Few relationships are as fraught, and as consequential, as America and Iran’s. The Trump administration inherited a golden opportunity to strike a deal, but the path has been anything but smooth. With the Trump now in nuclear talks with Iran, the question looms: Could this be a Nixon-to-China moment? What would a deal mean for the region? What benefits could it bring, and what’s at stake?
Join Christopher S. Chivvis and Ali Vaez, Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group, as they break down the strategic choices in U.S.-Iran relations.
Transcript
Note: this is a rush transcript and may contain errors.
Ali Vaez:
The approach that the current administration has adopted, I think is particularly wise because it's not trying to resolve the nuclear standoff with Iran in a segregated manner from other nuclear-related questions in the subregion, in the Gulf region. If we really do care about great power competition, you don't want a country the size of Iran with the resources of Iran to be entirely in the camp of Russia and China.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right. Few relationships are as fraught or as consequential as America's relationship with Iran. As of June 2025, this relationship is at a fork in the road. President Trump has opened a negotiation with Iran's leaders that could halt Iran's nuclear weapons program, lift economic sanctions, and lead us into a new era in U.S.-Iran relations. But these negotiations could also easily collapse. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling for military strikes on Iran's nuclear program, and this path would lead in a very different direction for the region, for America, and for the world.
Is war inevitable? Or could this be a Nixon to China moment for Trump? If it is, how would this change the region and even the world? With me today to discuss this is Dr. Ali Vaez from the International Crisis Group. Ali is one of the world's leading experts on Iran and U.S. policy toward Iran. He's the author of a number of books and especially fantastic articles on this subject. He's also lived in Iran during the early years of his life, which I think makes him an especially fascinating and insightful expert to talk to on this subject. He understands better than almost anyone what strategies do and don't work in negotiating with Iran's theocratic regime. Ali, it's really great to have you come join us on Pivotal States today.
Ali Vaez:
Thank you for having me, Chris. It's great to be with you.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
I want to start with a big picture general assessment from you to get us going. This is not an easy question to answer, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. How would you grade America's statecraft with Iran over the course of the last 20 years?
Ali Vaez:
Well, on a scale of one to 10, I would put it at three.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
One being the lowest on the scale.
Ali Vaez:
One being lowest. Yes.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Okay. Not very good grades.
Ali Vaez:
Not good grades at all. I think it's easy to measure that if the metric is the concern that the U.S. has about Iran's policies, whether at home or abroad. If you look at Iran's nuclear program, for instance, in the past 20 years, it has gone from a rudimentary program to a program that is basically on the threshold of nuclear weapons. If you look at Iran's ballistic missiles, 20 years ago, it was a much more limited program primarily aimed at defending Iran itself. Now, Iran has the most sophisticated arsenal of ballistic missiles in the region and is proliferating drones and missiles to state and non-state actors.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Including Russia.
Ali Vaez:
Exactly. If you look at Iran's internal dynamics in terms of human rights violations, again, it has become worse and worse and worse with time. By every measure, the U.S. has not been able to achieve any of its objectives in the course of not just the past two decades, since the 1979 Revolution in Iraq.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
It sounds like we need to start thinking about different strategies for our policy toward Iran, and that's what I want to really focus on here. We're going to focus on the nuclear question because that is the issue of the day, and among these really the most important and central one. Although it's important I think to remember that, as you've already laid out quite eloquently, there are several other issues that also are interlinked with the nuclear issue that we will get to if we have time. But because President Trump has been so focused on doing a deal with Iran in the first few months of his administration, I want to talk about that. Before we go there, I want to talk a little bit about your relationship with Iran as an individual because you were born in Iran and grew up there and then decided to come to the United States. What was it that led you to make that decision? What were the circumstances that made you want to leave your home country?
Ali Vaez:
I was born and raised in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War actually. I remember vividly, it's one of my first memories basically, losing classmates in missile strikes because I grew up in the city of Shiraz in the south, which is surrounded by mountains. It was only until the stage in the war, which is called the war of the cities, because Saddam started using ballistic missiles and those missiles could actually reach Shiraz, whereas planes really couldn't descend to bomb it. It's only at that stage that we felt the war, but it was maybe worse because at least with fighter jets, you would get some advanced warning. With missiles, you would only get a few minutes or a few seconds of advanced warning. I think that trauma created this incentive in me to try to prevent these things from happening again. That's one of the reasons that today I work for a conflict prevention organization, the Crisis Group.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
But you also were somewhat disaffected with the trajectory of Iran's internal politics, and that's one of the reasons why you decided to leave toward the end of the 1990s, if I remember correctly.
Ali Vaez:
Yeah. I'm a child of the revolution. I was born after the revolution. Obviously there was a high degree of dissatisfaction within the country even in the 1990s when I was a teenager. I participated in some student protests in 1999 because our hope was that given the experience of the revolution, which was a recent experience in the 1990s, it was only 20 years after the revolution, I think there was this sense in my generation and in my parents' generation that radical change often results in a worse outcome. It ends in grief. It rarely brings about a better situation.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Reform is better.
