On September 4th of last year, shortly after Javad Zarif was named Iran’s foreign minister, a new Twitter account with the handle @JZarif posted its first tweet:
Several hours later, a second tweet appeared:
The tweets drew widespread attention, and some skepticism. Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani, had taken office a month earlier, but his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had challenged Israel’s right to exist, urged Jews to return to the countries they came from, and questioned the occurrence of the Holocaust. Moreover, most social media had long been cut off in the Islamic Republic. Among the skeptical responses was one from @sfpelosi:
@sfpelosi is Christine Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter and a former chief of staff for Representative John Tierney, of Massachusetts. She is now a Democratic Party activist in San Francisco. She is Catholic, but her husband is Jewish and her daughter attends a Jewish preschool. “I came across his tweet and thought, Was it real?” she told me. “I thought Iran didn’t have social media. Then I thought, What the heck, it’s Twitter! Let’s see if this is real or a P.R. stunt by one of his consultants or friends outside Iran.”
Within an hour, @JZarif responded:
The tweeter was indeed Zarif. (The Foreign Ministry is exempted from the country’s social-media censorship.) By e-mail, I asked Zarif if he knew that his interlocutor was the daughter of a prominent American politician. “Yes, ma’am,” he wrote back.
The exchange foreshadowed the most ambitious diplomatic opening since Iran’s revolution. Three weeks later, on September 26th, Zarif met with Secretary of State John Kerry at the United Nations to discuss resuming negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program. The next day, President Rouhani, who was in New York to attend the General Assembly, took a telephone call from President Obama. It lasted fifteen minutes, and was the first conversation between Iranian and American leaders since the Shah’s ouster, in 1979.
Since then, there have been monthly diplomatic talks, at various levels, in Geneva and Vienna. Zarif, who prepped Rouhani for the Obama call, is now the broker between his volatile government and the world’s six mightiest powers—Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States. The goal is a comprehensive deal to insure that Tehran does not seek or obtain a nuclear weapon. An interim, six-month agreement was reached in November and went into effect in January. Iran agreed to gradually suspend or convert controversial aspects of its nuclear program. In exchange, Tehran is receiving, also in phases, relief from economic sanctions amounting to between six and seven billion dollars. More than half is Iran’s own oil income, trapped in foreign banks. Iran and the six powers began drafting terms last week. The deadline for a final agreement is July 20th. The talks could be extended, but all sides want—and need—to make the date.
Zarif and Kerry have now met four times, and call each other John and Javad. “That’s one of the first things you Americans do,” Zarif told me. “Had I not been in the U.S. for such a long time, I would have been astonished for the Secretary of State of the adversary to start calling me by my first name.” They have each other’s phone number and e-mail address and have used them. Their staffs are in touch more often.
Yet, even at this stage, Pelosi’s question lingers over the process: Is it real? And can it prevent Iran from eventually getting a bomb?
Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a block-long building of beige brick, was erected in the nineteen-thirties, by Iran’s last dynasty. Its cavernous reception hall is majestic; the walls are mirrored mosaics. A dazzling chandelier, with several tiers of little bulbs bouncing light off the mirrors, hangs from a domed ceiling. Zarif’s office is wood-panelled and plain, unadorned with personal mementos. We sat on brocade furniture clustered at one end of the room.
Zarif is an affable man, with a disarmingly unrevolutionary grin, a quick wit, and the steely tenacity of a debater. He has snowy white hair and, since taking office, has grown his signature goatee into a short beard—a response to hard-liners who thought that his politics, as well as his clean-shaven cheeks, were too Western. The nuclear diplomacy has made Zarif both popular and vulnerable. On the Persian New Year, in March, two public-opinion polls named him newsmaker of the year; Rouhani trailed far behind. Yet Tehran’s squabbling politicos, whom Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini once compared to scorpions, dissect every utterance. Critics in parliament have already urged his impeachment. Earlier this month, Zarif survived a challenge by seventy-five members of parliament, who wanted to censure him for publicly denouncing hard-line positions and asserting that the Holocaust was a “horrifying tragedy.” Hard-liners also held a “We’re Worried” conference at the former American Embassy, to warn against concessions. The conference was billed as “the great gathering of critics of a weak deal.” A woman in a black chador carried a placard stating, “Our nuclear rights are not for sale.”
For many Iranians, a nuclear deal is about a lot more than nukes. It would remove the threat of regime change, by securing the Islamic government as the legitimate representative of the Iranian people. But it might also open Iran to the outside world in ways that affect the internal balance of power.
