1 Trump Abandons the Iran Nuclear Deal

On May 8, 2018, President Donald Trump announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the painstakingly negotiated multilateral nuclear deal with Iran. Trump had long been a harsh critic of the deal, not least because of his intense antipathy to his predecessor, President Barack Obama; Trump seemed determined to undo major elements of Obama’s legacy, including the JCPOA. In his determination to derail the agreement, Trump resisted the entreaties of other parties to the agreement, was indifferent to the preferences of allies who wished to preserve it and ignored the recommendations of even some of his own senior officials that the agreement was best left in place. Rather, Trump insisted that the JCPOA was a bad deal and justified his decision to withdraw by offering excoriating assessments of the agreement. “The Iran deal,” he said in the official announcement of his decision, “was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”Footnote 1

Abandoning the deal that, in its essence, had exchanged sanctions relief in return for substantial constraints on Iran’s nuclear activities and high levels of transparency to monitor those activities, Trump instead launched a campaign of maximum pressure against Iran. He ordered an immediate reimposition of sanctions that had been lifted as part of the deal and threatened severe consequences for those who continued to do business with Iran. The maximum pressure policy was linked to a very ambitious set of objectives, spelled out in detail by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.Footnote 2 Confident in the Trump Administration’s ability to coerce Iran and declaring an intention to impose “the strongest sanctions in history,” Pompeo outlined a sweeping agenda of a dozen explicit demands that called for a full surrender of elements of Iran’s nuclear program, an end to Iran’s ballistic missile program and an abandonment of most of Iran’s foreign policy behavior in the region. Specific measures sought included a full confession of Iran’s previous covert nuclear weapons development activities, an end to Iran’s enrichment program, unlimited International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to Iranian territory to allow monitoring of nuclear activities, a reversal of Iranian policy in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan, a curtailment of the activities of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and an end of threatening behavior toward US friends and allies. This was not an agenda for negotiation; it was a policy of coercion. The explicit intent was to confront Iran with a choice between changing its behavior and being forced to its economic knees. But Trump and his team also suggested that this was the road to a better nuclear deal with Iran.

A year later, confounding the expectations of the Trump Administration, Iran was not succumbing to pressure and had not complied with the Pompeo demands. Rather than capitulate to American pressure, in May 2019 Iran itself began to violate JCPOA limits—ending a twelve-month period in which Iran had continued to comply with the agreement despite Trump’s withdrawal. As has so often been the case in the long evolution of the Iran nuclear controversy, Washington concluded that the solution to the failure of pressure was more pressure. In the spring of 2019, Trump and Pompeo announced another wave of sanctions, some aimed at Iran’s oil sector, others (widely viewed as largely symbolic) aimed at Iranian individuals and entities.Footnote 3 Efforts to escalate the maximum pressure policy mounted thereafter, unleashing a frenzy of sanctions measures against Iran that continued to the final days of Trump’s presidency. Trump put in place some 1500 additional sanctions in the final three years of his term, the last of which were announced on January 15, 2021, just five days before Trump left office.Footnote 4 As one analysis of this policy explained, “Trump’s immediate goal appears to be to batter Iran’s economy with sanctions to the point that the country’s leaders will renegotiate the nuclear deal—and its military support for Hezbollah and other proxy groups—on terms that the administration deems more favorable to the United States.”Footnote 5

But more pressure did not produce better results; maximum pressure seems to have produced maximum resistance. There was no demonstrable improvement in Iran’s regional behavior. On the contrary, as the International Crisis Group noted in a major report issued near the end of Trump’s term, Iran’s regional policies remained unchanged and indeed “its actions and those of its allies have if anything become more belligerent.”Footnote 6 Trump and Pompeo seem to have shared this judgment, complaining repeatedly about Iranian misbehavior. In explaining the January 2020 assassination of the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Qasem Soleimani, for example, Pompeo said that it had been necessary to stop Iran’s “reign of terror” while Trump, in his public remarks, offered a litany of violent and aggressive Iranian acts that in his eyes justified the killing.Footnote 7 Clearly, ever rising levels of maximum pressure did not bring an end to assertive Iranian activity in the region.

