register, 96 Resolution 1696, 10, 24, 94 Resolution 1737, 10, 24 Resolution 1747, 10, 24 Resolution 1803, 10, 24 Resolution 1835, 10 Resolution 1929, 10, 25, 62, 96, 125

195

Resolution 2231, 11, 35 United Nations Charter, 10, 11, 59, 61 United Nations Security Council (UNSC), 9, 24, 94, 123, 153 United States Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, 44 Antony Blinken, 42, 136 Barack Obama, 61, 124 Cold War Game Theory, 20 Congressional Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA), 58 Congressional Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA), 36 containment policy, 20 Donald J. Trump, 17, 36, 37, 40, 41, 55, 68, 70–72, 76, 101, 130, 132, 159, 160 Embassy of the United States of America, 17 Foreign Terrorist Organization, 37, 44, 76, 176 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 88 George W. Bush, 13, 60 Henry Kissinger, 120 Immigration and Nationality Act, 44 Iraq Study Group, 61 Jacob Sullivan, 42 Joseph R. Biden Jr., 12, 18, 71 Middle East Peace Process, 58 Nimrata Nikki Haley, 160 Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile systems, 38 Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (RPSA), 25 Richard Bruce Cheney, 61 Richard M. Nixon, 120

196

INDEX

RQ-4A Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, 37 Significant Reductions Exceptions, 160 Stuxnet computer worm, 25 unilateralism, 4, 126, 147 United Nuclear Corporation, 23 United States of America, 2, 3, 17, 53, 86, 88, 118, 146 US Congress, 23, 25, 29, 30, 32–34, 43, 55, 61, 127 US Department of the Treasury, 36 US hegemony, 5

US National Security Estimate, 26 US policy preferences, 118 USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, 37 Warsaw, 37 Washington, 4, 10, 13, 14, 18–21, 23, 24, 26–28, 30, 31, 33, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 54, 61, 76, 139, 154, 160, 165

W World Trade Organization (WTO), 67