The Iran Nuclear Deal

Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been the subject of global hand-wringing for more than two decades. While Iran’s leaders long insisted the country was not building nuclear weapons, its enrichment of uranium and history of deception created deep mistrust. In 2015, after more than two years of talks and threats to bomb the country’s facilities, Iran and world powers reached a deal that limited the Islamic Republic’s nuclear work in exchange for relief from economic sanctions that had cut off oil exports and hobbled its economy. After the U.S. under President Donald Trump withdrew from the pact and reinstated sanctions in 2018, Iran began violating the deal’s restrictions and, in early 2020, said it would no longer observe limits on the amount of nuclear material it produces. President Joe Biden, who replaced Trump in 2021, has said he would return the U.S. to the deal if Iran resumes complying with it, a condition Iran says it will only agree to after sanctions have been lifted.

Concerns about Iran’s intentions escalated in early April when the country vowed to ramp up its uranium enrichment to close to weapons grade. The announcement came in response to the sabotage of one of its leading atomic facilities in advance of talks in Austria aimed at reviving the 2015 deal. The attack was widely attributed to Israel, which opposes the accord on the grounds that it’s insufficiently tough on Iran. Iran had already upped the ante in mid-February, by notifying the International Atomic Energy Agency that it would stop allowing the group’s monitors to conduct snap inspections. The effort to return the U.S. and Iran to compliance is complicated by the fact that both sides insist the other goes first, creating a sequencing problem. The presidential election in Iran in June is also a potential snag. The field is set to be dominated by conservatives whose influence has surged since the U.S. abandoned the deal, which President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate, had sold to Iranians as a ticket to economic prosperity. Instead, the tighter U.S. sanctions provoked an economic contraction. A hardline successor to Rouhani may not be willing to simply reactivate the pact as is.