Similarly, Iran did not modify its nuclear program in the ways demanded by the Trump Administration. Rather, in an incremental fashion Iran’s behavior increasingly transgressed its obligations under the JCPOA, as Tehran came to judge that it could not justify complying with the agreement when the United States was engaged in extensive and flagrant rejection of it. One step at a time over the course of 2019, Iran disregarded important provisions of the JCPOA, growing steadily more noncompliant as the Trump Administration redoubled its sanctions policy.Footnote 8 Iran initially took the fairly limited and easily reversed steps of exceeding JCPOA limits on inventories of heavy water and enriched materials. But thereafter it went beyond permitted limits on levels of enrichment, began to install prohibited advanced centrifuges, and initiated enrichment activity at its Fordow facility, though that is forbidden by the JCPOA. Then on January 5, 2020—probably in part in reply to the drone attack that killed Soleimani two days earlier—Iran announced that it no longer regarded itself as constrained by any of the operational limitations in the JCPOA.Footnote 9 No better deal ever materialized—indeed, no negotiations were ever undertaken during the Trump years though the administration thought that Iran would be desperate for new talks—while the existing, unprecedented JCPOA limitations on Iran’s nuclear program were lost. Having championed a policy that liberated Iran from an extensive web of nuclear constraints, Secretary of State Pompeo complained shortly after leaving office that Iran had “unwound the nuclear deal in a matter of months.”Footnote 10 That indeed is what followed from the Trump-Pompeo policy of rejecting the JCPOA—their approach left Iran unconstrained by agreement and much closer to a nuclear bomb than had been the case under the JCPOA.

Though proponents and supporters of maximum pressure believe that it was working (at least in the sense of causing impactful economic pain for Iran) or would have succeeded in achieving at least some of its objectives had Trump been re-elected, at the time of his departure from office, it was on its own terms a complete failure. Not one of the twelve articulated objectives had been achieved—literally zero out of twelve. Trump came then to the end of his presidency with Iran as belligerent as ever, its nuclear program unleashed and accelerating, with the JCPOA undone, diplomacy absent from the picture, and the promised “better deal” nowhere in sight.Footnote 11 As Senator Chris Murphy later commented, during the years of Trump’s Iran policy “Everything got worse.”Footnote 12 Trump’s maximum pressure campaign was strikingly unsuccessful in altering Iranian behavior or producing a better nuclear deal but it did have one significant consequence that was pleasing to its supporters: it derailed the JCPOA and put in place both a damaged diplomatic setting and an elaborate web of sanctions that would make it difficult for any successor to restore the agreement.

2 What to Do About a Wrecked Deal?

This was the situation that President Biden inherited when he assumed office in January 2021. During the 2020 American presidential campaign, Biden had been an outspoken supporter of the JCPOA and was a harsh critic of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement. Trump’s move, Biden argued during the campaign, was “reckless,” a “self-inflicted disaster,” a “dangerous failure” that left the United States worse off. Biden was critical of the incoherence of Trump’s policy, withdrawing from and thereby undermining the agreement but then insisting that Iran abide by it and protesting loudly when, in response to large breaches of the agreement by Washington, Iran too began to violate it.Footnote 13 President Trump, Biden would state, walked away from an agreement that was blocking Iran’s path to nuclear weapons. As he continued to say even after taking up the presidency, he regarded Trump’s JCPOA decision to be “a gigantic mistake.”Footnote 14

Accordingly, Biden was explicit and unambiguous during the campaign that if he became President he would seek to restore the JCPOA. It will be a “priority” of the Biden administration, he wrote in an op-ed in September 2020, “to set Iran policy right.” In his eyes, this meant a return to the JCPOA on the basis of “compliance for compliance.” If Iran were prepared to come back into compliance with the agreement, Biden would “rejoin” the JCPOA.Footnote 15 In short, if he won the election, Biden intended to correct Trump’s “gigantic mistake” so long as Iran was also interested in the restoration of the agreement.

Once Biden assumed office on January 20, 2021, the question became how this might happen. One approach available to Biden was simply to reverse Trump’s policy. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA was a unilateral act. It was not negotiated with Iran, nor coordinated with allies, nor discussed in the UN. It does not normally require an international negotiation for the United States to take (or reverse) a unilateral foreign policy decision. On the day of his inauguration, for example, President Biden signed an executive order that overturned Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement; less than a month later, the United States had formally rejoined the treaty.Footnote 16 Biden might have taken a similar step with the JCPOA, establishing in an executive order on day one of his presidency the intention to immediately bring the United States back into the JCPOA. During the campaign, he had repeatedly stated that this would be done only on a “compliance for compliance” basis, so such a move would have been conditional on Iran also moving back into compliance on some reasonable time frame. The JCPOA is a long, detailed, painstakingly negotiated document in which Iran’s obligations are explicitly spelled out so it would have been clear what Iran needed to do to reestablish its compliance and the JCPOA’s intrusive verification provisions would have provided clear indication of the pace at which Iran was altering its behavior to conform to JCPOA requirements. Presumably, if withdrawing from the JCPOA was a “self-inflicted disaster,” as Biden believed, then getting the United States back into the agreement quickly was very much in the US interest so this was a plausible path that would leave the decision about America’s connection to the JCPOA entirely in his hands.

