Time out

The West and Iran will negotiate for four more months, but the gap is wide

AFTER some unconvincing last-minute brinkmanship, Iran and the six world powers it is negotiating with decided on July 18th to extend the deadline for an agreement by four months. The negotiators, seeking to secure a deal to curb Iran's nuclear programme in exchange for the removal of sanctions, are taking a break until September. Then they have until November 24th, exactly a year after the signing of the “joint plan of action” that first set the ball rolling, to find a permanent solution.

In the meantime, the provisions of the six-month interim deal that came into force on January 20th will stay in place with a few minor tweaks. Iran will take another step towards neutralising its stockpile of 20%-enriched uranium by turning the uranium-oxide powder into fuel plates for a research reactor. In return, Iran will continue to get very limited relief on some lesser sanctions and another $700m a month from frozen bank accounts abroad.

Another issue that people close to the negotiations feel could soon be resolved is that of the enrichment facility at Fordow. Buried deep beneath a mountain and believed by many to be invulnerable to attack by conventional bombs, it could now be converted into a fairly innocuous R&D centre. Combined with the enhanced-inspection regime that Iran has largely co-operated with, these are potential gains worth holding on to, at least for now.

For Iran, the choice has been much starker. To walk away from the table at this point would be to condemn Iranians to the prospect of a failing economy permanently locked in the grip of an unyielding sanctions regime. The damage to the presidency of Hassan Rohani, elected last year to end Iran's economic and political isolation, would probably be irreparable. Even the glowering supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, might fear the consequences of failure for his regime's legitimacy.

Western negotiators are clearly hoping that contemplation of that grim prospect will give their Iranian counterparts the space they need to make the further concessions undoubtedly required if a comprehensive agreement is to be reached. America and its negotiating partners want to see Iran's current enrichment capacity—about 19,000 centrifuges, half of which are spinning—cut drastically. The Americans believe that anything above 3,000-4,000 would be impossible to sell to a sceptical Congress. Yet the Iranians seem to be digging in their heels by coming up with ever-higher estimates of the number of centrifuges they aim to have.

In a speech on July 7th, Mr Khamenei declared that Iran must be able to produce enough enriched uranium to fuel the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear reactor when a contract with Russia to supply fuel runs out in 2021. That translates to a “definite need” for 190,000 separative work units. Iran would need more than 100,000 of the older IR-1 centrifuges that are the current backbone of its enrichment programme, or about 20,000 of the more efficient IR-2m centrifuges it has recently begun to deploy. The Iranians say this is in line with what they describe as their “right to enrich” for civil nuclear purposes under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

America has tacitly admitted that Iran will have to be allowed to do some enriching as the price for a deal that otherwise constrains its nuclear plans. But it will not accept that Iran, given its record of deceit and clandestine activity, needs a capacity to enrich that is possessed by very few other countries that use civil nuclear power. Robert Einhorn, an arms-control expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who served in the Clinton administration, argues that the Iranian demand “fails the realism test at several levels”. It has no need to produce all its own fuel because it can either go on getting it from Russia or on the enriched-uranium buyers' market. Iran has neither the technical knowledge nor the infrastructure to produce fuel of the type Bushehr requires.

If the enrichment capacity that Iran says it will eventually need is both implausible and far in excess of anything being contemplated as acceptable to the P5+1, so too is its concept of the time an agreement would run before Iran could be treated as a “normal” NPT signatory. Iran is thinking in terms of not much more than five years, while the Americans and their partners have in mind ten to 20 years of punctilious compliance before Iran could start building up its centrifuges again. It is possible that under such a deal Iran might be allowed to continue developing advanced centrifuges and learn the techniques of fuel fabrication, thus preparing itself for a more ambitious nuclear programme after the agreement expires. That, Mr Einhorn thinks, could be the basis of a compromise.

Can Mr Rohani sell a deal along those lines back home, above all to the enigmatic Mr Khamenei? They may not even know. But four months is not long to find out.