U.S. pre-elections diplomatic limbo
Diplomacy on key foreign policy goals on de facto hold ahead of the U.S. elections in November.
Many world leaders will head to New York next week for the annual high level week of the opening session of the United General Assembly. Among them, American President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
But with Biden in his last months in office, and the U.S. election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump under seven weeks away, diplomacy to advance solutions to key global crises, including possible eventual negotiations to try to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and to try to reach a potential updated deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, is unlikely to move significantly forward in the current moment.
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy is expected to try to present Ukraine’s new peace proposal in meetings with world leaders next week, including with Biden, Harris, as well as with Trump or his team. But the United States assesses that Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to be serious about potential negotiations before he sees who will be in the White House next year, if then.
Meantime, while Iran’s new president Pezeshkian suggested this week that Iran might be open to direct talks with the United States under certain conditions, and has appointed as Iran’s foreign minister a key Iran nuclear deal negotiator, Abbas Araghchi, familiar to western diplomats, the Biden administration has basically decided it is too politically sensitive to engage in direct diplomacy with Iran ahead of the US elections, and certainly on issues as domestically politically controversial as a potential new Iran nuclear deal.
“We are not hostile towards the U.S.,” Pezeshkian said at a press conference in Tehran on Monday (Sept. 16). “They should end their hostility towards us by showing their goodwill in practice.”
“We are brothers with the Americans as well,” he added.
The State Department, asked about his comments, echoed affinity between the Iranian and American people, but said from the Iranian regime, it was looking for actions, not words.
“Certainly, we have great fondness for the Iranian people,” the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told journalists at the department press briefing today. “There are tremendous connections between the American people and the Iranian people…
“But when it comes to the regime, ultimately, we'll judge them by their actions, not their words,” he said. “And if he wanted to show brotherhood with the United States or with other countries in the world, the way to show brotherhood would not be through rhetoric. It would be by to stop arming and encouraging terrorist groups, to stop nuclear escalations…, stop transferring missiles and drones to Russia, and ultimately stop cracking down on the human rights of its own people.”
President Biden is expected to address the UN General Assembly for his final time on Tuesday morning, September 24.
“This is obviously Biden’s farewell appearance at the General Assembly,” Richard Gowan, UN Director at the International Crisis Group, said in a call with journalists on Monday previewing next week’s events.
“I think it’s fair to say that the U.S. President will get a mixed reception here,” he said. “I think that other UN members do recognize that Biden and his team did restore a lot of US-UN cooperation in 2021 and 2022…But I think there’s also been an underlying sense of Biden himself and his immediate foreign policy circle as being not that interested in the UN. And obviously, the U.S positioning over the ceasefire in Gaza in late 2023 and early 2024 burnt a huge amount of goodwill.”
“Were Harris to come, which I think we now think is very unlikely, she would obviously be a great focus of interest,” Gowan added. “But clearly, in the back of everyone’s mind, is going to be…Donald Trump. And I think in a lot of the private conversations around the General Assembly, the number one question will be what will Trump do to the organization?...It’s not pretty. We imagine that he would pull out of a lot of the things he pulled out of before, like the Human Rights Council and Paris Climate pact. We also think that he would slash the UN Budget. And I think a lot of Congressional Republicans are very, very keen to strangle funding to the UN, in response to all the criticism Israel has faced at the UN over Gaza."
Iran balancing acts: Arming Russia and proxy groups, while trying to lay groundwork for diplomacy with West
On Iran, while the Biden administration its initial two years in office intensively engaged in negotiations to try to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that Trump quit in 2018, the effort petered out, after Iranian leaders did not accepted a painstakingly negotiated updated draft deal in August 2022. Then Iran was riven by months of the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests following the death in September 2022 of a young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested by Iran’s so-called morality police over how she was wearing her headscarf.
