McManus: Iran protests shoved nuclear issue off center stage, for now

Instead, the U.S. confrontation with Iran has become broader and deeper — a conflict on more than one front.

Let’s start with the nuclear standoff. The United States and other big powers have been working for almost two years to revive the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that President Donald Trump canceled in 2018. The deal put a ceiling on Iran’s uranium enrichment program, which produces the basic ingredient for nuclear weapons, in exchange for lifting economic sanctions.

By August, officials on both sides said they were close to agreement. But Iran raised new demands, stalling the deal, U.S. and European officials say.

Then, in September, an unexpected event: Iran’s streets erupted in protest after a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died in police custody. She had been arrested by Tehran’s morality police for allegedly wearing her headscarf improperly.

Angry demonstrations against the regime began among women and girls, and spread quickly. Protesters in Tehran set fire to police stations and called for the overthrow of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader. Police arrested thousands and announced that protesters would be put on trial — some on charges that carry the death penalty.

Iran scholars said the uprising was unprecedented in the era of the Islamic Republic.

The Biden administration reacted almost immediately, condemning the repression and calling on the United Nations to monitor the Tehran regime’s actions. The United States also relaxed sanctions that restricted exports of communications technology to Iran, to allow Google and other companies to provide tools for protesters to communicate securely.

That may not sound like much, but some normally critical human rights advocates praised the administration for its agility.

“They’ve done quite a bit,” said Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group.

The uprising has one more effect: It has made it politically impossible, at least for the moment, for the administration to relax nuclear sanctions.

If the Tehran regime agreed to sign the stalled nuclear deal, the U.S. would be required to lift many of its economic sanctions against Iran. Billions of dollars in frozen assets would flow into Iran’s treasury, and Iran would be free to sell oil in the world market.

But that leaves Biden administration officials trapped in a dilemma.

They still want a nuclear deal with Iran; they just don’t think they can conclude one now, with a regime under siege by its own citizens.

Meanwhile, Iran announced last month that it had increased uranium enrichment at its underground Fordo plant to 60 percent purity — a short step from the 90 percent required for a nuclear bomb. That means Iran would need only a few weeks to assemble a crude nuclear device, U.S. officials say.

That’s the spiral of escalation that the nuclear negotiations were intended to prevent.

Without an agreement, Iran will be tempted to use its nuclear program for brinkmanship and barely veiled threats. The nuclear agreement may be off the agenda for now. But the problem it was intended to solve hasn’t gone away.