A POLITICO review of available records, speeches, and congressional statements found that when it came to Iran, President Joe Biden has long tried to walk a careful path
Chuck Hagel recalls the men feasting on “tremendous, beautiful, delicious Persian food” and talking in subtle ways about all manner of issues, even Iran’s nuclear program and ways the two countries could find common ground.
| AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster “I’d love to see the regime change, but I think the policy should be: How do we prevent them from getting nuclear weapons? How do we prevent them from moving forward in missile technology and how do we prevent them from becoming the kind of irritant and trouble in … Iraq,” Biden said on NBC News in June 2005. “That should be the policy. And it seems to me in order to do that, you have to deal with them. It’s going to be a tough, tough, tough negotiation, but we have to get in the game. We have to actually engage them.” Biden urged the Bush administration to talk to the Iranians as well as Syria’s government to help tamp down the chaos in Iraq. “The last thing they want is a civil war [in Iraq],” he insisted in fall 2006. But he also was cast as being naïve about Iran’s intentions. When he proposed dividing Iraq into three largely autonomous parts , some analysts said Iran would exploit the set-up, especially if the U.S. withdrew its troops. As Iraq’s woes deepened, no weapons of mass destruction were found there and Biden embarked on another run for president, he voted against a Senate resolution urging Bush to label Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group, sayingas a justification for war with Iran. And he kept pressing for a way short of military force to pressure Iran to stop its nuclear program. Biden dropped out of the 2008 presidential race relatively early, but in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing held just weeks before Barack Obama selected him as his vice president, he called for the U.S. to use both negotiations and sanctions to cajole Iran into a nuclear agreement. He also “A diplomatic presence would increase our knowledge of the forces at work inside Iran. It would give us a stronger diplomatic hand to play and it would decrease the chances of miscalculation,” he said.Middle East scholar Michael Rubin called Biden “Tehran’s favorite senator,” and declared: “Biden’s unyielding pursuit of ‘engagement’ with Iran for more than a decade has made it easier for Tehran to pursue its nuclear program.” Rubin questioned Obama’s judgment in selecting Biden as his running mate. But in Obama, Biden had found a president with similar views on how to approach Iran. Both wanted to diplomatically engage the country, but both were willing to ramp up sanctions to nudge Iran into talks. Obama in particular was keen to break away from ingrained U.S. habits on foreign policy, including by being willing to reach out to longtime adversaries.just a few weeks after the Obama administration took office, Biden said the U.S. wanted to talk to Iran, but that it would take preemptive action to stop Iran’s nuclear program if necessary. He turned to tough talk on Iran more than once in the early days of the administration. Months after the Iranian regime cracked down on protesters questioning the results of the 2009 presidential vote that gave a second term to Ahmadinejad, Biden warned that Iran’s leaders are “sowing the seeds for their own destruction.” But even as Biden chided the Iranian government over the disputed election, he also stressed that America’s national interest hadn’t changed: it still wanted to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear program. Over the next several years, the Obama administration saw various pieces of its strategy to rein in the Iranian nuclear program fall into place; the plan was aided by the 2013 election of Hassan Rouhani, a moderate cleric, as Iran’s president, though quiet U.S.-Iran discussions began under Ahmadinejad, the hardliner. The result was the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The agreement, put together through the efforts of several countries beyond just Iran and America, lifted U.S. and international nuclear sanctions on Iran in exchange for severe limits on its nuclear program. Biden personally was not central to the negotiation of the Iran agreement, at least not the way Secretary of State John Kerry or Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz were. The president tasked Biden with other portfolios, including relations with Ukraine following the 2014 Russian invasion of that country. Biden’s son Beau died in May 2015, which also appeared to lead the vice president to temporarily lower his profile. But Biden was kept in the loop about the Iran talks and could often be relied upon to raise concerns about the political palatability of the moves under consideration. As the particulars of the nuclear deal came into focus, Biden homed in some of the technicalities, with a special concern about the measures designed to inspect and verify that