Employing what might be called the Paris Climate Change model for the JCPOA would have had several advantages. First, Trump’s withdrawal had positioned the United States as the agreement-wrecker—the party whose actions had derailed an agreement that many other parties regarded as both desirable and effective. If Biden had immediately rejoined the agreement on the condition that Iran do likewise, the onus would then have been on Tehran to bring its behavior back into compliance with the agreement or take responsibility for the demise of the agreement. Among other things, this could have served as a test of Iran’s real intentions. Second, this would have brought the matter to a head while Iranian President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif—who negotiated the JCPOA and were important advocates of it in the Iranian context—were still in office, ahead of the Iranian presidential election of June 2021. Because of term limits, Rouhani was ineligible to run for reelection, so it was certain that there would be a new government in Tehran and there was every expectation that the new leadership would be less hospitable to, if not hostile towards, the JCPOA. It might have been advantageous to have Iran’s initial response to an American return to the JCPOA be set in the Rouhani-Zarif era. Third, an immediate American acceptance of the JCPOA, if reciprocated by Tehran, would minimize the amount to time that Iran was acting outside the constraints of the agreement, limiting the advancement and modernization of its nuclear program. Especially given concerns about the expiration of JCPOA provisions and worries about the short period of time remaining before some key limits began to lapse, it would make sense to maximize the amount of time in which Iran was constrained by the agreement. On the other hand, if Iran failed to conform to JCPOA requirements, this would offer more clarity about Iran’s intentions and would facilitate and justify coordinated international efforts to press Iran for nuclear restraint.

After the 2020 election, there was some expectation that Biden would rapidly, if not immediately, reverse Trump’s policy by bringing the United States back into the JCPOA. Once in office, however, Biden did not make a quick unilateral move to alter US policy, opting instead for a diplomatic path that involved discussions in the P5 + 1 context and indirect engagement with Iran. The intent was to find a negotiated arrangement that would synchronize US and Iranian returns to compliance, allow discussions that might address concerns and perceived shortcomings of the JCPOA, and hopefully lay the groundwork for follow-on negotiations leading to a “longer and stronger” deal.

Why did Biden surrender his unilateral discretion over US policy and instead put an important American interest into a complicated diplomatic process? A number of factors seem likely to have influenced this outcome. The decision reflected, in part, the desire for a longer and stronger agreement, which would require an ongoing negotiation. There was also a feeling that Iran’s nuclear advances once it had breached JCPOA limits should be dealt with; Iran’s progress meant that circumstances had changed since the JCPOA was negotiated. Moreover, while Iran’s nuclear program was improving, the nonproliferation benefits of the JCPOA were shortening as time passed and expiration dates grew nearer. There was also a sense among some of the Democratic experts that Trump’s maximum pressure campaign, though misguided and unsuccessful, had in fact put considerable pressure on Iran that could be an asset for the Biden Administration as it sought to tackle some of these issues; the pressure might work if linked to reasonable goals rather than to Trump’s demands for surrender. There was a line of analysis, in short, that suggested that just returning to the JCPOA in its original form, was insufficient. As one influential analysis argued, “Simply returning the United States to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a long-term solution….The United States needs to pursue a renewed nuclear bargain with Iran, building on the solid foundation of the original and addressing its shortcomings.”Footnote 17

Biden’s calculations were undoubtedly also influenced by the international and domestic pressures and constraints he would face when trying to deal with Iran. Important friends and allies—Israel and Saudi Arabia notable among them—were hostile to the Iran deal and opposed to or unenthusiastic about a resumption of the JCPOA. More immediately, at home Biden faced a domestic setting marked by widespread opposition to the JCPOA. His Republican opponents were and are unanimously and (in many cases) vehemently and outspokenly disparaging about the agreement; Trump’s scathing characterization of the deal as a terrible giveaway reflected the views of his party. But some in Biden’s own party were almost equally zealous in their criticisms of the agreement. One of the loudest detractors, for example, is Senator Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey), who voted against the JCPOA in 2015 and has remained steadfastly hostile to the agreement in the intervening years, causing some to describe him as a “JCPOA saboteur.”Footnote 18 If Biden acted unilaterally without addressing alleged weaknesses of the deal and without confronting nuclear progress Iran made while operating outside the deal, criticism was sure to be intense and the domestic political price would be high. Further, Biden’s ability to deliver sanctions relief or other concessions under these circumstances was very much in doubt—indeed, any step that required Senate action or support seemed politically infeasible. Hence, while it was clear that the Biden Administration wished to rejoin the agreement and hoped that the JCPOA could regain its status as a functioning arrangement complied with by all, the President’s freedom of maneuver has been limited by a substantial set of constraints that make some plausible paths forward painfully difficult and arguably too politically costly to pursue.Footnote 19