Ali Vaez:
Reform is better. Evolutionary change is better. That was the concept that we were pursuing. In 1997, first time I could vote, I voted for Khatami, the reformist president in Iran. We were hoping that that would bring about a gradual but meaningful reforms. It didn't. The system, the deep state in Iran, which is represented by the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards, the unelected institutions in the Islamic Republic, basically blocked the reformist from being able to bring about meaningful change. I was dissatisfied, and I wanted to leave the country to pursue my studies abroad. Then I came to the U.S. in 2009, 2008 actually, to do my postdoc in Boston.
Then the 2009 uprising happened in Iran. If you remember, this was this second term election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which was a rigged election. I was personally an emotionally very involved in that election. In fact, I organized a voting booth for Iranian students who lived in Boston area. After that election was stolen, I participated in protests against the regime. But that also coincided with a period in time that the nuclear standoff between Iran and the West had reached boiling point. In international press, there was always debate about whether Israel would bomb Iran this week or next week, whether the U.S. would be involved or not.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
In order to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program?
Ali Vaez:
Correct. I came to D.C. out of curiosity to see what's the policy debate about Iran. I have to tell you, Chris, I was shocked by the degree of miscomprehension in this town. In fact, I came to events at Carnegie, at Brookings, different places just to see what people were saying. I realized most people who claimed expertise on Iran either don't speak the language, have never been to the country, cannot read its newspapers, have very strong opinions, but really don't know the society that they're talking about.
Some might have had conversations with cab drivers from which they draw big conclusions, but the reality is that I felt that with this degree of miscomprehension, Iran and the U.S. are going to end in conflict. That was the one thing I wanted to prevent. Despite my dissatisfaction with the regime, I've always believed that the one thing that is worse for Iran than the Islamic Republic is a war with the U.S. Of course the U.S. was now my host country, had been much kinder to me than my home country, and I also didn't want the U.S. to once again commit a mistake in that part of the world and get bugged down in unwinnable extremely costly conflicts.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Here I guess you're referring to the 2003 Iraq War.
Ali Vaez:
And Afghanistan War.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
And Afghanistan.
Ali Vaez:
Because that coincides with when President Obama was deciding whether he would surge troops in Afghanistan or not. Even Afghanistan, which was seen as the war of choice or the better conflict between the two, Afghanistan and Iraq, even that didn't look that promising at the time. I decided that if there's anything that I could do about this and to prevent this trajectory from ending in grief, I should. But I knew that I didn't have the expertise, so I left my very attractive academic position in Boston at the time, went back to school, studied international relations, and then ended up coming into the policy field.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
It's interesting because the way that you describe it it's clear that you've had these two different polls. On the one hand, a deep desire to see change in Iran and reform in its domestic politics, but at the same time a deep concern about what the consequences of a violent war with the United States would mean presumably for the Iranian people, but also for America and the region. America where you live and the region, which you know well.
Ali Vaez:
Absolutely. I think that's a good description of it.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Let's shift a little bit towards... You've already started this, but shift towards the actual policy frame here. I think it would be helpful if you could just lay out the basics of how we got from the Obama era to where we are right now for those who may not have followed Iran as closely as you have. Back in 2015, we obviously had the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration had been negotiating in large part secretly with Iran, along with the help of some European partners and eventually China and Russia, which was a major breakthrough in 2015. Walk us from there to where we are right now in terms of the policy evolution?
Ali Vaez:
In 2015, the JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, basically capped and rolled back Iran's nuclear program, put it in a box under the most rigorous monitoring mechanism ever implemented anywhere in the world. Look, the IAEA has one mandate, which is nuclear accountancy. Basically making sure that every gram of nuclear material, uranium, plutonium, whatever that is, is accounted for. None of it is diverted towards weaponization efforts. Now, what the JCPOA did was it went much further than that. It basically allowed the IAEA for the first time to also monitor the equipment. Every nut and bolt that would go into a centrifuge, which are these machines that enrich uranium from raw to weapons grade, all of these were monitored and accounted for by the IAEA so that there was no way that Iran could divert even equipment towards a clandestine nuclear program.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Nuclear weapons program. Yeah.
Ali Vaez:
Obviously the deal was controversial because it was a transactional agreement addressing only one area of disagreement between Iran and the West.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Which was nuclear weapons.
Ali Vaez:
Nuclear weapons.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Because all of the other areas that you mentioned at the start, the ballistic missile program, Iran's support to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, were also things that more maximalist people here in Washington would've liked to have seen dealt with as well. But the Obama administration chose only to focus on the nuclear weapons program. Correct?
Ali Vaez:
Correct. I remember at the time, one of the things that Iranian President Rouhani used to say was that disagreements between Iran and the U.S. are so numerous and heavy and difficult to deal with, that if you put all of them on the table, the table would not be able to bear the weight.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
Both sides decided to basically prioritize the most urgent issue, which was the nuclear issue, in the hope that then that would be not a ceiling, but a floor.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Unlock the other issues. Right?
