The Iranian presidential election unsurprisingly resulted in victory for Ebrahim Raisi, reportedly the favorite of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Raisi’s election could clear a domestic Iranian political obstacle to concluding an agreement that would bring the United States and Iran back into the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran deal. Yet serious disagreements over core nuclear issues continue to plague the negotiations, creating some residual uncertainty whether these could be resolved prior to Raisi’s August 3 swearing in. The most important disagreement revolves around the desire to retain the JCPOA as a diplomatic framework that keeps Iran a fair distance from a nuclear breakout capacity.

Since U.S. President Joe Biden assumed office in January, the nominal goal of all the negotiating parties—the United States, Iran, China, the EU, France, Russia, and the UK—has been to find a formula that allows all sides to reassume their original commitments under the JCPOA. After a series of U.S. concessions, the sequence of the respective steps everyone must take is no longer an issue. Similarly, Iran has reluctantly come to accept that not all sanctions imposed on Iran by former president Donald Trump’s administration can be waived. What still stands in the way of an agreement is profound divergence on what countries’ respective obligations would be under the revived deal. The gravest challenge is rooted in the nuclear progress Iran has been able to make in response to the Trump administration’s unilateral abrogation of the agreement. Iran has used the period since 2018 to develop, test, and deploy over one thousand advanced centrifuges that dramatically shorten the time it would need to reach a bomb’s worth of fissile material, and is now enriching uranium to levels that have no plausible peaceful use. Conceivably, Iran could produce a weapon’s worth of nuclear material in a few months, much less than the one-year “breakout” standard (the time estimated for Iran to enrich enough uranium for one nuclear weapon) that the JCPOA was designed to achieve.

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