Biden’s decision to follow a diplomatic track rather than to modify US policy and then join his JCPOA partners in calling for Tehran’s timely return to compliance thus may be understandable and even defensible but it has so far turned out to be fateful. The ultimate outcome for the JCPOA is as yet unknown but more than thirty months into President Biden’s term, the negotiations have been fruitless, the process is stymied, and at this moment it seems that there is a good chance that it will prove impossible to save the agreement. Negotiations were slow to get started and were soon bogged down. Proceeding down the diplomacy track to resurrect the JCPOA had as an inevitable consequence that Iran’s reactions and behavior would have a decisive impact on the pace, direction, and outcome of the negotiating process.

3 Tehran’s Doubts and Grievances

The choice to reverse Trump’s Iran policy by diplomacy rather than by unilateral decision and action brought the Biden administration up against a tangle of complicating Iranian perceptions and calculations.Footnote 20 First, Tehran’s belief is that the difficulties for the JCPOA have been caused by the United States and hence it is incumbent on Washington to take steps to remedy the situation. In this view, it was not Iran that undercut the agreement and it is not Iran’s responsibility to repair the situation. In Tehran’s eyes the matter was very simple: resolution of the issue will occur when the United States corrects its policy. As then-Foreign Minister Zarif explained early in the Biden Administration, what was required was that “US unconditionally and effectively lift all sanctions imposed, re-imposed, or re-labelled by Trump. We will then immediately reverse all remedial activities.”Footnote 21 The Iranian position collided, however, with the Biden Administration view that Iran should come back into compliance with the JCPOA before the United States abandoned Trump’s policy. Neither side wanted to make the first move, which was a serious bottleneck as the negotiations unfolded.

Furthermore, the Biden Administration has left in place the entire enormous set of Trump sanctions, in effect perpetuating Trump’s policy while seeking to restore the JCPOA. When it comes to sanctions, nothing has changed under Biden. During the course of the negotiations with Iran, it became evident that while Biden is willing to provide significant sanctions relief, he is unwilling to reverse all of Trump’s sanctions, believing some of them to be justified on grounds unrelated to the nuclear deal. Not surprisingly, Tehran feels itself still subjected to maximum pressure and is reluctant to succumb to what it sees as coercion—indeed, there is a view in Tehran that it is a vital interest to avoid allowing itself to be bullied by the United States because capitulating will be an open invitation for future bullying. Iran seeks the complete elimination of Trump’s sanctions, which it regards as unfair and unjustified, but it seems unlikely to obtain this objective.

In short, Iran believed that the complete abandonment of Trump’s policy and a return to full compliance by the United. States was the path back to the JCPOA, steps it regards as both necessary and warranted. Washington, on the other hand, was unwilling to alter course until Iran had taken steps to bring its nuclear program back into conformity with the JCPOA. These misaligned expectations were not conducive to swift and smooth negotiations.

Second, for Iran, the benefits of the agreement have been very disappointing, even during the Obama administration and even more so, obviously, under Trump. It may be that Iranian expectations were unrealistic, but the economic gains from the limited and uneven sanctions relief provided by the JCPOA have been, as Iran sees it, lamentably meager. Nor is this merely a misguided perception on Tehran’s part. As Middle East expert Juan Cole has pointed out, the United States and its allies largely failed to deliver on the economic promises made to Iran: “The Republicans in Congress refused to allow Obama to lift US sanctions, which threaten third parties. European companies, fearing the US Treasury Department, refused to invest in Iran. So the country never really got the sanctions relief it was promised.”Footnote 22 The presumption of both Trump’s maximum pressure campaign and Biden’s diplomatic initiative has been that economic pressures would make Tehran eager to get the JCPOA back in place in order to regain the economic advantages provided by the deal. It is far from clear that this presumption is correct. Some economic gain for Iran will ensue if the JCPOA is revived and no doubt this remains an incentive for Tehran to retain interest in salvaging the deal. But the lure of sanctions relief will be limited if the benefits are expected to be modest, and there is nothing in Iran’s experience since 2015 to suggest that a macroeconomic bonanza awaits it if only it will agree with the Biden Administration on a path back to the JCPOA. Quite the contrary, many in Iran seem to have concluded that the United States is incapable of providing genuine and substantial sanctions relief, while the Europeans are incapable of standing up to Washington’s ongoing recalcitrance. Hence, Iran’s incentive to save the agreement may be much weaker than anticipated in Washington. Why would Iran make what it sees as major concessions for minor, inadequate benefits?