“I’m still waiting for the real battle to be fought in Tehran,” a leading Western diplomat told me. “My best guess is that it will be fought after the nuclear deal.”
Zarif straddles Iranian and American culture to a greater extent than any senior official since the revolution. He greeted me at the door, but did not shake my hand, according to Muslim custom. He did not wear a tie, choosing a small standup collar, following revolutionary custom. Yet he speaks English with an American accent and with American idioms, the legacy of twenty years in San Francisco, New York, and Denver. He has two children—a daughter who is an interior decorator, a son who is a marketing consultant—and both were born in the United States.
He may be the only person in the world who can telephone both Senator Dianne Feinstein and the Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. Feinstein met Zarif in 2006, and carried a proposal by him to the Bush Administration. (The Bush people never responded, she said.) She kept in touch and met Zarif again in New York in September.
“He doesn’t play games,” she told me. “He doesn’t produce incendiary sentences. He is thoughtful. He is real. He wants to help his people and lead them in a different direction. That’s important to me in my measurement of a person.”
As Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2002 until 2007, Zarif met with Vice-President Joseph Biden and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel during their Senate days. In 2007, the Bush Administration allowed a rare exemption from the twenty-five-mile travel limit on Iranian diplomats in New York, so that he could give farewell speeches in Washington and pay a courtesy call on Capitol Hill. “Zarif is a tough advocate, but he’s also pragmatic, not dogmatic,” Biden told me then. “He can play an important role in helping to resolve our significant differences with Iran peacefully.” At a luncheon hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Martin Indyk, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, told Zarif, “We’re going to miss you.”
Yet in January Zarif met Nasrallah in Lebanon, and laid a wreath of showy white flowers at the grave of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah military commander. Mughniyeh was linked to the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed two hundred and forty-one peacekeepers. Zarif then travelled to Damascus, for talks with Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, now in the fourth year of a war against his own people.
“In order to practice dialogue, you need to be able to set aside your assumptions and try to listen more than you want to talk,” Zarif told me. “It’s not always politically correct to be able to do that, but it can give you a better sense of the reality. I have benefitted from the knowledge and the information that all these people have been able to provide to me. I have disagreements with some and more agreements with others. But that doesn’t mean I cannot listen to those I disagree with.”
Some American critics don’t buy it. “There are worse Islamic revolutionaries out there, but, make no mistake, he’s an Islamic revolutionary,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. officer and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me. “He understands the Islamic revolution as being incompatible with the United States. Only in the Byzantine world of revolutionary politics do the differences between Zarif and what some call hard-liners gain importance.”
The son of an affluent merchant who wanted him to be an engineer, Zarif grew up without television or newspapers. The family was conservative and devout, but his father did not support the revolution. Shiites have historically been so-called quietists—passive politically and opposed to the clergy’s involvement in politics. The return to the ideal Islamic state, they believed, should wait for the reappearance of the Mahdi, the Muslim messiah. So the revolution was as distressing for some of the faithful as it was for the Shah’s supporters, and left deep fissures within the Zarif family. When I noted that dinner-table discussions must have been interesting, Zarif replied, “Out of respect to my father, I usually listened.”
At seventeen, Zarif left Tehran to attend a prep school in San Francisco, before enrolling at San Francisco State University. During the fourteen months of the revolution, Iranian students at California colleges clustered around the Muslim Students Association in Berkeley. So many of them rushed home to enlist in the new Islamic Republic that they were known as the Berkeley mafia. Zarif stayed behind, to continue his studies, and became the Berkeley group’s representative to Iran’s San Francisco consulate, assigned to insure that it did not deviate from the new political creed. When he started graduate school, in New York, at Columbia, the revolution’s Ambassador to the United Nations hired him.
“At the time, anybody who prayed and knew English was a rare commodity,” Zarif recalled. As the mission purged monarchists, he did everything from visa work to writing letters to the Secretary-General about the Iran-Iraq War. “Nobody else in the mission either knew how to do it or was trusted to do it,” he said.
After a year at Columbia, Zarif left to earn his doctorate at the University of Denver’s School of International Studies, where he had some of the same professors who had taught Condoleezza Rice. “One of my professors once told me, ‘In Denver, we produce liberals like Javad Zarif, not conservatives like Condi Rice,’ ” Zarif said, smiling.
“Condi and Javad had many common traits,” Ved Nanda, who taught both and was on Zarif’s dissertation committee, recalled. “They were both good in the classroom. At that time, I would not have thought of her as Secretary of State, though I would have told you that she would go places. But him—I thought he’d play an important part in his country’s life.”