Ali Vaez:
Correct.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
But that to me seems like common sense negotiating strategy, that you don't try to tackle everything all at once. There may be some situations in which that makes sense, but if you can make progress on one issue, especially one that's as important as Iran's nuclear weapons program, that you should do that and take that win and then hope to make progress on the other issues at a later point in time. But obviously there were many here in Washington who disagree.
Ali Vaez:
Yeah. But, look, that was an entirely reasonable approach, which I think we should not pursue anymore because we've lived through that experience. We now know by experience that a narrow transactional will not survive in the broader context of animosity between Iran and the United States and their respective allies in the region. I'm not arguing necessarily for a grand bargain, but I'm just saying that we have to learn the lessons of that experience.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Okay. I want to get to that, but let's just make sure that we've got the basics of what's happened since JCPOA to today out there. The Obama administration has this successful negotiation where Iran agrees to what it considers to be very intrusive monitoring that gives the international community confidence that it's not developing a nuclear weapons program. It gets to keep some level of nuclear program, but only for civil nuclear use. That's where we are in 2015. What are the next big steps in the story?
Ali Vaez:
The deal is implemented actually in January of 2016. We're already in an electoral cycle and every Republican candidate has said this is a bad deal and has promised to tear it apart. Of course President Trump is elected in November of that year and starts undermining the agreement almost immediately as soon as he walks into the office.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
By casting doubt upon whether or not he's going to comply?
Ali Vaez:
Correct. In fact, Congress required the president every 90 days to certify that Iran is complying with the agreement. He, I think, begrudgingly signed a few of these certificates, and then he stopped doing it before he withdrew from the agreement in May of 2018.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
That was the next big moment is the United States withdraws under Trump.
Ali Vaez:
Correct. The other members of the agreement, France, U.K., Germany, Russia, China, European Union, they all say, "Okay. We'll stay in the deal, and we try to save it without the United States." They all make these lofty promises to the Iranians of how they would try to make up for the effects of reimposition U.S. sanctions that they prove unable to deliver on. Iran waits for a year after U.S. withdraws from the agreement, still complies with all of its obligations under the deal as verified by the IAEA, but then in May of 2019, Iran starts rolling back its own commitments.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Enhancing enrichment in particular?
Ali Vaez:
Correct.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
And refusing to allow monitors to monitor its programs.
Ali Vaez:
Well, there are still inspectors.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
There are still monitors today-but it becomes more difficult. Right?
Ali Vaez:
Yeah. They start ratcheting down monitoring in the sense that the one big advantage that I described to you, the fact that the IAEA could also monitor the equipment in Iran, that goes away.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
That goes away. Right. Step by step, they're notching down their participation in the agreement.
Ali Vaez:
Exactly. In the past four years, we don't know how many advanced centrifuges Iran has produced and where it has stored them. The first Trump administration objective was to get to zero enrichment. As a result of it, Iran started again ratcheting up its nuclear program, and we basically... The zero enrichment turned Iran's industrial scale nuclear program into a threshold nuclear weapons state. Meaning that Iran is now really literally a screwdriver turn away from being able to weaponize its nuclear program. When President Trump walked into the Oval Office in January of 2017, it would take Iran more than 12 months to enrich enough uranium for a single nuclear weapon. That is what is known as breakout time. It is not a bomb. It's the material for a bomb. It's like you have the ingredients of a cake, you still have to bake it into a cake, so you still have to manufacture the weapon.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Yeah. We still have to make the weapon, which it could take another who knows-
Ali Vaez:
A few months. A few months. But the breakout time was the real metric in the JCPOA, and it was 12 months up until Trump withdrew from the agreement. Today that timeline is six days, and this is again the result of pursuing zero enrichment and withdrawing from the JCPOA. Now, the Biden administration comes in all comprised of people who were critical of Trump's withdrawal from the agreement and reimposition of sanctions, the so-called maximum pressure policy, and they all promise that they were going to go back into the agreement, but they start posturing. They start seeing if they can use Trump's sanctions to extract more concessions from the Iranians, which basically erodes trust on the Iranian side, pushes them to dig in their heels, and then a hard-line president is elected in Iran in 2021 President Raisi, and basically two years of negotiations are wasted. Although they were at several moments in time pretty close to reviving the JCPOA, but they couldn't cross the finish line.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
I just have to say, as someone who was there in the early days of the Biden administration in the government, I was pretty surprised that they took the approach that they did. My expectation was that they would've done a lot more to try to get back into the agreement very quickly. I don't know what you think, but in retrospect, it seems to me that doing more to get back into the agreement early might've been the better choice than the one that they made, which was actually to go for a larger, more substantial agreement.
Ali Vaez:
Absolutely. You don't need the benefit of hindsight to be able to say that. It was even obvious then that given the fact that it was the U.S. who had reneged on its commitments under the deal, it was the U.S.' responsibility to try to put things back together.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right. The Biden administration basically fails to reignite an agreement which some of the key figures in the Biden administration had actually negotiated under Obama.
Ali Vaez:
Correct.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
At the end of their term, they haven't managed to get back in. Trump comes in, and the expectation would be that he's going to go back to the policy of his first administration, which is hate Iran, hate JCPOA, maximum pressure. In fact, I heard some fairly senior people in Trump's circle say, "That's what we ought to expect is maximum, maximum pressure from day one of the new Trump administration." But it hasn't quite been that, has it?
