The deal to watch is in Baghdad, not Vienna

By Ali Ahmadi

The Cradle

Forget the JCPOA impasse in Vienna. The Saudi–Iran dialogue in Baghdad is the greatest hope for clearing the underbrush beneath the Iran–US relationship.

With the election of conservative Ebrahim Raisi as President of Iran, there appears to be a new shadow over the prospects of future Iran–US diplomacy. The negotiations in Vienna about the US re-entering the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), continue, and are said to be near a positive outcome. But beyond nuclear diplomacy, many outstanding issues remain between the two countries, and in the opinion of some, the prospect of further Iran–US diplomatic conflict resolution seems to have dimmed with the consolidation of power by conservatives in Tehran.

There has long been strident opposition in Tehran to the idea of negotiating with Western powers over regional security and Iran’s missile program. The new Biden administration certainly wants more concessions from Iran, but it’s unclear if they desire real engagement. If they did, they would have at the very least removed the sanctions designation against Iran’s top diplomat. What seems definite is that, even before the election of Raisi, the shine on the nuclear deal had dulled. In 2015, the deal held the hope of transformative change in the relationship between Washington and Tehran. Now it’s seen as a realist exercise, an intermission in between phases of security competition that alters the rules a bit.

The real promise for the region, and perhaps for US–Iran diplomacy, is not in Vienna, but in Baghdad. Iranian and Saudi officials have been meeting for many months to discuss security issues in sessions facilitated by the Iraqi government. The struggling government of Prime Minister Mustafa Kadhimi believes that progress between the two sides will have security dividends for Iraq, and clearly wishes to portray Baghdad as the place where the region’s forces, powers and ideologies come to mete out their differences peacefully rather than where they come to clash.

Why now?

Iranian officials have long maintained that they wish to engage their Saudi counterparts and re-establish diplomatic connections that were severed in 2016. Iranian diplomats have said that they have approached their Saudi counterparts in the hopes of initiating talks. They say they were received warmly by the Saudis but were ultimately rebuffed. More security-minded Iranian officials feel this is an appropriate time to engage Saudi Arabia, as they believe they have the upper hand in many of the conflicts around the region and would be negotiating from a position of strength.

Saudi Arabia has for several years eschewed engagement with Iran and supported Trump’s maximum pressure campaign. For Riyadh and its Crown Prince, the last four years have been an opportunity to take a dominant position in the region’s security affairs behind the strong support from the Trump administration and its European allies. But as the term of the Trump administration was ending, those ambitions had not been realized and its interests were arguably more at peril than ever.

The key for Saudi Arabia was that the US did not retaliate on its behalf when its oil facilities came under assault by what it contends were Iranian missiles and drones. The US did retaliate against Iran when it was attacked directly, but not when the Saudis were. The specter of Washington not rushing to the aid of Saudi Arabia at what seems like the high watermark of American support for the Kingdom has brought the Saudis to seek a modus vivendi with Iran.

Raisi and his role

These talks clearly have the support of Iran’s foreign policy establishment in general and have even been formally acknowledged by Iran’s foreign ministry – giving them a modicum of officialdom. Raisi is unlikely to challenge this trend. For one, he argued during the campaign that Iran’s relationship with its neighbors will be his top priority and reinforced that message during a post-election press conference. But, more importantly, his influence on foreign policy will likely be limited, especially regarding regional affairs. Iran’s foreign policy decision-making apparatus is complex. The Supreme Leader is the key decision-maker who sits atop a foreign policy whose framework is designed by the Supreme National Security Council, a consultative body made up of stakeholders from the various branches of government and the military. This gives Iranian foreign policy a certain amount of stability, at least at a framework level.

The Presidency is extremely important as he is a key feature of this consultative process but also because of the role of the executive branch as foreign policy entrepreneur and executor. It is certainly possible that Raisi would take on a harder line on certain details simply to distinguish himself from the previous administration, but that is more likely to be seen in the context of the nuclear deal issue with the West. He ran as a close confidante of the Supreme Leader and is unlikely to demand substantive changes to the current path of Iranian foreign policy in the immediate term.

Also of note is that for many in Tehran, West Asian issues are security policy, not diplomatic policy. This means it is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp, not the Foreign Ministry, that takes the lead. This has been a significant source of consternation in decision-making circles. Outgoing Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has complained about this issue on numerous occasions and even once threatened to resign, largely over this issue. The new administration is unlikely to challenge that status quo at first, if at all. This means the real question regarding the effect Raisi will have on Iranian foreign policy is not what he thinks but rather what role does he actually have? This bodes well for both the nuclear deal implementation and engagement in the region, as there seems to be a brittle consensus among all other stakeholders regarding those issues.

Iran and the US

In Washington, the idea of the US and Iran cooperating on security issues in West Asia is typically framed as a scenario where the US government exchanges further sanction relief for Iran abandoning its regional alliance network that would leave vacuums that the US and its allies can fill. This was never realistic. Over the last 40 years, the United States has mounted a largely successful campaign to deny Iran any state-level allies. Iran’s cooperation with non-state allies and the Syrian government during its civil war is part of how it overcomes that deficit. This yields a strategic depth that, along with its missile program, is the centerpiece of Iran’s regional security strategy. From Tehran’s standpoint, such a trade-off would place Iran’s own security in significant peril against emboldened foes in a way that no economic concession can justify. As scholars have argued for decades, countries targeted by sanctions are unlikely to make concessions when they see the sanctioning country’s demands as either unacceptable to their national security interests or when it is likely to undermine their position of the target country in future rounds of security competition with the sender.

But Iran and Saudi Arabia engaging in some deconfliction should also address various differences between Tehran and Washington as well. US intentions in the region have been a subject of controversy and accusations of hegemony-seeking behavior for decades. But recent initiatives by the Biden administration to move military assets out of the region – in order to facilitate a more aggressive posture in the Far East in line with “great power competition” and their much-advertised intention to de-emphasize West Asia in US foreign policy – means lower tension in the region could provide the US with an opportunity for a graceful exit. In fact, one report characterized the Iran–Saudi dialogue in Baghdad as being, at least in part, “indirect US–Iranian talks” as well. This would not mean that the US will disappear from the region but that its much smaller footprint and vastly diminished Central Command operational capacities will advance both Washington’s desire to pivot towards China and Iran’s desire to limit US interference in its backyard.

What the West can do to support dialogue between Iran and Saudi Arabia is to incentivize progress and maintain contacts in the hopes of playing a more concrete role regarding individual conflicts. Various international stakeholder groups have been assembled to deal with conflicts in Syria and Yemen. They have been denied real progress so far, but the new dynamic between Iran and Saudi Arabia can change that. A somewhat ideal configuration of interactions may be increasingly official and comprehensive interactions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, regular but largely unofficial consultations with the European Union and Washington, and more formal Western engagement with regard to individual conflicts. Critical to stabilizing the region will be the departure of American occupying troops from northern Syria and the lifting of the US-backed, medieval siege on Yemen that has caused the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.

It is worth noting here that progress is likely to be glacial. There is much mistrust and animosity, and both sides are likely to worry that concessions may make them seem untrustworthy to their regional allies. Saudi Arabia’s main issue of concern is Yemen, but despite the Houthis regularly being referred to as ‘Iranian proxies’ in the Western press, Iran does not exercise command-and-control influence over them. The ideal outcome of the Baghdad dialogues is for the two countries to re-establish their diplomatic ties and for them to develop a healthy understanding of each other’s legitimate security needs that could clear a path to more constructive discourse on specific regional conflicts. This is the greatest hope for improvement in the region as well as for clearing the underbrush beneath the Iran–US relationship.