Third, the American miscalculation about Iran’s incentives to rejoin the agreement may be traced to highly divergent perceptions of Iran’s ability to withstand sanctions. US policy has long been rooted in the judgment that American pressure could compel Iran to take desired steps. Trump’s maximum pressure campaign, in particular, seemed to reflect high confidence that Tehran simply could not withstand a fully mobilized and unrestrained economic assault and that the resulting desperation would drive Iran to accept Trump’s maximalist demands. Iran, on the other hand, has been coping with American sanctions continuously since the revolution in 1979 and takes pride in its so-called “resistance economy.” Where Washington sees Iran as isolated and penalized, Tehran draws comfort and gains from that fact that much of the world does not share the American obsession with sanctioning Iran. Trump’s determined escalation of the sanctions campaign has had painful effects on the Iranian economy, no doubt, but Iran withstood the blow and survived while denying Trump and Pompeo all of the ambitious objectives they sought. To Tehran, this may look like a win. Certainly, there is little in the four years of Trump’s bluster and sanctions escalation to suggest that Iran is going to capitulate in response to American pressure.

Fourth, as Tehran sees it, an explanation for the unsatisfactory economic results is that the Western parties to the JCPOA failed to fulfill their obligations under the agreement. Even the Rouhani-Zarif team, though associated with and supportive of the JCPOA, complained bitterly about what they saw as persistent non-compliance and unrelenting pressure by the United States and its European friends. As Zarif put it in his revealing collection of interpretations and documents from the JCPOA saga:

“The JCPOA participants have underlined that ‘the lifting of sanctions, including the economic dividends arising from it, constitutes an essential part of the JCPOA.’ However, the United States—aided and abetted by its European accomplices—never implemented these and many other provisions of Resolution 2231 and the JCPOA in good faith. The western JCPOA participants continued to use economic pressure to achieve those illegitimate political objectives that they had failed to achieve in the course of the long and tedious JCPOA negotiations…. The US and E3 have been transparent about their transgressions and have repeatedly stated their ill-intention to compel Iran to renegotiate those provisions through economic pressure and blackmail.Footnote 23

This picture of the malfeasance of the United States and its European friends stands in stark contrast to Iran’s self-image as stalwart defender of the JCPOA. Again, Zarif’s words emphatically illustrate the point. He wrote in July 2021:

Throughout the past six years the Islamic Republic of Iran has proven its commitment to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in deeds and not just words. My Government and the people of Iran have made enormous sacrifices—almost single-handedly—to preserve the JCPOA in spite of U.S. contempt for it and EU/E3 complacency in the face of that contempt.Footnote 24

This is, of course, not how Washington and other outsiders see it, but Tehran’s calculations will be rooted in its own perceptions however much disagreement its views may prompt. And it is reasonable to ask why Iran would pay a significant price for or attach a high value to an agreement if it has good reason to believe that the United States and its friends will not deliver on their end of the bargain.

Fifth, Iran must also factor into its policy on the JCPOA the prospect that a revived agreement could be very short-lived. Trump has established the precedent of American withdrawal, which of course demonstrates that Washington can be an unreliable negotiating partner. Republicans in Congress have been loud and unambiguous about their intention to do whatever they can to block a return to the JCPOA if Biden and the P5 + 1 manage to reach a deal with Iran. In March of 2022, for example, 49 Republican Senators announced that they oppose the JCPOA and stated that if Biden agrees to rejoin it “Republicans will do everything in our power to reverse it.”Footnote 25 When the negotiations showed signs of progress in the late summer of 2022, Republicans in the House Armed Services Committee took to social media to proclaim: “Even if Iran accepts President Biden’s full capitulation and agrees to reenter the Iran nuclear deal, Congress will never vote to remove sanctions. In fact, Republicans in Congress will work to strengthen sanctions against Iran.”Footnote 26 Possible Congressional action to block the restoration of the JCPOA is not an idle threat. Under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) of 2015, passed by Congress to give it the right to oversee the JCPOA, Congress can pass a Joint Resolution of Disapproval that would deny Biden or any successor the ability to lift sanctions, thus “nullifying” the deal.Footnote 27