Ali Vaez:
It hasn't. It has actually moved in a very surprising way, but I think it's because, look, the president had the right instincts on this from the beginning. He wanted his own deal. He wanted the stronger deal, but he always wanted the deal. He didn't want a confrontation with Iran. He didn't want war with Iran even in the first term. His problem was that he was wrapped in an anti-Iran ecosystem, and I think the president learned the lessons of the first experience that he's not going to listen to hawks and neocons who are putting Iran and the U.S. on a collision course.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Collision course. Yeah.
Ali Vaez:
He's not going to listen to people who are going to ask for a set of unrealistic maximalist demands. When Bibi Netanyahu came to D.C. in February of 2025 as the first foreign leader who visited Trump, one of the ideas that he put on the table as the ideal solution for the Iranian nuclear issue is the so-called Libya model. In 2003, Libya agreed to completely pack its nuclear program up and send it to the U.S. as a means of getting sanctions relief. That's considered the gold standard of how you get rid of a nuclear program that you're concerned about. The problem is that Iran in 2025 is not Libya in 2003. This nuclear program has deep roots. There is indigenous knowledge. There is infrastructure. Libya's nuclear program was imported from the black market and wasn't even installed fully. The Iranians have now in the course of these 22 years of a nuclear standoff with the West, in terms of direct and indirect costs of this program, it has probably cost our economy upwards of $5 trillion.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
There's a sunk cost issue from an Iranian perspective, having spent so much on this program, both financially and also in terms of political capital. This has been such an important issue for Iran. It's much, much more difficult for them to let it go entirely.
Ali Vaez:
There are two more things, Chris, here as well. One is from a strategic perspective, it is the Iranians believe that if they give in on something like this that they have described as a red line, what would that teach the United States? Would it result in the United States dropping its animosity or would it actually whet the U.S.' appetite to put more pressure on Iran to get more concessions on other things that Iran describes as red lines?
Christopher S. Chivvis:
It feels that it needs to have at least some win out of the negotiation in order for it to take the U.S. commitment to future restraint seriously?
Ali Vaez:
Correct. Also, there is an imbalance. This is not arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
Iran is a much weaker country. If you prove to the much stronger country with a big stick in its hand, which is the tool of sanctions, that it can actually use that tool to force you into concessions and to zero-sum outcomes, then you're basically putting yourself in a slippery slope with no end. Right?
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Exposing yourself to future demands of this kind. Very interesting.
Ali Vaez:
But there's also another element, which again, I say this as someone who has roots in Iran, which is often difficult for people to understand, is the Persian pride element. For many Iranians, and I'm sure this applies to the Supreme Leader as well, sometimes if you're faced with a choice between losing face or losing your neck, you will choose the latter.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Losing your neck?
Ali Vaez:
Yeah. Losing face is something that is very, very, very difficult for the Iranians to do. The Supreme Leader is 86. He is one of the original revolutionaries, and this was a revolution that came to power primarily on the premise of resisting U.S. dictats. For him to end his reign now after being in power for almost 40 years with surrendering to the United States is from a legacy perspective, disastrous.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Can you just briefly clarify one important point here, which is the relationship between the Supreme Leader and the president? Because obviously this is something that we don't have in really any western political systems. Both are important, but the Supreme Leader is the ultimate arbiter of Iranian policy, correct?
Ali Vaez:
Yes. He sits at the pinnacle of power in Iran. It's a lifetime position, and he has the final say on all matters of state. Governments come and go and they have different tendencies. They are hard-line, conservative, more pragmatic, more centrist, more reformist. But at the end of the day, it is really the Supreme Leader who makes all the key decisions.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Okay. That's helpful I think. I want to talk about what's at stake here. You said recently in an article in the New York Times, you were quoted by Steve Erlanger as saying that, "The alternative to doing a deal is terrible. Iran with the bomb or Iran bombed, both have bad consequences." Let's try to unpack that a little bit. Let's talk first about what a successful negotiation with Iran would bring for the region, for the United States and for the world.
Ali Vaez:
There are several factors here. The approach that the current administration has adopted I think is particularly wise because it's not trying to resolve the nuclear standoff with Iran in a segregated manner from other nuclear related questions in the subregion, in the Gulf region. As you know, Saudi Arabia now is very keen to have a nuclear program of its own.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
And is also very keen to have access to nuclear fuel cycle technology, meaning being able to enrich uranium itself to fabricate fuel and all the other steps that it takes in between. It wants to be independent and not reliant on buying fuel from the international market. The other country that has nuclear reactors in the region is the UAE. If there is a agreement with Saudi Arabia that gives Saudis enrichment, then we probably have to renegotiate the deal with the Emiratis and still have to negotiate a deal with Iranians.