Zarif’s dissertation, written during the Iran-Iraq War, was about using force in violation of international law. Its themes echoed Iranian-American relations, before and after the revolution. “No political, military or economic justification can be advanced to explain with legal validity a unilateral resort to force in the absence of prior armed attack,” he wrote. Intervention to restore law and order in foreign lands “can find no legal grounds in universally accepted norms of law.”
Nanda particularly remembered Zarif’s bitterness about American support for Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Iran in 1980. As U.S. officials later admitted, the Reagan Administration provided satellite intelligence to Baghdad about Iranian troop movements which was used for some of Iraq’s chemical-weapons attacks. The C.I.A. once estimated that Iran suffered at least fifty thousand casualties, including thousands of deaths—the largest loss of life from toxic nerve and mustard gases since the First World War.
Since leaving Denver, in 1988, Zarif has been at the center of Iran’s diplomatic pivots. Jan Eliasson, a Swede who is now the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, led negotiations to end the Iran-Iraq War. Zarif was the youngest diplomat in the Iranian delegation, Eliasson recalled, but he worked the hardest to talk to the Iraqis, even between sessions. The former U.N. hostage negotiator Giandomenico Picco, an Italian, detailed, in his memoir, Zarif’s “invaluable” role, between 1989 and 1991, in freeing Western hostages held by Iran’s allies in Lebanon. One had been held for almost seven years. Picco called his work with Zarif over a period of some two decades the closest professional relationship of his career. “The proof is the hundred and twenty-three lives that we brought back to their families and homes,” Picco told me. “He’s a craftsman.”
In testimony before Congress, James Dobbins, currently the State Department’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, credited Zarif with help on Afghanistan. At the 2001 International Conference, in Bonn, the Afghan opposition balked over terms for a new government. At two in the morning, after pressure from American, Russian, German, Indian, and U.N. diplomats proved futile, Zarif took the Afghan representative aside and whispered for a few moments in his ear. It worked. “Zarif had achieved the final breakthrough without which the Karzai government might never have been formed,” Dobbins said.
In 2002, Zarif became Iran’s U.N. envoy. The next year, he wrote the final draft of a master statement—nicknamed “the grand bargain”—that sought to resolve all outstanding issues with the U.S. Like earlier attempts, it never took off. After hard-liners gained control under Ahmadinejad, Zarif was squeezed out of the foreign service, in 2007. “I don’t think that the West interpreted our openings and accommodations the way they should have,” he told me then. “Since it was misinterpreted, the reaction was disappointing, and in fact only heightened tension and increased mistrust.” He said that he would return home from the U.N. seen as “a stupid idealist who has not achieved anything in his diplomatic life after giving one-sided concessions.”
He retired from government service at the age of forty-seven. Afterward, he taught, played with architectural plans—a hobby of his—and kept a low profile during six months of protests following the disputed 2009 Presidential elections. The uprising was quashed, but simmering discontent produced Rouhani’s stunning election, last year. The political tide had turned. Three of the six Presidential candidates asked Zarif to be their foreign minister, and a popular news Web site has since posited him as a future Presidential candidate. “Not a chance! Don’t even say that,” he replied, when I asked about his prospects. “I’m not a politician!”
Zarif has reason to be wary. Iran has a noisy and mischievous right wing. At Zarif’s confirmation hearing, in August, the lawmaker Nasrollah Pejmanfar warned parliament, “Our enemies have set their greedy eyes on Zarif, and Americans have called him an ‘olive branch.’ Therefore, Zarif has to clearly announce that we don’t want to have relations with the United States.”
In early October, a front-page story in Tehran’s most hard-line paper, Kayhan, reported that Zarif had told a parliamentary committee that the phone call between Obama and Rouhani was inappropriate. The Foreign Ministry denied it, and Zarif complained on his Facebook page that the fabricated story, and political tensions, had caused him physical injury.
“I developed pain in the back and foot after seeing the newspaper’s headline this morning,” he wrote, to four hundred and fifty thousand followers. “I could not even walk or sit. I left the Foreign Ministry in the afternoon for the hospital. . . . It was due to being nervous, and the muscular spasms.”
A week later, after acupuncture, he flew to the first round of the nuclear negotiations on an airplane bed. Iranian media posted pictures of him under a blanket, with a laptop on his chest. He was rolled into the talks in a wheelchair. His entrance broke the ice. An American official who briefed reporters recalled, “Everyone had a back story for him, books they thought he should read, things he might try, because we all have suffered.”