Further, even if, in the short run, a renewed deal survives Congressional scrutiny, Iran must still take into account the 2024 US Presidential election—a point which Iran’s experience with Trump will have made blindingly clear. And there is ample and very open evidence that a resurrected JCPOA will not survive beyond Biden’s term in office if a Republican wins the next presidential election. As one example among many, Trump’s former Ambassador to the United Nations and declared Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said in a public speech, “If this president signs any sort of [Iran nuclear] deal, I’ll make you a promise: The next president will shred it on her first day in office.”Footnote 28 Another possible Republican presidential contender, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, has stated that “I intend to systematically fight the implementation of this catastrophic deal, and will work with my colleagues to ensure that it is blocked and eventually reversed in January 2025” —another promise to wreck the JCPOA immediately if a Republican Administration takes office after the next Presidential election in 2024.Footnote 29 In a subsequent public comment Senator Cruz clarified his point: “The next Republican president will rip up whatever ridiculous Biden-Iran deal is struck.”Footnote 30 In view of this extensive, unambiguous, and unmissable evidence of Republican intentions, Iran’s leaders can be forgiven if they conclude that the JCPOA could turn out to be a very short-term deal—too short to allow major economic benefits to occur. Even if Biden is reelected in 2024, the opposition is so widespread, so intense, and so unwavering that Biden himself will face fierce opposition if he agrees to a deal that returns the United States to the agreement and his ability to deliver on sanctions relief is questionable.Footnote 31

For all these reasons there are grounds for questioning how much value Iran attaches to the JCPOA, particularly after the Iranian elections replaced the Rouhani government with one much more skeptical about the agreement. Iran sees the United States as implacably hostile and believes that its nuclear leverage is necessary if Washington is to have any incentive to negotiate reasonably with it. Giving up that leverage in return for benefits that are meager, disappointing, unreliable, and quite possibly very short-term will hardly look like an enticing bargain, especially to Iran’s opponents of the deal. Hence, while American critics of the JCPOA wail about the “Biden giveaway” and insist that Biden’s alleged desperation to reach a deal is producing an outcome overwhelmingly favorable to Iran, there is scant evidence that Tehran sees the deal as highly attractive or even acceptable. Quite the contrary. The negotiations have produced a draft agreement that the Biden Administration and other parties to the agreement believe is good and acceptable. The problem is that Iran has yet to accept it—to the puzzlement, frustration, and irritation of American and western negotiators who clearly believe that a good deal has been put on the table and it remains only for Iran to seize this opportunity and accept it. The protracted Iranian hesitation and resistance leads to the suspicion—if not the conclusion—that Iran simply is not interested in a revived JCPOA deal. Symptomatic is the comment by the head of British Intelligence, Richard Moore: “I think the deal is absolutely on the table. And the European powers and the (U.S.) administration here are very clear on that. And I don't think that the Chinese and Russians, on this issue, would block it. But I don't think the Iranians want it.“Footnote 32 If this is true, it is not hard to understand why. The deal that Tehran was prepared to accept in 2015 in anticipation of economic and diplomatic gains may now seem, in light of the experience of the past five years, no longer worthwhile from an Iranian perspective. American critics will no doubt draw from Iran’s reluctance to move forward with a deal the conclusion that Tehran is simply preserving its option to pursue nuclear weapons—a possibility that cannot be dismissed but that would be more clear-cut and convincing if Iran actually had in front of it a deal that it found attractive and in which it could trust.Footnote 33 It may be, however, that Iran has its own tribe of critics and policymakers who believe that no deal is better than a bad deal.

Choosing the diplomatic track for changing American policy not only exposed the Biden Administration to Iran’s doubts and ambivalences about the deal, but also created an opportunity for Tehran to air its grievances and to seek remedies for the deficiencies it sees in the JCPOA. Washington is not the only town with an abundance of critics of the deal. Indeed, the domestic politics of the JCPOA seem as harsh and intense in Tehran as in Washington and Iranian opponents of the deal echo the negativism of Biden’s critics. Iran’s leaders must heed their own political and policy imperatives, no matter how much disappointment and exasperation this produces for their American counterparts. The reality is that progress has been complicated and slowed by the fact that Iran, like the United States, has sought to use this process to address the concerns and deficiencies it sees with the JCPOA—though in truth at least one of Iran’s demands is unsatisfiable, impossible for the United States to address and hence a potentially intractable roadblock.

For understandable reasons, Iran has sought guarantees on two particularly difficult issues. First, it has desired assurance that the United States will remain in the deal—a solution to the risk that any agreement with Biden will be very short-term in nature. This is a natural reaction to the Trump derailment of the JCPOA, but it is simply not possible for the United State to provide any such guarantee. Biden has no way of binding his successors. Even if the restored JCPOA were to take the form of a legally binding treaty—utterly unattainable given the current makeup of the US Senate—there is nothing the prevent a future president from withdrawing, as Trump did from the INF Treaty, the Open Skies Agreement, and the Paris Climate accord. The problem is that Iran has good reasons for wanting such an assurance and Washington is correct in explaining that nothing of the sort can be provided. This is the sort of stalemate that bogs down a negotiation.

