An undue frostiness greets Iran

If hawks could crow, that would be the baleful sound from exultant hardliners on both sides of the stand-off over Iran’s nuclear programme. The third round of negotiations over the Islamic republic’s ambiguous nuclear ambitions ended this weekend in the shadow of a spectre from the past — the crisis triggered when radical students took hostage 52 Americans at the US embassy in Tehran after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Washington is denying a visa to Hamid Abu Talebi, the former Iranian ambassador to the EU who Tehran has named as its next ambassador to the UN, because he played a cameo role as an interpreter in the hostage saga. The US Congress, where both houses unanimously endorsed a law enabling this veto, is cock-a-hoop. So too, it would appear, is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the theocracy’s enforcer and international spearhead.

Another fillip for the rejectionists are the reports that Russia — notionally part of the six powers (along with the US, Britain, France, Germany and China) seeking a diplomatic outcome to the Iranian nuclear controversy that forestalls war — is carpet-trading a barter deal of oil for imports worth up to $20 billion (Dh73.4 billion) with Tehran. This risks eroding the sanctions that brought Tehran to the table, even if the architecture of the embargo is still in place.

The potential rewards of securing a rapprochement with Iran are so great that none of this is enough to derail it. But even after the euphoria of late November’s interim agreement, a nuclear deal is no foregone conclusion. Unless everyone — including Israel and Saudi Arabia — is persuaded that Iran’s ambitions can be contained and that it is not pursuing an atomic bomb, saboteurs lie in ambush down the road.

But politicians and diplomats who have dealt with Iranian leaders in recent months are convinced they want a deal.

“It is quite striking how they are moving,” says a senior European diplomat with direct knowledge of the talks. “They are the ones giving this momentum [because] for them it’s a game-changer.”

A prominent Iranian ally in the region says: “They are entirely focused on this”, and that there will be much else to discuss if a nuclear deal becomes, as both sides cautiously anticipate, the catalyst for wider understanding over regional conflicts such as Syria and Iraq.

With the replacement as president of the mercurial Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by the urbane Hassan Rouhani, the era of Iranian leaders as pantomime villains may be at an end. But still there is the stern and ostensibly unbending Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who outranks them all, backing the negotiations but warning they “will not stop or slow down any of Iran’s activities in nuclear research and development”.

Yet, amid the bombast, there have been enough ifs and buts to hint that Ayatollah Khamenei may be preparing to emulate his predecessor, the Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, who likened his decision to sign an armistice in the 1980-88 war with Iraq to “drinking from a poisoned chalice”.

Yet, as the row over Abu Talebi attests, visceral American mistrust of Iran, rooted not only in the hostage crisis but also the lethal attacks on its troops and diplomats in the 1980s by Hezbollah, Tehran’s Lebanese proxy, is still around. Iranians are proud heirs to an ancient culture of richness and resilience, resentful at having been the plaything of imperial powers since the 19th century and, above all, the 1953 Anglo-American coup that toppled an elected nationalist government that presumed to nationalise the oil industry.

Today’s mullahs have easily manipulated the right to enrich uranium into a modern proxy of the sovereign right to own the country’s oil wealth.

But the signs so far favour pragmatism. President Barack Obama faced down attempts by Congress, egged on by Israel, to ratchet up rather than slightly ease sanctions as talks go on, all but tarring his opponents as warmongers. US public opinion is hostile to Iran yet overwhelmingly opposed to new adventures in the Middle East — and war with Iran would be the mother of all regional wars.

An Iran with a stake in resolving the lethal problems of the Middle East, rather than incentives to destabilise it, could be transformative. It is the IRGC and its Hezbollah and Iraqi militia allies, for instance, that enable Bashar Al Assad to cling to power in a rump Syria. Yet some negotiators are already predicting that if Tehran secures a nuclear deal — recognising its right to enrich uranium under strict outside monitoring — it could help foster Syria’s transition out of a ruinous war, and dump the Al Assads.

Iran, for its part, senses that international reintegration of its sanctions-stricken economy is essential to its ambition to become a recognised regional power. It is worth recalling, too, that the US and UK are not the only imperial spectres in Iran’s political culture. Russia occupied swathes of Iran beyond the end of the Second World War, and the Pahlavi dynasty of the deposed shah was founded by a Cossack officer. Iran would not flinch at dumping Vladimir Putin’s Russia — its ally of convenience on Syria and sanctions-busting — any more than it would the Al Assad regime.

Russia may soon discover, as the US has finally learnt, that old grudges die hard in Iran. And, if the US and EU come round to seeing Russia as a real threat to their interests as a result of Moscow’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula and its threat to east Ukraine, then a deal with Iran that dilutes Russian influence in the Middle East is a bonus.

— Financial Times