Shortly after Zarif accepted the interim nuclear deal, President Obama told an audience at the Brookings Institution that the new diplomacy with Iran had only a fifty-fifty shot. Even those odds may be high. For the past quarter century, American Presidents have failed to prevent unfriendly or unstable countries from getting the bomb. Ronald Reagan pledged that Pakistan would not get a nuclear weapon, but it did, from a clandestine program built up in the nineteen-eighties. Bill Clinton vowed that North Korea would not get the bomb, but it developed secret capabilities in the nineties and tested its first nuclear device in 2006.
George W. Bush promised that Iran would not go nuclear. Both sides were clumsy, repeatedly missing diplomatic opportunities. Meanwhile, Tehran made a big leap in technology. It jumped from fewer than two hundred centrifuges—spinning tubes that enrich uranium by separating its isotopes at supersonic speed—to around five thousand by the time Bush left office.
Iran now has nineteen thousand centrifuges. The majority are at a well-guarded site near Natanz, an area famous for its pears. After an opposition group exposed the facility, in 2002, Iran said that it was not obliged to make a declaration to the U.N. watchdog agency until the plant was within six months of receiving nuclear material. A second site is at Fordo, buried deep in mountains less vulnerable to air strikes, near Qom, Iran’s center of religious learning. Tehran declared the site in 2009, by which point the United States already had it under surveillance.
Enriched uranium can fuel energy for domestic uses or for weaponry. A nuclear bomb requires roughly twenty-five kilograms—fifty-five pounds—of uranium that is highly enriched, to ninety-per-cent purity. Using all its centrifuges and all the uranium enriched so far, Iran, if it wished, could produce the fuel for a bomb in about two months, Robert Einhorn, a former member of the U.S. negotiating team, told me. Other steps are required, including fitting the fuel into a warhead and developing a delivery system. But the so-called “breakout time”—the time it takes for a country to produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb—is key.
“Once a country can produce bomb-grade material, the game is up,” Colin Kahl, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, explained. The fuel can be moved to a less conspicuous site, safe from military action. At that point, air strikes on Natanz or Fordo might not stop Iran from making a bomb.
Only fifteen countries currently enrich uranium. Only nine have the bomb. Five are now at the negotiating table trying to persuade Iran, through Zarif, not to make one of its own.
Zarif has not actually been to any of Iran’s facilities. “I haven’t had the chance,” he told me. “And I don’t think I need to. It would be nice, in terms of national pride, to be able to look at them, and to visit them. But I wouldn’t understand much, because I’m not a nuclear physicist. I’m a negotiator.”
The Islamic Republic has always claimed that its nuclear program is intended only for energy and medical research. The U.S. has long acknowledged Tehran’s need for both. In the mid-seventies, before the revolution, the Ford Administration approved the Shah’s plan to buy more than twenty nuclear power plants. The decision was supported by Dick Cheney, Ford’s chief of staff, and his Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. The calculation was that the deal would be good for American business. It would deepen strategic relations, and it would help Iran provide energy for a modernizing economy, while extending the life of its oil reserves for export to Western industrialized nations. “I don’t think the issue of proliferation came up,” Ford’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, recalled, in 2005, to the Washington Post.
A 1978 State Department memo noted, “We have been encouraged by Iran’s efforts to broaden and diversify its non-oil energy base.”
Iran needs nuclear energy now far more than it did under the Shah. After the revolution, the ruling clerics called on women to breed an Islamic generation. Within a decade, the population increased by more than fifty per cent. The Government of God soon realized its earthly limits, however. It could not feed, house, educate, or employ the growing numbers, so it initiated a family-planning program; most birth control, including vasectomies, was subsidized. More than thirty thousand women were recruited to go door to door promoting a two-child policy. Clerics preached family planning on United Nations World Population Day; some even escorted anxious males to vasectomy clinics. Engaged couples were required to go through a surprisingly graphic family-planning course. By 2002, births were down to two children per family.
The birth boom triggered an oil-consumption surge that went up an average of ten per cent a year during the revolution’s first three decades—until 2010, according to an Iranian Web site. Within ten years, Iran could become a net importer of oil, with devastating economic consequences. Before the introduction of sanctions, petroleum sales had accounted for sixty per cent of fiscal revenues. “If the trend continues,” the Web site acknowledged, “the situation could turn catastrophic.”
