Staving off ‘doomsday’: As America barks and Europe drifts, Iran’s nuclear programme and belligerence grow

The Europeans are arguing with the Russians and the Chinese, but are also squabbling among themselves over how to deal with Iran. The Americans are hectoring everyone. France and Germany worry about London breaking ranks and joining Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, a move which would destroy faltering efforts to salvage the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal forged over years of diplomacy and actively being sabotaged by the United States.

Meanwhile, day by day, Iran’s nuclear programme grows. Last weekend Iran surpassed the threshold of 1,200kg of stockpiled reactor-grade uranium which, if Tehran were to make a headlong rush towards weaponisation, could be used to fuel a single nuclear warhead.

“Iran is increasing its stockpile of enriched uranium with full speed,” Ali Asghar Zarean, an Iranian atomic energy official, boasted last weekend.

Though the threat of an all-out war has receded following the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani and retaliatory airstrikes on a US airbase in Iraq, experts and diplomats say the crisis between Washington and Tehran is far from over.

The situation remains fraught with many dangers, a potentially explosive slow-burning crisis which could eventually overshadow all others.

“There’s a consensus that we want things to cool down a bit,” a senior European foreign policy official tells The Independent. “We may end up in a doomsday scenario, but we’re not there yet. We’re trying to avoid that.”

Indeed, as bad as the situation with Iran is, it could easily get far worse. The potential sources of friction between Washington and Tehran and their respective allies are many.

Iranian-backed forces and allies in Syria are conquering Idlib province in an unrelenting offensive that has “appalled and horrified” Washington, James Jeffrey, US Syria and Isis envoy, told reporters on Thursday.

In Yemen, Iranian-allied Houthi fighters are holding their own against US-backed Saudi forces and their local allies. And in Iraq and Lebanon, Iran’s allies are suppressing protests tacitly supported by Washington.

Iranian lawmakers and officials, insisting they are being backed into a corner, are also increasingly warning they could leave the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the five-decades-old agreement by which countries forego atomic weapons in exchange for access to peaceful nuclear technology. Western diplomats are not taking the threat lightly.

“If this is escalated, exiting the NPT would be one of their options,” the European official says. “They could go down the path of North Korea. We’re not not sure if they would; they could just be trying to build leverage. But I don’t think we want to find out if this is a bluff or not.”

Donald Trump’s 2018 move to exit the JCPOA and reimpose sanctions sparked the ballooning crisis. The administration’s scheme, peddled by a narrow coterie of Washington hawks who have the president’s ear, was meant to strangle the Iranian economy, impose limits on Iran’s nuclear programme, starve its overseas paramilitary operations and missile programme of funds, and force Iran back into negotiations for a better, broader deal.

But the plan appears to have so far failed on all counts.

Iran has demanded that US sanctions are removed before talks reopen.

After an initial free-fall following the resumption of sanctions, Iran’s currency has stabilised, its stock market is up 138 per cent since the beginning of the Iranian calendar year last March, and there are indications that China is surreptitiously buying increasing quantities of Iran’s oil, the mainstay of its economy, according to experts.

Arguing that Europeans are not moving fast enough to offer Tehran economic incentives to stick to the deal, Iran has begun to steadily break its JCPOA commitments, increasing the number of centrifuges it spins and breaking through limits on fuel stockpiles.

“Iran’s ‘breakout time’ – the amount of time it would take for Iran to assemble enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon after a decision to do so – is now below the one-year timeframe that the JCPOA was designed to maintain,” said a note issued this week by the Soufan Group, an intelligence and risk-management consultancy.

The American withdrawal from the JCPOA has also triggered a cycle of ever-escalating threats and armed confrontations between Iran and the US.

Last summer Iran downed a pricey US drone along the northern shores of the Persian Gulf and allegedly attacked oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, while it or its Yemeni allies launched a devastating and complex drone attack on Saudi oil facilities.

