The Iranian Nuclear Negotiations as a Two-Level Game: The Importance of Domestic Politics

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn July 2015, after more than a decade of negotiations, the international community and Iran finally reached agreement over Iran’s nuclear programme. All of the work that produced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA] was nearly undone, however, by the United States Congress, which came close to killing the agreement. This episode emphasises the fact that international negotiations are “two-level games” in which policy-makers must take into account not only their own objectives and those of their interlocutors but also the interests of domestic constituencies if they are to secure the “ratification” of an agreement. In many cases, securing the consent of those constituencies is unproblematic, whether because the matter at hand is uncontroversial, domestic interests are disengaged, or policy-makers have sufficient autonomy from them to ignore their objections. In other cases, however, the domestic game can play a huge part in determining the eventual outcome of the negotiating process. As the intensity of the debate within the United States in 2015 and the narrowness of the margin by which the JCPOA survived suggest, the American–Iranian dimension of the nuclear negotiations falls into the latter category.