Oil consumption also presented an existential problem. Six of Iran’s major cities are chronically polluted. Tehran closes down periodically because of thick brown smog. Billboards flash pollution levels. On the worst days, children, the infirm, and the elderly are warned to stay indoors; some people resort to wearing surgical face masks. The government reports that approximately eighty thousand Iranians die every year—more than two hundred a day—from diseases linked to dirty air.
So Iran needs clean nuclear energy. Still, almost four decades after its deal for more than twenty nuclear power plants, the country has only one, at Bushehr, on its southern Persian Gulf coast. It was started by the Germans before the revolution; the Russians took it over in the mid-nineties, and, after many technical glitches, it joined the national grid in 2012.
But the Bushehr plant only adds to Iran’s credibility problem, because none of the centrifuges at Natanz or Fordo are used for it. Russia provides all the enriched uranium—and takes away all the spent fuel. What’s more, Tehran is at least a generation away from building its own nuclear power plants. And, as the country has developed all these fuel capabilities, the question for the outside world remains: Why, if not to make fuel for a bomb?
Zarif says that Iran has no intention of producing either weapons or weapons-grade fissile material. “We do not consider that to be in our interests, or within our security doctrine,” he says. The country’s one research reactor, supplied by the United States in 1967, is used to produce medical isotopes. In 1968, Iran signed the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons; it claims the use of nuclear energy as its right.
The government also says it needs its own reactors and fuel so that it won’t be held hostage to the politics of suppliers. “If you look at it from the perspective of any other country that has access to all sorts of available fuel in the international market, available medical isotopes in the international market, then you’ll find it very difficult to even justify this from a financial perspective,” Zarif said. “It’s much cheaper to buy most of this stuff on the open market than to produce it. We understand that. But that becomes irrelevant when you do not have access to open markets.” Iran is believed to have spent a hundred billion dollars so far to develop independent nuclear technology.
Iran’s ultimate argument is religion. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has renounced the bomb at least four times since 2003. “We consider developing nuclear weapons as unlawful,” he told nuclear scientists in 2012. “We consider using such weapons a big sin. We also believe that keeping such weapons is futile and dangerous, and we will never go after them. . . . We want to prove to the world that nuclear weapons do not bring about power.”
Despite Iran’s growing capabilities, the Worldwide Threat Assessment report, which reflects consensus among America’s sixteen intelligence agencies, concluded earlier this year that Iran’s rulers had not resolved whether to build a bomb. “We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” James R. Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, said.
Last fall, President Obama predicted that Iran was still “a year or more away” from having all the pieces and skills needed for the final product. That estimate has not changed.
At a farewell party shortly before leaving the U.N., in 2007, Zarif was given a copy of Henry Kissinger’s book “Diplomacy,” a gift arranged by a mutual friend. During Zarif’s five years in New York, he and Kissinger had met, talked, and dined together. “He was intelligent, courteous, disciplined, interesting to talk to,” Kissinger recalled of one dinner. “I conducted the conversation to educate myself, so I did not try to persuade him of any particular approach, except my basic theme was that, on the basis of national interests, there is no conflict between Iran and the United States. Everything beyond that is ideological.”
Kissinger wrote in Zarif’s copy of his book, “To a respected adversary.” The inscription came up at his confirmation hearing, as a retort to criticism of his American ties: “Is it bad if an experienced eighty-year-old diplomat calls a forty-something-year-old child of this revolution a ‘worthy adversary’?”
Any nuclear deal—to defer the Iranian decision to actually make a bomb, to alter the timetable of a breakout, and to insure that the terms stick—will depend as much on Iran’s strategic calculus as on its technical coöperation. Iran now has the requisite scientific knowledge. That knowledge can’t be bombed. A deal that limits centrifuges, cuts back enrichment, converts facilities, curtails research, and increases inspections can go only so far in preventing Iran from eventually developing a weapon. Tehran will ultimately have to decide, Kissinger has noted, whether the Islamic Republic is a country or a cause.
I asked Zarif if he had become a realist, in the Kissinger vein. “Far from it!” he said. “I have very serious theoretical problems with realism.” He went on to acknowledge, however, that his thinking had evolved. “All governments are rational beings—that’s the first premise of realist theory, and I don’t disagree with that,” he told me. “Of course, that doesn’t mean that all government actors, all government officials, are rational beings. . . . But I believe we have gone through a learning process in Iran. We have been exposed to realities, and I’ve learned to adapt to those realities. But it doesn’t mean we have moved away from our principles.”
He went on, “Let’s put it in Kissinger’s terms. More and more people see Iran’s interests are best served if we can find a way that Iran as a cause and Iran as a nation-state will be complementary, rather than in conflict, so that we won’t have to choose.”