The massive attack by Iran-backed Hamas on Israel last October 7 that killed over 1,200 Israelis and subsequently escalated tensions between Israel and Iran and Iran-backed proxies over the past months has further made visible U.S. diplomacy with Iran a domestic political pariah, particularly in a US election year.
New Iranian President Pezeshkian was elected this past summer urging negotiations with the west to try to ease sanctions on Iran and reduce Iran’s international isolation. But his debut at the UN next week and efforts to test the waters for possible future negotiations will be marred by the U.S. and British announcing last week that Iran for the first time had sent short-range ballistic missiles to Russia for use in its war against Ukraine.
Pezeshkian will be trying to manage two difficult balancing acts in his debut on the international stage next week: trying to lay the groundwork for renewed dialogue to try to deescalate tensions with the West, while Iran is simultaneously providing military support to Russia in its war against Ukraine, and is the major sponsor of Iranian-backed proxy groups engaged in simmering hostilities with Israel and throughout the region, said Ali Vaez, the Crisis Group’s Iran program director.
“This is Pezeshkian’s first appearance on the international stage,” Vaez said. “He has to try to set the tone for his foreign policy, which is a very difficult balancing act, in the sense that he wants to rebalance Iran relations with the West and …he believes Iran has tilted too far towards Russia and China.
“But before taking a step forward, he has already taken a step back, given the delivery of missiles to Russia last week, which really puts Iran, like him, at a negative starting point,” he said.
“My sense is that what they are likely to try to do is to basically lay the groundwork for future negotiations by doing two major things,” Vaez said. “One is to gauge the Western vision for the future of nuclear diplomacy. And two, in trying to gauge the possibility of engagement with the U.S. in case of continuity after the November elections, through engaging with civil society and former US officials.”
Iran will seek to message it is ready for negotiations
The new Iranian presidential and foreign ministry team will seek in New York to project that they are ready for negotiations, said Ali Alfoneh, a political scientist who specializes in Iran, and senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
The Iranian president “will be spending almost an entire week in New York, and Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, will be spending ten days,” Alfoneh said. “This tells me that the Islamic Republic under Pezeshkian is engaged in some kind of charm offensive in the United States. They truly want to use the General Assembly to send out the message to the world that Iran is willing to engage in negotiations.”
Pezeshkian has composed a cabinet drawing from different Iranian political factions that may help him achieve internal consensus as they embark on negotiations with external powers, Alfoneh said.
“He has tried to form a national unity government,” Alfoneh said. “This helps the regime to make…decisions which will not be sabotaged by other parties who are not represented in the cabinet.”
Limits to attempted charm offensive
However, negotiations with the West are going to be very difficult, even if there is internal Iranian regime consensus, for several reasons, Alfoneh said.
“Number one, the Europeans are very unhappy with Iran's aid to Russia,” Alfoneh said. “This is making life difficult for Pezeshkian when it comes to negotiations with Europeans, because Iran cannot abandon…this tactical cooperation between Iran and Russia, regardless how many demands the Europeans and the United States may put forward.”
A second difficulty is Pezeshkian “cannot completely write off the risk of Mr. Trump being elected president,” Alfoneh said. “Therefore at the same time that he is trying lead a charm offensive in New York, he … cannot make a deal with the US before the US elections.”
The timing of Iranian missile sales to Russia could actually be something that Iran wanted to get out of the way before Iran resumes potential negotiations with the West, suggested London-based Iran analyst Esfandyar Batmanghelidj.
“There’s the possibility that these transfers are being made now because they are the kind of thing that could not be undertaken during the negotiations, because it would jeopardize the course of the negotiations, and that a limited transfer at this stage is actually a signal in and of itself to say that Iran retains other options, and basically continues to have leverage over the west,” he said.
“That’s both the cynical and optimistic take,” he said. “Because it shows that Iran is playing a dangerous game. But on the other hand, it means that something like the missile transfers doesn't preclude that there will be a serious attempt at diplomacy.”
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