Follow us on social

50249134648_db0dd9e14e_o-scaled

The Trump administration’s fantasy about snapping back sanctions on Iran

The Trump administration's snapback fiasco will weaken future nonproliferation agreements and damage U.S. power on the U.N. Security Council.

Analysis | Washington Politics

The Trump administration’s obsession with Iran degenerated some time ago into aimless hostility that has yielded nothing but negative results. With a track record of well over two years, the Trump policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran has resulted in increased, not decreased, Iranian nuclear activity. The policy has resulted in increased, not decreased, aggressive Iranian actions in the Middle East, including attacks on neighboring states’ oil facilities that Iran never had attempted before the U.S. administration’s attempt to destroy Iran’s own oil trade. The policy has increased, not decreased, the political power of hardliners in Tehran.

Amid all that counterproductivity, it is the United States, not Iran, that has become ever more isolated — at the United Nations, in other diplomatic discussions, and in world opinion.

Where the administration has gone beyond negative results and isolation and into fantasyland has been with its most recent anti-Iran ploy, which is its attempt to invoke the “snapback” provision of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231. That resolution, adopted unanimously in 2015, is the Council’s blessing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the multilateral agreement that limited Iran’s nuclear program and closed all possible paths to a possible Iranian nuclear weapon. 

Snapback is an ingenious bit of diplomatic engineering designed to reassure everyone that if Iran were to violate the JCPOA, prior international sanctions against it would be quickly re-imposed, without needing any arduous new negotiations and without being blocked by, say, an Iran-friendly Russia. Under the snapback provision, if any participant in the JCPOA declares Iran to be in violation, then sanctions would be automatically re-imposed 30 days later unless the Security Council kept sanctions suspended with a new resolution — which, of course, the United States or any other permanent member of the Council could veto.

What makes the U.S. move ludicrous in the eyes of most of the rest of the world is that the Trump administration is attempting to use a power reserved for participants in the JCPOA even though in 2018 it withdrew — loudly, emphatically, and unequivocally — from participation in the agreement.  Accordingly, 13 of the other 14 members of the Security Council (the Dominican Republic has stayed silent) have explicitly rejected the notion that the United States has any standing to invoke snapback.

The U.S. move is further out of order because it was the Trump administration, not Iran, that violated the agreement and did so wholesale, completely reneging on the U.S. obligations regarding sanctions relief. (Iran’s later incremental exceeding of agreed limits on enriched uranium, which it began a year after the U.S. reneging, is not even technically a violation of the JCPOA, which explicitly relieves Iran of its obligations if other parties do not live up to theirs.)

Now, in a further flight from reality, the administration is talking as if U.N. sanctions have been reimposed, even though they have not. (The 30-day waiting period after the Trump administration claimed to invoke snapback ended within the past week.) As U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has stated, it is up to the Security Council to interpret its own resolutions, and the overwhelming majority of the Council has determined that there is no snapback.

Of course, the Trump administration will do whatever it wants regarding U.S. sanctions. It already had sanctioned just about everything Iranian-related it can think of. It also has aggressively used secondary sanctions to discourage other countries from doing business with Iran. Thus there is not much more the administration can do unilaterally, apart from intensifying the aggressiveness of the secondary sanctions.

The charade becomes more of a worry if the administration were to start taking physical actions such as intercepting Iran-bound shipments at sea. Under the current circumstances, such a move would be state-sponsored piracy, as well as risking escalation to wider military conflict.

The administration’s rhetoric about “enforcing” U.N. sanctions is as fanciful as its other rhetoric on this matter. No one has given it the authority to enforce what it says it is enforcing, and the United States itself is currently the biggest violator of the relevant Security Council resolutions.

This entire escapade is part of the Trump administration’s effort to destroy the JCPOA, which Trump never liked because it was Barack Obama’s biggest foreign policy achievement. Probably a hope underlying the administration’s latest tactic is to provoke Iran into renouncing the agreement or taking some other action that would effectively kill it. That would be bad enough regarding the cause of nuclear nonproliferation, but also worth considering is the damage the administration’s tactics are inflicting on the United States’s own diplomatic tools and options.

A snapback-type device probably is dead as an option for any future agreements with Iran, and perhaps with other states on other topics. It is hard to imagine Iran or the other JCPOA parties signing up to a repeat of this kind of diplomatic engineering given the Trump administration’s attempted abuse of the device in Resolution 2231. This consequence will make it more difficult to construct arms control or other agreements that provide sufficient confidence that violators will be punished.

