[Salon] The JCPOA revival: Iran seeks to maintain the status quo

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

The JCPOA revival: Iran seeks to maintain the status quo

Summary:  Iran is seeking to maintain its successful asymmetric warfare advantages by attempting to secure a continuation of the status quo in Vienna, happy to trade short-term acquisition of nuclear weaponry for relief from sanctions and continued progress with its programme of regional interventions.  With the United States pulling back, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are preparing themselves to be able to disrupt that status quo should it threaten them.

We thank Arab Digest member Jonathan Campbell-James for today’s newsletter.

The outcome of the Joint Commission nuclear talks in Vienna, aimed at resuscitating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), hangs in the balance. As it stands, both parties seem to believe that progress is being made, but it would be a brave pundit who would make any prognosis of an outcome, which no doubt would be immediately contradicted by events.

Iranians pride themselves on being accomplished and skilful strategists.  In the run-up to the talks in Vienna, brought on by the result of the US presidential election and President Biden’s desire to revive the JCPOA, as well as in the progress of the talks in Vienna so far, it seems clear that Iran is seeking to reinstate the previous agreement, without expanding its scope to include either missile matters or regional expansionism.  The only difference they seem prepared to countenance is an extension of the life of the agreement.  Their goal seems broadly to maintain the security status quo while securing the lifting of sanctions, the economic effects of which threaten regime security.

The head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Hossein Salami (R) watching a launch of missiles during a military drill in an unknown location in central Iran, January 15, 2021 (photo credit: IRGC)

Implicit in this aim is a recognition that a revived JCPOA might slow Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weaponry, albeit this has to be balanced by two factors well explained by Durham University’s Professor Anoushiravan Etheshami in his recently published Defending Iran:  From Revolutionary Guards to Ballistic Missiles. Professor Etheshami argues that acquisition of nuclear weapons is not necessarily Iran’s foremost defence priority, and Iran appears to have made considerable progress towards achieving this goal anyway during the interregnum of the JCPOA;  on the way to enriching a stock of plutonium to the 90% purity necessary to build an arsenal of five nuclear weapons, Iran is now advertising it is targeting 60% purity levels.

Perhaps a better reason for securing the status quo is the understanding that in the prevailing circumstances, Iran’s armed forces and their military proxies in the Axis of Resistance (Tehran/Assad regime/Hezbollah) enjoy an advantage which they would not enjoy should the confrontation between Iran and its enemies go hot or take on another form.  The IRGC’s Quds Force has patiently built substantial  influence in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and there are other targets in their sights.  Despite some reverses of late, the Axis of Resistance strategy, coupled with difficult-to-attribute drone attacks, rolls onwards, with this Forward Defence policy in effect taking Iran’s battle with its adversaries onto territory far from home, pushing away the prospect of confrontation on its own direct borders. Indeed, the instinctive impulse in Iran to avoid direct cross-frontier threats to national security and regime survival, as experienced during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, is very strong, and Forward Defence has worked well in achieving this.

Should confrontation take on a different character, Iranian defensive weakness would be cruelly exposed.

In the air, the bulk of the Iranian Air Force fighter force is about forty years old, suffers acute spare parts shortages, and is technically and numerically hugely outgunned, probably two to five, by the air forces of Saudi Arabia and the UAE – which are combat-proven, still growing and are maintaining their decisive advantages in leading-edge weaponry and avionics systems.  The imbalance is stark, and overwhelming if one was to include US Air Force assets in any contest as well.

At sea, swarms of IRGC speed boats and jet skis pose a threat to shipping in the Gulf if nobody is engaging them, but their asymmetric advantage disappears when a shooting war starts.  The peculiarly accident-prone Iranian Navy, which has lost three major vessels to accidents and mishaps in the last three years, might have some surprises in store, particularly in the form of their missile-capable light submarine fleet, but in a conventional war this threat would be eliminated rapidly.

On land, Iran’s ground forces are numerically far superior to those of the GCC combined, but if a ground war every developed, difficult to conceive of in current circumstances, then it comes with the risk that regime cohesion will be threatened, with rebellious provinces such as Khuzestan, Sistan Baluchistan and the Kurdish North West which can be kept in check in peacetime likely to take advantage of the chaos.

Finally,  Iran’s ballistic missile fleet and drones:  substantial and well-protected, if ever Iran chose to use this capability en masse, then it would need to penetrate Saudi Arabia’s anti-ballistic shield – the most practiced such capability in the world - as well as withstand counter attack by Saudi Arabia’s own very substantial fleet of Chinese DF-3 (CSS-2), DF-21s (CSS-5), and probably a third as yet unidentified system.  Nor could Iranian use of their ballistic missile capability escape drawing into the conflict the United States, with its capability both to detect and destroy even the deepest underground facilities.

So on balance, while Iran’s use of asymmetric warfare techniques and its Forward Defence strategy works well in less-than-open-warfare scenarios, should a conventional war break out then the balance of advantage switches dramatically.  The Iranian negotiators have every reason therefore to try and maintain the existing status quo, in the limited circumstances of which they enjoy the advantage.

Similar calculations are also likely to have been made in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, where there is much talk of late about de-escalating tensions with Iran.  But such de-escalation has not as yet involved any sacrifice of major interests, and indeed in Yemen Saudi Arabia has become more explicit recently in its targeting of what it describes as IRGC facilities.  In the meantime, the United Arab Emirates in particular is stepping up its conventional warfare capability, to match and to complement that of Saudi Arabia.  The equipment on the UAE’s shopping list – Rafale, F-35s, MQ-9B Reaper drones and EA-18G Growler electronic counter measures aircraft – are just what one would need to conduct offensive operations over Iran, without necessarily any overt dependency on the Americans.

A successful outcome in Vienna may therefore postpone a potential nuclear Armageddon, but will still leave the Gulf with an intractable security problem – unless wider regional issues and ambitions can also be reconciled through diplomacy.

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