While the U.S. and Iran weren't exactly at peace when Trump took office in January 2017, the JCPOA had at least created the foundation for what many hoped would be a new era in their relations.
Iran had agreed to drastically limit the scale and scope of its uranium enrichment program, reduce the number of centrifuges it could operate, curtail its production of low-enriched uranium suitable for fueling a power plant, and ship nearly all of its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. It closed and disabled its Arak plutonium reactor, while agreeing to a stringent regime in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would monitor every aspect of its nuclear program.
In exchange, the United States, the European Union (EU), and the United Nations agreed to remove an array of economic sanctions, which, until then, had arguably made Iran the most sanctioned country in the world.
Free of some of them, its economy began to recover, while its oil exports, its economic lifeblood, nearly doubled. According to How Sanctions Work, a new book from Stanford University Press, Iran absorbed a windfall of $11 billion in foreign investment, gained access to $55 billion in assets frozen in Western banks, and saw its inflation rate fall from 45% to 8%.
But Trump acted forcefully to undermine it all. In October 2017, he "decertified" Iran's compliance with the accord, amid false charges that it had violated the agreement. (Both the EU and the IAEA agreed that it had not.)
Many observers feared that Trump was creating an environment in which Washington could launch an Iraq-style war of aggression. In a New York Times op-ed, Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, suggested that Trump was repeating the pattern of unproven allegations President George W. Bush had relied on: "The Trump administration is using much the same playbook to create a false impression that war is the only way to address the threats posed by Iran."
Finally, on May 8, 2018, Trump blew up the JCPOA and sanctions on Iran were back in place. Relentlessly, he and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin piled on ever more of them in what they called a campaign of "maximum pressure." Old sanctions were reactivated and hundreds of new ones added, targeting Iran's banking and oil industries, its shipping industry, its metal and petrochemical firms, and finally, its construction, mining, manufacturing, and textile sectors. Countless individual officials and businessmen were also targeted, along with dozens of companies worldwide that dealt, however tangentially, with Iran's sanctioned firms. It was, Mnuchin told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "a maximum pressure campaign for sanctions". We will continue to ramp up, more, more, more." At one point, in a gesture both meaningless and insulting, the Trump administration even sanctioned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, a move moderate President Hassan Rouhani called "outrageous and idiotic," adding that Trump was "afflicted by mental retardation."
Then, in 2019, Trump took the unprecedented step of labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran's chief military arm, a "foreign terrorist organization." He put a violent exclamation point on that when he ordered the assassination of Iran's premier military leader, General Qassem Soleimani, during his visit to Baghdad.
Administration officials made it clear that the goal was toppling the regime and that they hoped the sanctions would provoke an uprising to overthrow the government. Iranians did, in fact, rise up in strikes and demonstrations, including most recently 2023's "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, partly thanks to tougher economic times due to the sanctions. The government's response, however, was a brutal crackdown. Meanwhile, on the nuclear front, having painstakingly complied with the JCPOA until 2018, instead of being even more conciliatory Iran ramped up its program, enriching far more uranium than was necessary to fuel a power plant. And militarily, it initiated a series of clashes with U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf, attacked or seized foreign-operated oil tankers, shot down a U.S. drone in the Straits of Hormuz, and launched drones meant to cripple Saudi Arabia's huge oil industry.
"The American withdrawal from the JCPOA and the severity of the sanctions that followed were seen by Iran as an attempt to break the back of the Islamic Republic or, worse, to completely destroy it," Vali Nasr, a veteran analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and one of the authors of How Sanctions Work, told me. "So, they circled the wagons. Iran became far more securitized, and it handed more and more power to the IRGC and the security forces."
Biden's Reign of (Unforced) Error
Having long supported a deal with Iran -- in 2008, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, in 2015, in a speech to Jewish leaders -- Joe Biden called Trump's decision to quit the JCPOA a "self-inflicted disaster." But on entering the Oval Office, Biden failed to simply rejoin it.
Instead, he let months go by, while waxing rhetorical in a quest to somehow improve it. Even though the JCPOA had been working quite well, the Biden team insisted it wanted a "longer and stronger agreement" and that Iran first had to return to compliance with the agreement, even though it was the United States that had pulled out of the deal.
Consider that an unforced error. "Early in 2021 there was one last chance to restore the agreement," Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. "He could have just come back to the JCPOA by issuing an executive order, but he didn't do anything for what turned out to be the ten most critical weeks."
It was critical because the Iranian administration of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, responsible for negotiating the original accord, was expiring and new elections were scheduled for June 2021. "One of the major mistakes Biden made is that he delayed the nuclear talks into April," comments Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Princeton University scholar and a former top Iranian official who was part of its nuclear negotiating team in 2005-2007. "This was a golden opportunity to negotiate with the Rouhani team, but he delayed until a month before the Iranian elections. He could have finished the deal by May."
When the talks finally did resume in April -- "gingerly," according to the New York Times -- they were further complicated because, just days earlier, a covert Israeli operation had devastated one of Iran's top nuclear research facilities with an enormous explosion. Iran responded by pledging to take the purity of its enriched uranium from 20% to 60%, which didn't exactly help the talks, nor did Biden's unwillingness to condemn Israel for a provocation clearly designed to wreck them.
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