This year the US assassinated Soleimani as he was departing the international airport in Baghdad, and Iran retaliated on 8 January by launching airstrikes on a US base in Iraq, injuring at least 50 service people, 19 of whom were so badly hurt they had still not been returned to active duty by last week.

For months, European officials had been counting on Emmanuel Macron, the French president, to lay on the charm and talk some sense into Mr Trump and Hassan ​Rouhani, the Iranian president. That approach was a flop. Now they are pinning their hopes on Boris Johnson, who shares some of the same populist attributes. But few are hopeful he can achieve much.

More plausible is the possibility of waiting for Mr Trump to lose the US election in November, and for Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren to return to the deal come 20 January 2021.

“At the moment we’re at a stalemate,” says Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The diplomatic initiatives are focused on damage limitation rather than any sort of political breakthrough. The best we can hope for with the multiple tracks of diplomacy is that you extend the cooling off period before the next round of escalation.”

Iran watchers and Persian Gulf security experts believe another military confrontation between Iran and the US is likely. Despite Mr Trump’s promise to “end the endless wars”, the US has increased its military presence in the Middle East by more than 13,000 troops.

Iran is doing little to ease tensions, matching every American provocation with its own.

It recently conducted its first-ever joint military exercises with China and Russia. It is also reportedly preparing fresh satellite launches with rockets that non-proliferation experts believe could be trial runs for intercontinental delivery systems.

Overwhelmed by Brexit, and international crises from Libya to Ukraine, European leaders and foreign services have little capacity to deal with the burgeoning crisis between Tehran and Washington. But they know they must.

Talks with Iranian officials over the country’s missile programme and regional deployment of armed forces, have become more intermittent, and have reached a dead end. But in some ways, dialogue with Washington has become as futile, as the complicated dynamic of the 2020 election cycle enters the fray.

More than three years into the Trump administration, most European leaders still don’t act or speak as if they understand how dangerously adrift and incoherent US foreign policy has become, especially on matters pertaining to Iran.

In part, they’ve never encountered a US leader who fails to abide by conventional American tenets of national interest, and who appears only concerned with his own political and financial wellbeing.

“The Trump administration has no idea what it’s doing,” says Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear non-proliferation expert and former US defence official who now teaches at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.

“They have a strategy that I believe is entirely domestic,” says Mr Lewis, who is a vocal supporter of the JCPOA. “It’s all about talking tough for a US audience. They repeat ‘maximum pressure’ like it’s some kind of mantra.”

Mr Lewis says the strategy appears to be designed by Washington hawks with the aim of triggering a war that could lead to regime change in Tehran.

“But the president doesn’t want a war,” he says. “In fact, the only underlying principle of the Iran policy is that Trump truly doesn’t want a war with Iran.”

Worried about Iran’s expanding nuclear programme, the UK, France and Germany, the so-called E3, last month triggered a dispute-resolution mechanism in the JCPOA that could bring Iran before the United Nations Security Council and effectively torpedo the deal for good.

The Trump administration had been pressuring UK and European diplomats for months to invoke the measure, threatening to slap 20 per cent tariffs on their automobile exports to the US if they did not. But they were inclined to do so anyway, in part to maintain their credibility in the face of Iran’s increasing belligerence, but also because of their own lack of remaining options and diplomatic channels.

Adding to the complications are cracks within the ranks of the JCPOA’s remaining supporters. Moscow and Beijing are adopting the Iranian position that the dispute-resolution mechanism should first address the reimposition of US sanctions. There are questions about the UK’s post-Brexit stance on the JCPOA. After 31 January, does the E3 still exist?

“The E3 is a group of EU member states but formally and institutionally independent from the European Union,” says one EU official. “So it boils down to the future intentions of the individual member states.”

There is also some confusion as to what the dispute mechanism actually is.

“There are differences of views as to what we’re triggering,” the European official continues. “There’s an aim to establish common ground. No one wants a rush towards additional steps.”