A second vexation has influenced Iran in the negotiations: Disturbed by what it sees as persistent and even flagrant noncompliance by the United States and its friends, Tehran has sought serious monitoring and verification of the sanctions relief that is meant to be the main Iranian benefit from the deal. Iran’s own compliance under the JCPOA is intensely monitored by unprecedentedly extensive and intrusive verification arrangements, but equivalent measures were not put in place to confirm that Washington and its friends were fulfilling their obligations under the agreement. In view of its disappointment with the benefits provided it by the JCPOA, Tehran has a strong incentive to insist on assurances that there will be meaningful scrutiny of the behavior of the United States and other parties in fulfillment of their JCPOA obligations and accountability if noncompliance is detected. It should hardly be a shock that Iran seeks to protect its own interests.

Iran has also demanded an end to IAEA investigation of its past nuclear behavior—a problem that has arisen because unexplained nuclear particles were discovered at undeclared sites in Iran. This is an issue that falls outside the JCPOA and involves Iran’s obligations under its safeguards agreement. The IAEA has the right and the obligation to follow up on all situations involving the presence and handling of fissile material and, with support from Washington and other JCPOA parties, it is rightly pursuing the matter until it concludes that a satisfactory account has been provided. Iran’s unwillingness to be forthcoming has reinforced suspicions that it is covering up illicit, possibly weapons related activity. Iran, for its part, claims to see this issue as the latest in a never-ending series of allegations that haven’t stopped no matter how much Iran has cooperated with the IAEA. The current negotiations have provided an opportunity for Iran to force this issue into the JCPOA discussion and use it, perhaps as a bargaining chip, perhaps as a deal-blocker, and perhaps in the hopes of gaining some concession that would end or abate what Tehran clearly views as an ongoing irritant. There appears to be no inclination to give Iran relief on this issue, so this has become another complication in the Biden Administration’s so far futile quest to restore the JCPOA.Footnote 34

These illustrations (and others) demonstrate that Iran brought to the negotiations on restoring the JCPOA its own agenda, its own sense of needed improvements, its own list of deficiencies to be corrected. The Biden team may have believed that they were in a position, with Trump’s maximum pressure in place and Biden’s more reasonable goals in hand, to negotiate modifications that address American concerns about the JCPOA given the situation that existed when Biden came into office. However, Iran believed that the expansion and momentum of its nuclear program gave it leverage and when Biden opted for the diplomatic track, Tehran too sought gains and corrections that would improve the agreement as they see it.

4 Troubled Negotiations, Glacial Progress, and Risks of Failure

These various perceptions, positions, and dynamics have made the negotiated return to the JCPOA a slow, frustrating, and volatile exercise, with phases of apparent progress and optimism alternating with periods of setback and pessimism. There have been months of haggling over who would take the first step, the sequencing of steps, the timing of sanctions relief in relation to Iran’s return to compliance, the extent of sanctions relief, the verification of sanctions relief, the permanence of the American commitment to the deal, the prospects for follow-on negotiation aimed at a longer and stronger deal, and the resolution of Iran’s dispute with the IAEA (which is of concern to both sides but from opposite perspectives).Footnote 35 Time has been lost, reciprocal frustrations have accumulated, Iran’s program has continued to advance in an unconstrained fashion, Trump’s maximum pressure scheme remains in place (still upsetting Tehran and still failing to achieve its objectives), while the JCPOA lingers in an odd limbo, not completely dead but not implemented by either the United States or Iran. Somewhat remarkably, more than  half-way through Biden’s term, Washington and Tehran have been unable to rejoin an agreement that was finalized and accepted by both sides in 2015. The negotiations continue, however, and could still produce an agreement. Occasional moments of apparent progress make it seem as if a positive outcome is still possible. But the protracted failure to bring the negotiations to a conclusion, the recurrent periods in which the negotiations are stalled or stalemated, the apparent inability of the two sides to surmount the remaining obstacles to agreement have led many to gloomy expectations about the likelihood of achieving an agreement that restores the deal. As one recent analysis observed, “Both sides point to the other as the problem. In fact, both are the problem. Washington and Tehran lack the political will to offer a viable compromise. And so, the talks drift.”Footnote 36

What is at risk are the constraints and transparency measures contained in the JCPOA. It is true that those who demand that a negotiated agreement contribute to regime change in Iran or who insist that Iran must be transformed by negotiations into a benign regional actor find these measures insufficient and regard the JCPOA as a failure. If the goal is to coerce Iran’s surrender rather than to achieve a useful bargain, then the JCPOA comes up short—but Iran has been successfully resisting American pressure since the Iranian revolution in 1979 so it seems rather short-sighted to prefer a very unlikely coerced capitulation to an existing bargain that significantly constrains Iran’s nuclear behavior.

