Why a good nuclear deal is so hard for Iran

The Iranians want and need a nuclear deal, but politics and the complicated dynamics of the Iranian leadership will make this exceedingly difficult. AEI Resident Fellow J. Matthew McInnis explains why he thinks Iran's negotiators may end up shooting themselves in the foot.

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Transcript:
On October 15, yet again, the P5+1 representing the US, our Western allies, Russia, and China will sit down with the Iranian negotiators to find a way to finalize a nuclear deal.
This process started last year. Many people were hopeful, but now I think pessimism is the order for the day. The Iranians—they want a deal, they need a deal, but I think they’re going to shoot themselves in the foot yet again. And here’s why.

President Rouhani and his closest advisers, at least I believe, know they need to find a deal, and they know this is the right thing to do. It’s what Iran needs. But they can’t bring themselves to do it, and part of that is their own issues and how they’ve been handling the negotiations, and how they’ve been working with the Supreme Leader and getting his endorsement for it, but other things are more structural in the system for Iran, and this is what are the real obstacles, and I worry that Rouhani’s not going to find a way to navigate through.

President Rouhani knows that his biggest obstacle is convincing the rest of the leadership that they can actually walk back uranium enrichment capability. They’ve invested so much in this, and it’s something that is frankly part of national pride, but it’s also an enormous commitment they’ve made to have the capacity to have highly enriched uranium if they wanted it, and I think this is going to be very difficult for them to walk back from.

The second problem is that Iran has a lot of difficulty coming clean on what almost everybody understands is some very suspicious activities that they have been doing to potentially develop a nuclear weapon. Most of this has been occurring, we think, at the Parchin military complex just southeast of Tehran. On October 5, there was a huge explosion there right before the International Atomic Energy Association’s inspectors were supposed to arrive and potentially investigate. People still wonder what actually happened there. But it brought back the fact that Iran has refused inspectors to come to Parchin since 2005, and there’s been lots of evidence that Iran is up to, frankly, no good there.

Finally, I worry that President Rouhani has not been able to convince the Supreme Leader Khamenei and others in the regime of how dire their economic situation is. You know, President Rouhani campaigned on this in his election in 2013 that we had to find a better way to deal with the West and to improve the economic situation, which had become quite severe under sanctions. I think the regime knows this is a problem, but I don’t think they recognize how bad their situation is, and if that’s not clear I don’t Rouhani is going to have enough of the leverage he needs within his own system to get a more effective or a better compromise here.

Despite all these obstacles that the Iranians are putting in front of themselves to find a deal, they don’t want to go back to where they were before the Geneva Agreement in November 2013.
The situation that Iran now has with the West in being able to talk and to have some form of dialogue, in addition to frankly the sanctions being relaxed at least a little bit, is a much better place.
So given all this, the US and Iran have decided that talking is better than nothing. At least for now. But that’s not likely to solve the problem.

Why a good nuclear deal is so hard for Iran