Iran's Drive for Bargaining Power

Iran is reportedly enriching their uranium yields back to 20% to its prior negotiating level before the JCPOA deal brought back their levels to internally agreed upon numbers. Reuters picked this up as well as the source seems to be coming from the Russian envoy (Mikhail Ulyanov) to IAEA.

Now this information is interesting for a few reasons.

1. Back in July 2019 it was reported that Iran was increasing its lowgrade stockpile and hedging its bets for Trump’s re-election.
2. There were also IAEA that there were new readings in new possible sites. Supplied most likely by CIA/Mossad readings to IAEA (its where most of their Nuclear monitoring of Iran comes from).
3. The economy has reached a new low. Many of the election promises hinged on the JCPOA boosting their economy and Iran has not been able to weather the storm nearly as much as it hoped.

Here’s the official documentation via the IAEA and the most recent 8 page summary found here.

Why would they do this?

• Iran wants to renegotiate with the United States and do so from a position of strength.
• The assassination of Soleimani has weakened their backing of Shia militias.
• Apparently Israel is Suspect No. 1 for Iran’s chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh’s assassination.
• They need something to help with COVID and a stagnant economy
• They also don’t have much to lose. Trump has been too gun-shy ever since the drone fiasco on June 20, 2019. One of the war-hawks Bolton is out of office and Pompeo is worried about a possible election campaign in 2024.

Bonus Unintended Side-effect: All of these “crippling” sanctions against Iran (mostly it’s oil exports), and they have been some of the strictest and most powerful. Basically US Treasury has crazy amount of world power when any transaction is done in dollars. Even getting around this is iffy unless your China or none of your global transactions are done in USD. Their economy has been forced to adapt to become much more domestically focused and is not as integrated into the global economy. Basically when oil stops being this precious exportable commodity leading to continued yearly economic growth, i.e. Saudi Arabia, they will have a much more diversified economy.

Update 01/04/2020 - Well whadya know it’s now official and the process of enrichment above 4.5% is now ongoing. Looks like this is now the preferred method to stabilizing the Iranian regime and maybe later improve peoples suffering from crippling sanctions. Gotta remember that sanctions by and large affect the poor much more than the rich. You’re banking on creating such unrest and instability from below that the elite are threatened enough to change their behavior. This can’t happen unless people aren’t suffering.