Instead of doing this separately, it makes so much more sense to put all of this in the same basket and basically negotiate one agreement, which basically brings all of these countries together as part of a consortium. The advantage of consortium I think is twofold. One is that everybody's watching over each other's shoulders and basically making sure... It's a bear hug of a nuclear program that everybody is making sure that the other side is not doing anything that is not related to civilian nuclear power on top of the IAEA inspectors. You have additional sets of eyes and ears on the ground, but it also useful because this is one of the regions in the world in which there is no inclusive institution or cooperation.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
It has a potentially political benefit as well?
Ali Vaez:
Yeah. Exactly. Let's remember that the European Union started with cooperation over coal.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
Right. Cooperation over nuclear I think is a good way of starting to establish something that could eventually become a much more inclusive security architecture.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
A stabilizing factor for region that's been very divided. Let me just ask you briefly, when we talk about a consortium, this would mean joint production and sharing of nuclear energy? Is there any clear picture of what it actually involves?
Ali Vaez:
The devil is in the details.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
We don't know the details yet, but it has to be related to nuclear fuel cycle because that's the area of contention. That's the main issue that has to be tackled in the negotiations. Now, I am sure that the U.S. does not want Iran to have enrichment on its own soil, but would it agree to Iran having elements of an enrichment program? For instance, there are a group of Princeton scholars who have just published a piece in which they're suggesting Iran produces the components of centrifuges in Iran, but that enrichment happens in Oman and fuel fabrication happens in Saudi Arabia, and the UAE does the management of this joint project, so everybody basically has a role.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
So Iran could still say in that arrangement that it is enriching.
Ali Vaez:
Yeah. The Iranians will insist that they would want to have their own enrichment-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
... as a guarantee against U.S. once again basically reneging on its commitments. I think there's a lot of space there for negotiating the details, but I think-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
The idea of a consortium is a good idea because by enlarging at least that dimension of the nuclear problem, you might be easier to find a solution that works for the parties that could stop it otherwise. But let me ask you again, I want to go back to the question of the stakes. Just say... Okay. Say the way that they're approaching it you think actually deserves more credit maybe than it's being given out there in the broad press. But let's go to the question of if they succeed, without speculating about whether or not that's going to be the case, what are the big headlines for the future of the region, America's relationship with Iran and the world?
Ali Vaez:
I don't think this would be transformational immediately.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Okay.
Ali Vaez:
First of all, we can't get to a consortium overnight. It takes time to build it. You would first need an interim solution, which would be similar to what we had before, which is a series of restrictions and transparency measures that would basically limit Iran's nuclear program. But the number one advantage of a diplomatic solution is that you won't have an additional layer of turmoil and war and instability and refugees and radicalization in the region. That's number one. Number two is that because this is a different moment in which a deal is happening compared to 2015, and I describe what I mean by that, it has the potential to put Iran and the U.S. and Iran and region on a transformational trajectory, which again, would not happen immediately, but has the potential.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Sure. It would be a different path.
Ali Vaez:
Different path.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Yeah.
Ali Vaez:
The Gulf countries in 2015 when JCPOA was finalized were against it. In fact, when Trump withdrew from the agreement, they welcomed it because they believed that a transactional narrow nuclear agreement is empowering an adversary in the region, providing it with more resources to project power in the region. They were against that. Now they have experienced what a no-deal situation looks like. Right?
Christopher S. Chivvis:
It doesn't work well either.
Ali Vaez:
It doesn't. They remember the hot summer of 2019 when the U.S. managed to bring down Iranian oil exports almost to zero, and Iran lashed out and they were caught in the crossfire.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
They don't want to see a repeat of that. It would completely undermine their very lofty economic ambitions in the coming years. When the president was in the region at every stop, all the key regional Gulf countries' leadership asked him to do a deal with Iran, which was such a sea change compared to 10 years ago. The second reason is post-October 7, the region has changed so much. Iran's reliance on its network of partners and proxies in the region as its forward defense policy of deterring an attack on its soil has lost a lot of value in the eyes of the Iranian leadership because instead of protecting Iran and actually invited a direct Israeli strike on Iranian soil for the first time since the revolution, and so there is possibility of putting things on the table now that the Obama administration could never even imagine or the Biden administration couldn't imagine. For instance, the possibility of Iran committing not to send weapons to Hezbollah. This is acknowledging reality, by the way, because the land corridor through Syria no longer exists after the fall of the Assad regime, and the air bridge through the Beirut airport is also closed now. There are no more direct flights between Iran and Lebanon. There are things that are possible now on the non-nuclear dimension that were not possible back then.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Possible for Iran to make concessions that it would not have ever made in 2015.
Ali Vaez:
By definition, that also opens the door for the U.S. to do more on sanctions relief, including touching the U.S. embargo against Iran, which are mostly related to Iran being a state sponsor of terrorism. That opens the opportunities of U.S. companies potentially getting into the Iranian market, which creates skin in the game and creates more reason for the U.S. to sustain an agreement with Iran and for the relationship to start changing-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Build a more normal relationship.
