The pressure is on for European negotiators and, particularly, the Biden administration to reach a deal that restarts the Iran nuclear agreement scuttled unilaterally by former President Donald Trump. A hard-line new president is poised to take control in Tehran, and his pariah status in the United States for past human rights abuses promises to complicate the negotiating picture even more than it already is. Americans of all political stripes should care deeply how these negotiations play out because of the exceedingly high stakes: Failure to resolve the nuclear issue diplomatically could lead to yet another Middle East war of catastrophic dimensions.
The deal reached in 2015 between Iran and the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany was far from perfect, but it happened because of a remarkable show of unity by the world’s major powers to halt Iran’s lurch toward nuclear bomb-making capability. Heavy economic sanctions, enforced by both Moscow and Beijing, coupled with delicate diplomacy yielded a deal that dramatically slowed Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to bomb-grade quality.
When Trump scuttled the deal in 2018, the international sanctions fell apart, and Iran resumed its enrichment program free from many of the previously observed restrictions and monitoring regimes. Trump withdrew, in part, because the agreement did not restrict Iran’s ability to deploy powerful ballistic missiles or halt its support of radical militias in the region.