Iran was complying with the agreement. He was especially delighted with one of the most complicated yet most, called the “snapback.” The snapback, in short, gave the U.S. the ability to automatically reimpose sanctions on Iran through its veto at the United Nations Security Council. Biden’s interest in the details of the deal arose from his awareness that the agreement had to be airtight to win over U.S. lawmakers, former Obama aides said. That included several moderate and conservative Democrats with hawkish views toward Iran. The nuclear deal was not a treaty requiring Senate confirmation. But prior to the agreement being reached in July 2015, Congress had pushed through a law that gave it some oversight. After the agreement was unveiled, Republican opponents tried to pass a resolution disapproving it, and the Obama team had to scramble to get a critical mass of Democrats to support the deal.He helped secure the support of people like Sen. Chris Coons, a moderate Democrat representing Biden’s Delaware. “He understood the debate that was going to play out in Congress before it happened,” said Ben Rhodes, who served as a deputy national security adviser under Obama. Rhodes said Biden, chastened by the U.S. experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, had clearly grown weary of using American force in places like the Middle East. “Like all of us, he was worried about another war, or getting pulled into the aftermath of an Israeli strike on Iran,” he said. Some pro-Israel organizations were ardent opponents of the nuclear agreement, as was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who made little secret of his disdain for Obama. These critics saw Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel and viewed the 2015 agreement as too favorable to Iran in the long run. Despite Biden’s openness toward engaging Iran, he’d also managed to maintain good relations with many on this side of the spectrum, so Obama relied upon him to try to argue the merits of the deal to them. Biden evenin Florida, where he insisted, “I firmly believe [the deal] will make us and Israel safer, not weaker.” At the time, Biden was Obama’s emissary. Nearly six years later, now-President Biden owns the Iran policy.The Republican campaigned against virtually everything Obama had accomplished, and he took office intent on dismantling, among other things, the Iran deal. In May 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement. In quitting, Trump reimposed sanctions that had been lifted under the agreement, while piling on additional ones as well. In the years since, Iran has responded by taking steps that put it out of compliance with the deal, such as higher-level enrichment of uranium.The deal itself, while not completely dead, is already five years old and closer to the expiration dates for some of its clauses. Republicans remain dead set against a return to the agreement, as is Israel. Biden says he wants to first return to the original agreement by lifting sanctions, provided that Iran resumes complying with the deal. He’s also called on Iran to sit down for talks on a longer-lasting, more sophisticated agreement that could even address non-nuclear issues, such as Iran’s support for terrorist groups. Iran hasn’t committed to doing so. For now, Biden is relying on a delegation of diplomats to engage in indirect negotiations with Iran about saving the 2015 agreement. But he himself isn’t publicly showing much urgency on the Iran portfolio. Given that he has numerous other challenges to deal with, including a pandemic-damaged U.S. economy, it may be foolish to expend much political capital on an issue involving Iran. But Hagel said Biden also understands that when it comes to such diplomatic dances, neither side — Iran nor the United States — can look too eager, or each risks appearing weak to the other. “He’s very clear-eyed. He understands reality, the cold brutal facts of reality,” Hagel said, adding that he’d summarize Biden’s approach to Iran as “if it doesn’t fit, don’t force it, but keep trying.”to reviving the agreement. The critics already are insisting that Biden not lift sanctions on Iran, thus effectively killing the nuclear deal. Israel, meanwhile, is suspected to be behind recent efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, and Israeli officials have repeatedly told the Biden administration that it’s pointless to return to what they believe is a flawed deal. Iran is about to hold a presidential election that could bring to power a hardliner resistant to talks with the United States. And over time, the diplomatic dancing will edge closer to the campaign season for the U.S. 2022 midterm elections. If Biden is serious about saving the 2015 deal, he may need to make his intentions even more clear, perhaps wading directly into the negotiations and engaging Iran the way he’s often called on America to do. “Weirdly, your political space closes with time, and you don’t get points for performative negotiation,” Rhodes said.
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