Why Washington needs to open its eyes to Iran's intentions

Barack Obama does not like to back his diplomacy with military force. He believes there should be a clear sequence of engagement: diplomacy, sanctions, more diplomacy, perhaps more sanctions, and only after all peaceful alternatives are exhausted, the possibility of force. Even then, the administration is loath to entertain such hypotheticals.

This explains why economic sanctions are now the default instrument of American coercive statecraft for confronting challenges to the international order. When Russia invaded Crimea in February, Mr Obama turned to his "favourite non-combatant command" at the US Treasury Department to design targeted sanctions to increase the costs of Russian revanchism.

Financial warfare has become the weapon of choice against Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Syria's Bashar al-Assad, as these men threaten to unwind the nuclear non-proliferation regime and turn Syria into even more of a slaughterhouse.

Iran's sanctions were particularly important to Mr Obama. An American-imposed economic minefield, which both US Congress and the administration deserve credit for developing, persuaded Tehran to engage in more serious nuclear negotiations, leading to an interim nuclear agreement reached in January in Geneva, and more nuclear talks in Vienna this past week.

American officials are now brimming with optimism about the possibility of a final nuclear deal before the summer, based on a complicated technical compromise that will likely permit Iran to retain essential elements of its military-nuclear infrastructure.

Confident that a deal is nigh, Washington has gone from "disclose and dismantle" - insisting that Iran come clean on its military-nuclear activities, coupled with demands to dismantle its military-nuclear infrastructure - to "defer and deter."

This new approach involves punting on some of the tougher issues, such as demands for full disclosure on past nuclear weaponisation activities, and relying heavily on weapons inspectors to stop the regime from achieving its decades-long ambition to build a nuclear bomb.

Meanwhile, however, America's nuclear negotiating partners are splintering. The French, who would undoubtedly like a deal, are quite familiar with Iranian nuclear mendacity. They are much less confident that a technical algorithm can solve what is essentially a strategic problem. They rightly believe that if Iran refuses to come clean on its past nuclear weaponisation activities, there can be no confidence in any Iranian commitments in the future.

The Russians, smarting over US sanctions on scores of Putin's cronies over Ukraine, are reportedly negotiating a massive sanctions busting-deal with Tehran involving the transfer of Iranian oil to Moscow (akin to sending coal to Newcastle) in exchange for Russian military equipment. The Chinese and Germans, for their part, want to look past the current nuclear standoff and get back to their Iranian business ventures.

David Cameron's government, which continues to tack to the left of even the Obama administration on Iran issues, seems content to take a nuclear backseat after its embarrassing failure to rally parliament behind forceful action in Syria last September. Not that anyone blames Mr Cameron after President Obama's own walk-back from military strikes when Assad crossed the chemical redline.

What explains this splintering?

Among other things, it's the White House's panic attack about a recent bipartisan Senate bill mandating more sanctions if the nuclear talks fail or Tehran engages in further terrorism. Iran threatened to walk away from negotiations if the bill moved forward and Mr Obama, anxious to keep Tehran at the table, turned his fire on Senators, including from his own party, for undermining diplomacy and risking war. This anxiety, however, tells everyone, including Iran's Supreme Leader, that Mr Obama is not serious about backing up his diplomacy with real teeth.

But it doesn't end there. Mr Obama also downplays the sanctions relief he's offered to Tehran. Shouldn't one always overvalue the concessions one offers when bargaining? By contrast, Iran's negotiators understand the wisdom of undervaluing their relief package, so that they can ask for more at the end of the first six-month period of the Geneva interim deal, which is set to expire in July.

According to a new IMF report, thanks to de-escalating sanctions, Iran is also experiencing a modest albeit fragile economic recovery, which the Obama administration is loath to admit. Tehran's reprieve from what could have been a more severe sanctions-induced economic crisis (thanks to the de-escalation of sanctions pressure since the first half of 2013) has given the Iranian regime some breathing room.

Despite Mr Obama's claim that he can turn sanctions pressure on and off like "dials," even a modest recovery reduces US negotiating leverage. That leverage is eroding further as international companies test the bounds of Western sanctions relief.

As Juan Zarate, a former Treasury official, warned, "single-mindedly fixated on getting a deal at all costs," can too quickly reduce critical financial leverage without understanding that it can be "impossible to put the genie fully back into the bottle," once sanctions-induced pressure is relieved.

Tehran senses a desire in Washington for a deal at all costs and is pushing its advantage through negotiations to retain enough of its nuclear achievements for an atomic weapon at a time of its choosing. If the president believes that no deal is better than a bad deal, and he has assured the world that he does, then he needs to begin seeing diplomacy as a mailed fist.

Mark Dubowitz is executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and leads FDD's projects on sanctions and nonproliferation.