By Roger Boyes
A mutual sense of urgency should encourage a diplomatic solution. Instead, the negotiators on all sides look increasingly desperate. Rouhani, in particular, is on a short leash. He has been given time by the supreme leader, Khamenei, to reorder Iran’s priorities: to do, or pretend to do, anything necessary to have sanctions lifted, put the economy straight and assert Iran as a regional leader.
It costs money to fund the Revolutionary Guard’s military adventurism in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Gaza.
When the sums start to add up again, Iran can increase its efforts in the nuclear program.
Fraud is thus at the heart of this negotiation. When Rouhani was chief nuclear negotiator a decade ago his deception tactics were crude.
They have grown in sophistication. Offices and laboratories change buildings with astonishing rapidity, tunnels are dug deep into mountains to guard nuclear facilities from attack and from observation.
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency are led astray — one suspect compound changed its garden topsoil in case it was sampled.
Rouhani is tolerated by the Revolutionary Guard — who would see abandoning the nuclear dream as humiliation — not only because he enjoys the patronage of the ayatollah but because he has promised to cheat the West.
Once sanctions are taken apart it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to re-impose them; trading patterns will have been restored.
This will propel Iran into a prominent regional position, leave us shorn of economic leverage and, at best, postpone the inevitable looming crisis with the Iranian regime.