Iran's efforts to increase its diplomatic gains have a long way before pay off

Nick Donaldson/Getty

After a winter defined by deep discontent at home, Iran’s government has spent the past several weeks trying to consolidate diplomatic gains abroad.

In March, it concluded a Chinese-mediated detente with Saudi Arabia seven years after Riyadh severed relations, and has tapped its choice of ambassador to the kingdom. In April, it announced the appointment of an ambassador to the UAE, a role that had been vacant since 2016. This month, President Ebrahim Raisi travelled to Syria – the first such visit in more than a decade – as his team hailed a “strategic victory in the region” days before Syria under President Bashar Al Assad, one of Tehran’s key allies, was readmitted to the Arab League. And according to media reports, including from The National, Oman is facilitating discussions towards improving relations between Tehran and Cairo.

For the hardliners in the Iranian system’s decision-making circles, the combination of improved relations with Gulf neighbours, and robust ties with Beijing and Moscow, vindicate a tacit shift away from the slogan of “neither East nor West” that was a leitmotif of post-1979 revolution strategy. In this line of thinking, the US and Europe are purportedly in decline, while the East – including the Middle East – is ascendant and able to provide both economic and diplomatic reprieve against isolation from powers on both sides of the Atlantic.

But it is far from certain whether that sense of vindication will prove justified in the face of considerable domestic, regional and international challenges. The scale and scope of anti-government protests sparked by the death last September of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman detained by the regime’s “morality police”, may have ebbed – but their underlying social and political grievances have been suppressed, not addressed.

Iranians protests the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was detained by the morality police, in Tehran, October 1, 2022. AP

The brutal crackdown, in which more than 500 people are estimated to have been killed and thousands detained, underscores a profound gap between state and society manifesting over the past few years in more frequent rounds of anti-regime unrest.

Concerns over living standards and wages also remain acute as high inflation, corruption and mismanagement belie the notion of a “resistance economy” capable of thriving while under sanctions.

The prospect of those sanctions being lifted, however, has diminished as relations with the US and Europe have deteriorated over three key issues.

The first is the dire human rights situation, which has resulted in successive rounds of western sanctions targeting individuals and entities involved in the state’s repressive campaign against protesters and civil society, and sharply reduced the appetite for engaging with the Iranian government.

The second is what Washington and its allies regard as Iran’s complicity in Russia’s war in Ukraine, notably through the alleged supply of armed drones (something Tehran and Moscow deny, but on which there is broad consensus among western governments).

This, too, has led to successive rounds of western sanctions targeting those engaged in the development and transfer of Iranian arms to Russia, with a worried eye on their potential expansion to ballistic missiles shipments in exchange for Russian advanced fighter aircraft and other weapons systems.

The third is the deadlock over negotiations to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or 2015 nuclear agreement. Efforts to revive the deal that the Trump administration exited five years ago swung between near-conclusion and near-breakdown between April 2021 and September 2022. They appear moribund despite Iranian suggestions, including as recently as this month, that a deal can still be wrapped up if the West shows “credible political will”.

But as far as Washington and the three European parties to the deal (France, Germany and the UK, or E3) are concerned, they seem to have exhausted their political will for the JCPOA’s revival.

Iranian demands, such as shelving an investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency into past activities at undeclared nuclear sites, or guarantees that future US administrations will abide by an agreement, go well beyond what the US is prepared to countenance, even before Iran’s crackdown at home and drone transfers to Russia for use in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, US-Iran tensions remain high, particularly in Syria, where the US and Iran-linked militias engaged in a deadly altercation in March, and in the Gulf, where commercial shipping has once again come in the crosshairs of tit-for-tat seizures. This has prompted the US and its allies to bolster their naval operations in and around waterways such as the Strait of Hormuz, key to regional energy trade.

The result is a strategic impasse, both for Iran and western powers: Tehran claims to want conclude a deal, despite having turned down a compromise text that the other parties were willing to finalise last August. For the US and Europeans, who have only seen their concerns around Iranian nuclear and non-nuclear activity grow since then, that text is no longer seen as fit for purpose.

But the US and Europe have yet to propose a workable alternative to the JCPOA, which has become at most, as a joint statement by the G7 put it, a “useful reference”. They could table specific tweaks based on that reference, or shift to a more limited arrangement that either freezes or rolls back Iranian nuclear activity in return for sanctions relief that is less comprehensive than has been on the table. Either option would prevent the aggravation of non-proliferation concerns in the short term, but neither might find muster with the two sides.

With little clarity on what each side ultimately wants, the current state of play is driven by avoiding what they don’t want. Given how much Iran’s nuclear programme has advanced, with US officials estimating the breakout time (the period needed to accumulate one weapon’s worth of fissile material) at 12 days, neither appears to want further escalation. They express this through diplomatic messaging – for example, by the E3 signalling, to Iran and members of the UN Security Council, that they will restore pre-2015 UN sanctions if Iran raises enrichment to weapons-grade or commences weaponisation – and in part through military signals, demonstrated in recent joint US-Israeli exercises. “There are negative developments on the horizon that could bring about action,” Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, warned on Tuesday.

For its part, Tehran has continued to engage the IAEA over access to its nuclear facilities enough to avoid referral by the Board of Governors to the Security Council, but without fully satisfying the long list of agency concerns over access, monitoring and clarity on its past nuclear activities. The discovery earlier this year of traces of uranium enriched to 84 per cent only fuels those worries. With a meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors little more than a week away, and Iran’s enrichment activities potentially teasing the limits of what the US or Israel may regard as their red lines for military action, the margin between a situation that is deeply concerning and outright alarming is exceedingly narrow.

Iran’s overtures to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf neighbours, along with its deepening ties to Russia and China, are ostensibly meant to provide the diplomatic cachet it seeks and the economic dividends it sorely needs. Yet given the scale of the challenges it continues to face at home, and the deepening isolation its actions have provoked from the West, those returns may prove chimerical.