Ali Vaez:
... slowly. Again, all of this happens at the moment that the Supreme Leader's succession is looming large on the horizon. This is where a deal could potentially put us on and a better, a more stable region, potentially a better relationship between Iran and the U.S. and the West.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Also, it occurs to me, and this is somewhat obvious, but I think we should note it, that it could have a big impact on global energy markets too. If suddenly Iran, which is I believe the world's fourth-largest reserves of oil were to be supplying the world freely with oil, that would have a pretty big impact. Also, it would be not great for Iran's relations with Russia and China, which could be to America's interests. It seems to me that China has actually benefited from Iran's isolation because China has not participated in that isolation and is now getting a lot of much cheaper oil from Iran.
But if Iran's oil is going to the global markets, this makes things more difficult for China. Obviously if global energy prices go down, that makes things more difficult for Russia. Not to mention the fact that simply some not normalization, but improvement in America's relationship with Iran is going to naturally complicate Iran's relationship with Russia, which has been very problematic, as you know as well as anyone, over the course of the three years or so since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm just trying to get a sense here of what the world would look like if this Trump initiative actually works.
Ali Vaez:
Yeah. It's such an important point because if we really do care about great power competition, you don't want a country the size of Iran with the resources of Iran to be entirely in the camp of Russia and China.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
For 400 years, Iran's foreign policy has been based on negative balancing between great powers. That's their comfort zone. The reason they can't do it now is that they're not given that option. But if, again, there is a deal that could be a great way to additional understandings, then I think that would basically be the option of choice for Iran not to rejoin necessarily the Western orbit, but at least to hedge its bets and not be entirely reliant on Russia and China. I think that's beneficial for the United States.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
I think we have a pretty good picture then of how things would look more positive if the path of negotiation worked. Let's talk about the other scenario, path of negotiations fails, what does the military path look like? This is a path that has been raised by Prime Minister Netanyahu. It's a path that there's some degree of support here in Washington for taking.
Ali Vaez:
Now let's realistically play out the military scenario. As you know, Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981. It bombed Syria's reactor in 2011, I believe. But those were all individual sites. Iran has multiple locations in which it's doing enrichment and it has elements of nuclear fuel cycle. A lot of these are well-protected underground bunkered facilities that are very difficult to reach. Israel can do what it did in its confrontation with Iran in October of last year, which is to park its F-35s in the Iraqi airspace, so not entering into the Iranian airspace, and fire air-to-land ballistic missiles towards these facilities. It can destroy what's on the ground, but it cannot really destroy what's underground.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
What's underneath. Yeah.
Ali Vaez:
What's underneath is the highly enriched fissile material.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
If you pursue it that way, the risk is that Iranians have already said if there is a strike, they will take the nuclear material away from those facilities. The problem goes back to what I told you initially, which was that it is possible that Iran already has multiple locations of clandestine-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
We just don't know about it.
Ali Vaez:
... facilities in which there are advanced centrifuges ready to be fired up. They are just waiting for the material. By that point, the game is lost.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
Unless we know where these facilities are, the only option left to the United States after that point is to carpet bomb a country five times the size of Iraq. It's just not possible, so the game will be lost. The other next level for Israel is to go and destroy Iranian air defense systems entirely. It has damaged them, but it hasn't fully destroyed.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Already damaged them. Yeah. Sure.
Ali Vaez:
Go and completely destroy those facilities, destroy command and control, and basically put commandos on the ground who can go into these bunkered facilities and either destroy them or remove the material. This is a very difficult, risky undertaking.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Very far-reaching operation. We're talking about weeks, if not more, of Israel basically invading Iran.
Ali Vaez:
Correct. It cannot happen without the United States. Right?
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Sure.
Ali Vaez:
It needs U.S. support. Iranians are also going to sit idle. They're going to fire back. In their attack on Israel in October, they fired about 200 ballistic missiles. One third of those missiles got through Israel's multi-layered defense system. You can imagine if they fire 1000 or 2000.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Do they have those kinds of stocks?
Ali Vaez:
This is their only reliable conventional military capability. They have put everything they've had into their missile program, and nobody knows for sure how many they do have. But usually from a military strategist's perspective, they fired around I think overall 300, 400 in last year's confrontation with Israel. That cannot be 10% of their stockpile because you never... In one signaling exercise, you never exhaust 10% of your stockpile. They do have enough to cause serious damage. The problem I think is if we get into that tit-for-tat and there are Israeli fatalities and casualties, then we're an entirely different world because last year in the two confrontations between Iran and Israel, thankfully no one was killed. But if we get into a much more serious confrontation-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
That's going to inflame Israeli politics, and you can easily see how the escalation takes off from there. You could see how Iran could also strike other oil production facilities in the region just in order to punish the world oil markets. You could see the United States getting drawn quite deeply into a conflict like this especially if it's in a context where Iran has been blamed for the failure of negotiations or Iran's intent to build a nuclear weapon has been widely broadcast around Washington, D.C.
Ali Vaez:
Yeah. And Chris, all of this without actually resolving the problem.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
Because the Iranians already have the know-how on how to reconstitute their nuclear program, and they would be able to do it unless the U.S. commits to every few months bombing Iran and getting into this never-ending cycle of conflict.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Sure. Well, the thing that always concerns me about this path is that it's hard to see how it doesn't lead to an argument for regime change in Tehran. We know, and if you ask anyone in Washington D.C., would trying to conduct a regime change operation in Iran be a good idea? 99% of people will say obviously that's a bad idea. But the problem is that the further you go down the path that you just described, the more that argument is going to gain momentum. It doesn't mean that it's going to be a better idea. You're just going to hear more people out of desperation because of overreach and the dynamics that overreach creates making that case.