One also needs to consider broader damage to the power and standing of the United States as a permanent member of the Security Council. A sure sign of the craziness of what the administration has attempted regarding snapback is that even former national security adviser John Bolton, anti-Iran uber-hawk though he is, thinks the administration’s ploy was a bad idea. Bolton’s main stated concern is to protect the U.S. veto.

The U.S. power to veto Security Council resolutions is a key ingredient of snapback, but the significance of the veto power ultimately rests more broadly on the significance of, and respect for, any of the Council’s resolutions. By flouting the will of the Council and going off in its own fanciful way on matters involving Iran, the administration is damaging that significance and respect.

Notwithstanding the Trump administration’s disdain for international organizations and multilateralism, its attempt to invoke the snapback provision of Resolution 2231 is tacit testimony to how useful those disdained institutions can be, and specifically useful to the United States. The administration is destroying that usefulness.                


Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo meets with Dominican Republic UNSC Special Envoy Ambassador Jose Singer at the United Nations in New York, New York, on August 20, 2020. [State Department photo by Ron Przysucha]
Analysis | Washington Politics
Daniel Noboa, Xi Jinping
Top photo credit: Beijing, China.- In the photos, Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) and his Ecuadorian counterpart, Daniel Noboa (left), during a meeting in the Great Hall of the People, the venue for the main protocol events of the Chinese government on June 26, 2025 (Isaac Castillo/Pool / Latin America News Agency via Reuters Connect)

Why Ecuador went straight to China for relief

Latin America

Marco Rubio is visiting Mexico and Ecuador this week, his third visit as Secretary of State to Latin America.

While his sojourn in Mexico is likely to grab the most headlines given all the attention the Trump administration has devoted to immigration and Mexican drug cartels, the one to Ecuador is primarily designed to “counter malign extra continental actors,” according to a State Department press release.The reference appears to be China, an increasingly important trading and investment partner for Ecuador.

keep readingShow less
US Capitol
Top image credit: Lucky-photographer via shutterstock.com

Why does peace cost a trillion dollars?

Washington Politics

As Congress returns from its summer recess, Washington’s attention is turning towards a possible government shutdown.

While much of the focus will be on a showdown between Senate Democrats and Donald Trump, a subplot is brewing as the House and Senate, led by Republicans but supported by far too many Democrats, fight over how big the Pentagon’s budget should be. The House voted to give Trump his requested trillion dollar budget, while the Senate is demanding $22 billion more.

keep readingShow less
Yemen Ahmed al-Rahawi
Top image credit: Funeral in Sana a for senior Houthi officials killed in Israeli strikes Honor guard hold up a portraits of Houthi government s the Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and other officials killed in Israeli airstrikes on Thursday, during a funeral ceremony at the Shaab Mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, 01 September 2025. IMAGO/ via REUTERS

Israel playing with fire in Yemen

Middle East

“The war has entered a new phase,” declared Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior official in Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, after Israeli jets streaked across the Arabian Peninsula to kill the group’s prime minister and a swathe of his cabinet in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a.

The senior official from Ansar Allah, the movement commonly known as the Houthis, was not wrong. The strike, which Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz promised was “just the beginning,” signaled a fundamental shift in the cartography of a two-year war of attrition between the region’s most technologically advanced military and its most resilient guerrilla force.

The retaliation was swift, if militarily ineffective: missiles launched towards Israel disintegrated over Saudi Arabia. Internally, a paranoid crackdown ensued on perceived spies. Houthi security forces stormed the offices of the World Food Programme and UNICEF, detaining at least 11 U.N. personnel in a sweep immediately condemned by the U.N. Secretary General.

The catalyst for this confrontation was the war in Gaza, unleashed by Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, which provided the Houthis with the ideological fuel and political opportunity to transform themselves. Seizing the mantle of Palestinian solidarity — a cause their leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, frames as a “sacrifice in the cause of God Almighty ” — they graduated from a menacing regional actor into a global disruptor, launching missiles toward Israel just weeks after Hamas’s attacks and holding one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes hostage.

The chessboard was dangerously rearranged in May, when the Trump administration, eager for an off-ramp from a costly and ineffective air campaign, brokered a surprise truce with the Houthis. Mediated by Oman, the deal was simple: the U.S. would stop bombing Houthi targets, and the Houthis would stop attacking American ships. President Trump, in his characteristic style, claimed the Houthis had “capitulated” while also praising their “bravery.”

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.