Zarif made Iran’s case in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs:
Iran might appear to be negotiating from strength. Its armed forces number half a million, although a good bit of their equipment dates back to the Shah. Tehran has also built a network of surrogates, through the Revolutionary Guards’ élite Quds Force, which has been linked to operations on five continents. Tehran has armed, aided, and abetted some of the region’s most notorious militias (as well as a used-car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas, who was convicted, last year, of a bizarre plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in Washington). After 2001, the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq also bolstered Iran’s position, by ousting two rival regimes on its eastern and western borders. In 2004, Jordan’s King Abdullah fretted about a new Shiite “crescent” radiating from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut.
Yet the most striking impression Iran gives today is its sense of strategic loneliness. The vulnerability is partly a holdover from the Iran-Iraq War, the bloodiest Middle East conflict in modern times and still an obsession more than a quarter century after it ended. Billboards are devoted to portraits of the war dead. Disabled veterans are still dying from exposure to mustard gas. Other veterans are among Iran’s most hard-line politicians.
Iran has a minority mentality, too. Most Iranians are Shiites, a fraction of the Islamic world. Most are ethnic minorities distinct from their neighbors. Iranians have historically viewed themselves as exceptional in the region. In the early sixteenth century, the Safavid dynasty converted the country, en masse, from Sunni to Shiite Islam, in order to keep Persians distinct from the neighboring Ottomans. It was a political, not a religious, decision. Iran’s modern revolution has made it an ideological exception as well. Iran is the world’s only constitutional theocracy, and the only place in Islam’s fourteen centuries where clerics have ruled a state. For the past thirty-five years, Iranians have also felt exceptional—and exempt from international norms—because of the country’s claim to sacredness.
This sentiment is ingrained in Iran’s current policies. “Iran is not in any sort of routine groupings,” Zarif said. “It’s not an Arab country. It’s not part of the Indian subcontinent. So it’s in a neighborhood where it has some unique characteristics. We are a country which embraced Islam, learned Arabic, but didn’t change its language or its culture. . . . That’s what keeps us unique.”
As a result, Iran’s relationships are largely tactical—enemies of enemies are friends, despite differences. Syria, the region’s most secular state, is at the top of that list. Apart from Lebanon’s Shiites, a relationship dating to Persia’s Shiite conversion, Iran’s ties with many regional players shift with time and circumstances.
“Iran is a lonely country and a lone country,” Abbas Maleki, the deputy director of the Center for Strategic Research, a think tank led by Rouhani before he became President, told me. “We have no strategic alliances.”
President Obama has spent more time thinking about Iran than about any other foreign-policy issue. In both 2008 and 2012, Obama campaigned on attempting diplomacy with Tehran. He has written to its Supreme Leader and to its President. And, last year, he authorized a secret channel, in Oman, that seeded the current public talks. “It’s as big a priority as we have in our foreign policy,” his deputy national-security adviser, Ben Rhodes, told me.
Iran has been the bane of all six American Presidents since the revolution. But Obama believes that dealing with Tehran is a historic opportunity and a necessity. “A nuclear deal does so many things at once,” Rhodes explained, in his windowless office, in the West Wing of the White House. “It would likely assure that this is the first Administration since the Cold War that didn’t see a new nuclear-weapons state emerge. It would be the most significant non-proliferation event in many years. It would prevent a military conflict. And it could potentially open the door to a different type of relationship between the United States and Iran that, in our view, could be very healthy for the region.”
Obama believes that, for the first time since the revolution, Washington and Tehran are both willing to try—at the same time. Iran is feeling the pressure of economic sanctions, imposed in four U.N. resolutions since 2006, and more harshly by the United States and the European Union since 2012. Its oil sales have plummeted by sixty per cent in the past three years; so has the value of its currency. Separate banking restrictions have cut many Iranian financial institutions—and a lot of domestic commerce—off from global trade. Tehran can’t get access to more than a hundred billion dollars of its oil revenues, which are stranded abroad.
Ahmadinejad’s gross mismanagement of the economy exacerbated the crisis. Billions were poured into housing projects that proved unlivable. Two hundred thousand units ended up without water, gas, or access to a sewage system. The government ordered loans to be granted at interest rates below inflation. Cash payouts designed to compensate the poor for increasing fuel and food prices backfired; subsidies were doled out to almost everyone, and the government ended up paying out more than it gained from higher prices. The Western diplomat called it “voodoo economics.” During Ahmadinejad’s last year in office, inflation exceeded forty per cent, and his government was charged by the country’s judiciary with the worst corruption since the revolution. The Islamic Republic is now widely perceived to have failed the mostazafin, the oppressed and disinherited in whose name the revolution was carried out. “When a system implodes from inside, no bomb can save it,” Amir Mohebbian, a conservative Tehran columnist, told me.