Ali Vaez:
In Iraq in 2003, also Saddam after 15 years of stifling sanctions, there was a need for boots on the ground to get rid of them. The Iranian system is also hard to imagine that without boots on the ground, you can actually get regime change, and boots on the ground in the case of Iran means a million troops.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Talk a little bit about sanctions? This is a subject that you've written about a great deal. There's obviously a lot of people in Washington who believe that sanctions is a way to try to get either regime change or at least a lot more flexibility and malleability out of the Iranian leadership. Is that the case? Have sanctions been working or what's the effect been on Iran?
Ali Vaez:
Well, again, we can judge it by the results. There's now-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Has it made Iran more flexible?
Ali Vaez:
I think it has made Iran much more aggressive in the region, much more-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
But explain how that works? Because a lot of people still find that hard to understand. What is the mechanism by which sanctions don't make them back down?
Ali Vaez:
First of all, one has to understand Iran is a big country. It has 15 neighbors through land and sea, so you can never really impose the sanctions' regime on Iran that doesn't have holes, serious loopholes.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
If it's the U.S. and American allies in Europe imposing the sanctions in particular because Iran's still got other friends around the world, notably Russia and China.
Ali Vaez:
It's never going to be 100% effective. Now in a world in which you have great power competition, and China and Russia are no longer on board... They were under the Obama administration. They were actually enforcing sanctions. Even in President Trump's first term, China was much more on board with enforcing sanctions. Now they're not.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right.
Ali Vaez:
There is a limit to what you can achieve already with sanctions. Second, this is an economy that has basically developed a degree of resiliency because it has lived under sanctions for more than four decades. It's very good at figuring out ways of skirting sanctions. In fact, there is a constituency in among the political elite in Iran that benefits from sanctions because they're the ones who control the black market and the smuggling networks. They don't want change. This is one of the reasons that the IRGC-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
They're getting rich off the sanctions.
Ali Vaez:
Exactly. It's enriching. It's enriching the IRGC. Again, at the end of the day, I think sanctions are only as effective as the prospect of relieving them in response to real policy changes. This is where I think most people work on sanctions in this town and the Treasury Department are making a major mistake because I think the U.S. is excellent at designing sanctions. It's very good at implementing and enforcing sanctions, it is really bad at lifting them. If you can't lift sanctions, basically you cannot use this as a tool to advance diplomacy.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
If it's not credible that Iran could undertake behavior that would lead us to lift sanctions because we're not good at lifting sanctions for technical reasons, but also for political reasons, why would Iran do what we want them to do in the first place? That really diminishes the coercive capacity of sanctions. But okay, that's really helpful On sanctions. Let's focus... All of this clearly suggests that the Trump administration is right to try to pursue this deal.
We can complain about the fact that the Trump administration is... A lot of these are the same people who tore up the JCPOA in the first place, but that's in the past now, so good that they're trying to do this. The consequences could be very serious if they fail and very positive if they succeed. Let's just in the last few minutes here talk about the deal that's actually on the table and where things stand with the important caveat that here we are, it's June 4th, and the negotiations are... It's very unclear what's actually going to happen, but can you give us a basic picture of what the deal might be in its broad outlines as of now?
Ali Vaez:
Sure. The U.S. submitted a proposal to Iran in the last round of negotiations, which was the fifth round of negotiations. These talks started about two months ago. Slightly less than two months ago. This was the first U.S. written proposal. Iranians have had ideas, but the U.S. really didn't have a team of experts and enough institutional knowledge and memory to be able to put ideas on paper until-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Because most of these negotiations have been Witkoff going and negotiating with his Iranian counterparts. It's really at the political level, not at the technical level.
Ali Vaez:
Correct. Until recently. Until the last two rounds, and now there is a U.S. proposal on the table. To the extent that we know it is this consortium idea that I mentioned with some a limited Iranian nuclear program as an interim between the time that the deal is concluded and the time that the consortium is set up and is functional.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Iran... The United States has offered to say it's okay if Iran keeps its limited nuclear programs, basically something that would be similar to the original JCPOA, with the expectation that over time it will transfer to this regional... Membership in this regional consortium, which will provide it more or less the same level of civil nuclear benefit as if it were doing all of its enrichment in Iran itself.
Ali Vaez:
Correct. That seems to be the model. Now, realistically, this cannot be finalized. Even if the parties agree on the concept, all the details would take literally months to negotiate. This is obviously without the sanctions' relief elements, which in and of itself is going to be very difficult to negotiate given-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Right. Because that's obviously what the United States would give in return is supposedly significant sanctions relief.