It is also true that supporters of the JCPOA commonly adopt the habit of conceding imperfections in the agreement, perhaps as a shield against the relentless and often vehement assaults of the critics. What gets lost in the overheated rhetoric and the emphasis on faults and flaws of the agreement is its unprecedented nature. In the history of the nonproliferation regime, no other state has ever willingly accepted as many constraints or as much transparency as Iran did in the JCPOA. (This perhaps helps account for the Iranian view that they gave much and got little out of the JCPOA.) Iran accepted a limit on the level of enrichment at 3.67%, suitable for producing fuel for nuclear reactors but well below what is required to produce nuclear weapons. This is a clearcut and monitorable provision that allows no grey areas about compliance. Iran accepted limitations on its holdings of enriched material at a level of 300 kg—well below its existing inventory, which accordingly had to be reduced—and a level which inhibits rapid breakout in the direction of a weapon. Iran accepted limits on numbers of centrifuges at a level that required it to remove two-thirds of its installed centrifuges, and also agreed to restrictions on its ability to modernize centrifuges. In the realm of transparency, Iran agreed to challenge inspections; to daily access by inspectors to its uranium enrichment facility at Natanz; to monitoring of centrifuge production and of excess centrifuges that had been removed from service; to monitoring of uranium ore production. All of these measures are unprecedented. All of them are desirable. All of them are useful in restricting movement toward a weapons capability. Indeed, if properly understood and valued, they would be regarded as significant improvements to standard practice in the NPT regime, to be emulated when possible rather than criticized and rejected.Footnote 37 In addition, Iran pledged to sign and ratify the Additional Protocol to the IAEA’s safeguards agreements, which would provide more information to and additional authority to the Agency. And in the JCPOA Iran accepted limits that persist over protracted periods of time. There has been much complaint about the so-called sunset clauses (which, it should be noted, are common and normal in arms control agreements); the JCPOA includes expiration dates, some of which are not so far off given the time that has elapsed since the agreement was reached in 2015. But what often gets left out of such discussion is that the JCPOA is a “variable speed” agreement: some measures expire after 15 years (in 2030), others in 2035 or 2040, and still others are permanent—including the prohibition on weapons-related activities.Footnote 38

Overall, then, the JCPOA provides future years of implementation in which Iran’s nuclear program is unprecedentedly constrained and unprecedentedly monitored. An array of unique and highly useful measures greatly constrict Iran’s ability to pursue nuclear weapons even if it retains an appetite to do so. This should be regarded as an impressive accomplishment to be valued, not a failure to be rejected.Footnote 39 It is hard to see the case that a world worried about Iran’s nuclear ambitions is better off without such measures in place—no matter how distasteful the regime is seen to be and no matter how objectionable its foreign policy is regarded. In a rational and reasonable debate it will be understood that perfect agreements are not possible, neither side will get everything it wants in a bargained outcome, and arms control will not be the full or permanent solution to all concerns regarding Iran. The question is whether the agreement is useful in addressing significant security problems. The JCPOA passes that test.

Whether it can survive the current diplomatic process remains in doubt, however. A failed negotiation will leave Iran’s nuclear program outside of all the negotiated constraints, the much-condemned sunset clauses will be irrelevant because Iran will no longer be bound by any restrictions, the nuclear progress Iran has made during the Trump withdrawal phase of this melodrama will not in any way be rolled back (whereas the JCPOA would require reversal or reduction of many steps it has taken), and Iran’s advancing nuclear efforts will be subjected to less scrutiny. This is the prospect that stalemated diplomacy has raised—all the more disturbing because the alternatives to diplomacy, perennially unsuccessful sanctions or risky uses of force, do not seem more likely to effectively provide durable solutions to the challenge posed by Iran’s nuclear program. Perhaps if Biden had simply altered American policy unilaterally on the day of his inauguration, Iran would have refused to bring its behavior back into conformity with the JCPOA and we would have ended up in the same place—with a failed JCPOA. But the diplomatic track has proven no more fruitful and may turn out to have been a path to slow-motion failure.

This is, for the Biden Administration, a painful dilemma. If it was, as candidate Biden insisted in the 2020 campaign, a self-inflicted disaster and a gigantic mistake to withdraw from the JCPOA, then surely it is equally a disaster to fail to restore the agreement.