Today, May 8, is the five-year anniversary of Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. It is difficult to overstate how disastrous his exit from the agreement— and Joe Biden’s failure to re-enter it — has been for U.S. national security.
From Iran’s progress towards a nuclear weapons option and its support for Russia against Ukraine to the loss of U.S. leverage over Iran and credibility with the global community, this decision will go down in history as one of the biggest strategic screw-ups in American history.
Since Trump’s withdrawal in May, 2018, Iran has amassed enough enriched fissile material for several bombs. While its breakout time — the amount of time that Iran would need to assemble all the components necessary for one bomb — was more than one year during the JCPOA, it is now less than 10 days. Neither U.S.-led sanctions nor Israeli assassinations have dented Iran’s nuclear advances. It’s clear now that only the JCPOA has been successful in boxing in Iran’s nuclear program.
Meanwhile, having been betrayed by the United States, Iran has moved closer to China and Russia at a time when the U.S.’s own tensions with those powers are at a crisis point. Had the United States stayed in the agreement, Iran would very likely not be aiding Russia’s war in Ukraine today.
Moreover, Washington’s leverage with Tehran has dissipated. The United States has proven incapable of offering credible and enduring sanctions relief, while U.S. tensions with Russia and China have created new opportunities for Iran to circumvent U.S. sanctions.
In addition, in 2015, the U.S. was the gatekeeper to the international community. Washington decided which country was part of it and which was a pariah. But in today’s multipolar world, given that the United States has lost this role, Iran no longer needs Washington to shed its pariah status.
Tehran too deserves much blame for the dying state of the JCPOA. Western and Iranian diplomats have told me that Iran now wants to return to the package it rejected back in August 2022, while the U.S. and EU partners believe that Iran’s fast-growing nuclear program necessitates revisions to that text. But the prospects of reviving the negotiations are fast slipping away as the Biden administration has deprioritized this issue. Without some form of a deal, the risk of war is creeping closer.
Preventing war currently relies solely on the discipline of all actors involved — including the Israelis — from not taking dramatic escalatory steps. This is not a strategy that makes America safer.
As war inches closer, potentially triggered by Israel, other regional states are getting frustrated with Biden’s lack of interest and strategy. The president is neither handling this issue nor allowing Arab states in the region to find their own solution with Iran.
One possible way forward would be for a nuclear deal to be struck between Iran and its Arab neighbors. Georgetown University’s Ali Vaez and Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies did an excelling job of spelling out this option for Foreign Affairs this week. It is worth a shot. Indeed, if Biden won’t prioritize this issue or does not want to pay the political cost of striking a deal with the regime in Tehran, he should at least not stand in the way of regional states seeking to find their own solution.
If they succeed, restrictions will be imposed on Iran’s nuclear program that will help prevent an Iranian bomb. If they fail, America will be in no worse position than it is in today.