Ali Vaez:
Yeah. There's so much mistrust on the Iranian side that they would ask for in terms of sequencing of sanctions relief, in terms of guarantees that it would remain in place, even if there's political change in Washington. It is going to be tough. Very, very tough negotiation. The most realistic, I think, approach is to have some kind of a framework political agreement before the time for snapback runs out, so in the next two months, that the parties agree to say something in very broad strokes. That the Iran commits never to develop nuclear weapons. That the U.S. recognizes Iran's right to civilian nuclear power. That the two sides would continue negotiating to try to put a consortium in place, for instance. Also, some very broad language about sanctions relief. If they achieve that, then they have to go to the Security Council and postpone the date of the expiry of UN Resolution 2231 by six months or 12 months to put more time on the clock to negotiate a comprehensive…
Christopher S. Chivvis:
They're basically buying time on the assumption that some kind of a deal would be possible.
Ali Vaez:
Right. They have the framework, then they would have to negotiate a final agreement. There might be an interim step here as well, which by the way, there's precedent for this. When Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan working for Hillary Clinton went to Oman for secret negotiations with Iran in 2013, they produced a two page very broad document, which then turned into an interim agreement, which also had some practical steps attached to it. Iran wrote back-
Christopher S. Chivvis:
That was the JPOA, correct?
Ali Vaez:
JPOA, interim agreement in November of 2013. It rolled back to Iran's nuclear program and subjected to more monitoring in return for some partial sanctions' relief. Then that bought time for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was the full deal. I think it's a similar approach now, but and so the approach is reasonable. I feel the most important element in any diplomatic initiative, which is the question of political will, is there. President Trump really wants a deal. Iran really needs a deal. That's a good combination to have sufficient political will. Also, the alternatives, as we discussed, are not really attractive for either side. Without really being too hopeful about it, I would put the odds of reaching some sort of a framework agreement in the next two months at about 60%. There is still a significant chance that this can go south.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
One of the obvious things that Trump has is that he has so much sway over the Republican Party, which has been one of the big obstacles to getting an agreement in the past. I think it'll be also an interesting test of Trump's capacity to control his own party to see whether or not this works out. Let me ask you by concluding, because I think it's important for American listeners here in Washington to understand. You're someone who grew up experiencing the negative effects of the regime in Tehran.
Left the country, came to the United States and remain critical of that regime. But at the same time, you're among those of us who think that the path of diplomacy is more likely to be effective than the path of military action and are even somewhat skeptical about the effects of sanctions. Although I think we all would acknowledge that diplomacy does involve some element of coercion in it. You can't entirely separate these things, but many people here in Washington who have negative views about the regime want to see it suffer. They want sanctions. They want military action. How come it's not the same for you?
Ali Vaez:
It's a very good question, and because of my position, I paid a high price personally. I've been burned by both sides. I can't go back to Iran because if I do, it will be a one-way ticket to Evin Prison because the hardliners believe that I am an agent of the United States government. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories of how I dictated the JCPOA to the Iranians on behalf of Israel. They've made documentaries about this. Then in the U.S., I've also been blamed and portrayed as a agent of Iranian influence. Of course, when you are blamed by hardliners on both sides, you must be doing something right otherwise they wouldn't come after you. But for me, it's very simple. I don't look at this with starry eyes of thinking that destroying the middle class in Iran is the best path to a democracy in the country. It is just as simple as that. I don't believe that. I've seen it elsewhere. Again, in Iraq, Saddam in 2003 was as strong, if not stronger than Saddam in 1991, during the first Gulf War. It literally took a foreign invasion to get rid of him.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Yeah.
Ali Vaez:
By that point, the fabric of the Iraqi society was torn apart to the extent that putting it back together is not yet a job fully done 20 years, 22 years after invasion. Yes. I've seen this movie before. I know that sanctions hurt the Iranian people much more than they hurt the regime. People tend to forget that the Shah's regime was under no pressure from the West, was under no sanctions. Nobody from the outside, if you're not a conspiracy theorist, was trying to topple the Shah's regime, but it fell because it was not standing on strong legs. It didn't have legitimacy at home. The Islamic Republic, even today, according to their own surveys, there's 85% of the Iranian population who wants to see its back. There is no way that this system would be able to reform itself and be able to redeem itself. It has proven that again and again. It is doomed eventually to fail. What I want is a soft landing because, Chris, we got rid of the evil empire of the Soviet Union only to replace it with Putin's Russia. Right?
Christopher S. Chivvis:
That's an interesting thought that certainly we should bear in mind.
Ali Vaez:
This is a country that has been the other of the West for several millennia, whether it's been Iran against the Persians, against the Greeks, or the Persians against the Romans, or the Persians against the Ottomans and to this day. I want a soft landing for it because I think if the Iranian society is empowered, it can bring about the kind of change that is lasting, that is beneficial to the region, to the West, and particularly to the United States.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
Ali, thanks so much for joining us here on Pivotal States. I could go on talking to you for another hour or two. I've learned a lot and really enjoyed it.
Ali Vaez:
Great pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Christopher S. Chivvis:
This podcast was recorded on June 4th and reflects developments up to that time. This has been Pivotal States here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I'm Chris Chivvis, the director of the American Statecraft Program. We hope you'll sign up for our newsletter, NextGen Statecraft, and tune in for future episodes of Pivotal States.