Anger and alienation created diplomatic opportunity. “We have an actual mandate for Rouhani to govern in a different way and to conduct foreign policy in a different way,” Rhodes said. “There is a constituency that now has some degree of power in the Iranian system, that really wants to climb out of this isolation, and is willing to do things that they didn’t previously do.” He added, “We believe that it is real. . . . We are willing to take the risks to get a deal.”
But he also said, “We don’t know how far this can go—both on the nuclear issue and on the broader relationship. . . . They’ve got to decide whether we’re the Great Satan or whether we are their ticket into the community of nations.”
If a nuclear deal is the centerpiece of Obama’s strategy, just as important, long-term, Rhodes said, is the mere act of diplomacy—learning how to talk to Iran again. “There’s nothing inherent in Iran that suggests that they need to be seen as part of the Axis of Evil,” he said, referring to George W. Bush’s lumping Iran with Iraq and North Korea, in 2002. “There are attributes to the Iranian people that suggest that they could have a better relationship with us, that there is a sophistication to the Iranian people that is more evident in Rouhani and Zarif than in some of the other—well, than Ahmadinejad, to put it one way.”
Most of the nuclear talks, except for the opening and closing plenaries, are held at Vienna’s Palais Coburg, nicknamed the Spargelburg, or Castle of Asparagus, for its leggy neoclassical columns. The delegations meet in a gilded ballroom; they sit around three sides of a square. Baroness Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, sits at the top. The lead negotiators from the six major powers sit on one side, the Iranian delegation on the other.
The six major powers are nominally equal partners, but the Americans have more sway, since they introduced and effectively control most of the sanctions. So the pivotal exchanges are bilateral meetings between the Americans and the Iranians in hallways or staff suites.
“It is professional. It is respectful. It is quite substantive,” said Wendy Sherman, the State Department’s Under-Secretary for Political Affairs, who is the lead American negotiator. “I believe the intent is there.”
The six major powers dine together, with wine. The Iranians hold themselves apart, taking meals, without wine, in the room next door. Yet a familiarity has evolved since the first Zarif-Kerry meeting, last fall. Sherman was pleasantly surprised when an Iranian envoy congratulated her on becoming a first-time grandparent. She now knows about impending weddings in families of the Iranian mediators. In March, Zarif brought his wife, Maryam, and introduced her to Sherman and Ashton.
“Anytime one can understand that the person sitting across from you—besides being, perhaps, at times an adversary and at times a negotiator—is also a person is useful,” Sherman told me. “So we do call each other by our first names. We do know about each other’s families.” In between the monthly sessions, she said, they are often in contact by e-mail or telephone. “What happens now, which is useful, is when there is a concern it gets raised up pretty quickly, doesn’t have to wait for the next round,” she said. “We try to resolve it.”
The gaps are still huge. No progress was made in talks last week, all sides conceded. On Friday, the State Department’s deputy spokesperson, Marie Harf, told me, from Vienna, “It’s a tough moment, but we knew there would be tough moments.” Among many things, Iran has demanded the right to enrich uranium, with at least fifty thousand centrifuges, and it wants the sanctions lifted. The United States, among its many demands, wants to limit enrichment and to convert or close Iran’s nuclear sites, with intrusive inspections that will extend for years, even decades. Sherman compared finding creative compromises to solving a Rubik’s Cube. “This is not all linear—this is about a package,” she explained. “There are two objectives for this negotiation. One, that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon. And, two, that the international community has the assurance it needs that any nuclear program Iran has is exclusively peaceful. There are many paths to that.” She added, “But no deal is better than a bad deal.”
Skeptics aren’t convinced. “It’s a game,” Gerecht, the former intelligence officer, said. “American officials are being sucker-punched by Mr. Zarif.”
The toughest critics are in Congress, which may have the final word if a deal requires revoking sanctions legislation. “In my view, the Iranians are negotiating in bad faith, as we have seen them do in the past,” Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, told the Senate in February. “Iran’s strategy, consistent with their past approaches that have brought them to a nuclear threshold state, is to use these negotiations to mothball its nuclear infrastructure program just long enough to undo the international sanctions regime.” Menendez co-sponsored a bill, with Republican Mark Kirk, of Illinois, that would introduce new sanctions in the midst of diplomacy to increase pressure on Iran. It ultimately had fifty-nine co-sponsors.
To persuade critics, Obama will have to insure that the breakout time for Iran to produce sufficient nuclear material for a single bomb is pushed back from two months to a year or more, Gary Samore, who served as the White House Coördinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction during Obama’s first term, said. Samore is now the president of United Against Nuclear Iran. The United States has to build in enough time to detect, and respond, should Tehran secretly weaponize its knowledge. Even then, he added, Iran could covertly build a new facility.
The politics of engagement are even more suspect, Samore said. He pointed out that Iran’s new President was the country’s national-security adviser for sixteen years, when Iran made the greatest progress in its nuclear program. “Rouhani—like Iran’s political élite—has bought into and pursued the creation of a nuclear option for twenty-five years. He’s not a ban-the-bomb kind of guy,” Samore said. “If you look at the history of Iran, betting on the reformers is not a good bet. Historically, they have not done well.”
In any case, Ayatollah Khamenei has the last word. Iran also has a deep state among intelligence and security forces that have steadily amassed political and economic power in the past quarter century, partly as payback for fighting the gruesome war with Iraq. Hard-liners do not want a deal, for fear of losing their political edge and, in turn, their economic perks, said Hamidreza Jalaeipour, whose six independent newspapers were shut down by the hard-line judiciary. “If this nuclear deal is made, there will be no place for those hard-liners,” he told me. “They know a deal will bring moderates to power.” Khamenei is also wary of any agreement involving the United States, for fear that it will trigger perestroika-like openings that ultimately unravel the Islamic Republic. The 2009 uprising was a close call.
I asked Zarif what role Khamenei is playing in Iran’s internal debate over nuclear diplomacy. “We give him as honest an opinion and as honest a description of what’s happening as possible,” he told me. “Sometimes he believes it is not necessary for him to intervene in every detail. And sometimes he has shown that he is prepared to spend a lot of time on very small details.
“It’s interesting if you look at the way the Supreme Leader operates,” he continued. “He tries to reflect what he sees as the consensus emerging within the political élite, as well as within the general society. Not the noise. He can differentiate. I mean, if he was going to be moved by the noise, I would have been dead a long time ago!”
The nuclear negotiations have already benefitted Iran. Since the interim deal, in November, Zarif has hosted delegations from Greece, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Britain, Ireland, Mexico, Austria, Poland, Singapore, and other countries. In November, France delayed the interim deal with new language at the eleventh hour, surprising the five other major powers and Iran. But France was also the first Western country to send a delegation, in February, of more than a hundred businesspeople—from energy, automobile, telecommunications, and engineering companies—to discuss future investment. Lady Ashton visited Tehran in March to talk about improving relations with the European Union. Other visits are booked.
None of these countries can legally do deals until sanctions are eased, and without jeopardizing business with the United States. But, as the Western diplomat told me, “Iran is one of the last gold mines on earth. Everyone wants to get back in here.”
Zarif is leaning as far out on a ledge as possible without falling, the diplomat explained. “Zarif faces serious limits. He is too brilliant for the system. He’s dealing with foreigners in English. The hard-liners spent their youth at the war front; Zarif never went to the front. He was studying in the United States. So he’s someone who will never be trusted one hundred per cent, even if he does have the ear of the Supreme Leader. Which I think he does.”
I asked Zarif what a nuclear deal might mean for the two countries in which he has divided his life. “The United States—as President Obama very rightly said—has tried all other options which were on the table or off the table,” he answered. “And the only option that’s left is to try to reach an understanding, which was probably the most sensible option to begin with. But there is a saying—that we diplomats always choose the right approach after we have tried all the wrong ones.” The new diplomacy, he said, is now “the only game in town. And I think, if we play it right, it will change the course of Iran’s relations with the West.”
The nuclear diplomacy has “broken the ice,” he said. “We have broken the vicious cycle of trying to hurt one another, which was the case for the past ten years.” But he also said that he did not see a future in which the two countries would again be “buddies,” pillars of each other’s policy. Iran is more likely to develop relations with Europe on issues of mutual concern. “In the longer perspective,” he said, he foresaw “probably managed differences with the United States, and the possibility for greater understanding.”
He stopped himself. “I gotta be careful,” he said. “I want to take one step at a time. I don’t want to predict a future that, in and of itself, becomes an impediment to achieving it.” ♦
