Follow us on social

P20180805sc-0480_1

Five years after Trump's JCPOA exit, Iran closer to bomb than ever

With President Biden seemingly now disinterested in this issue, perhaps it's time for Tehran's Arab neighbors to take over negotiations.

Analysis | Middle East

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.


President Donald J. Trump signs an Executive Order in Bedminster, New Jersey, entitled “Reimposing Certain Sanctions with Respect to Iran.” (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Analysis | Middle East
Trump ASEAN
Top photo credit: U.S. President Donald Trump looks at Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., next to Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim when posing for a family photo with leaders at the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, October 26, 2025. Vincent Thian/Pool via REUTERS

‘America First’ meets ‘ASEAN Way’ in Kuala Lumpur

Asia-Pacific

The 2025 ASEAN and East Asia Summits in Kuala Lumpur beginning today are set to be consequential multilateral gatherings — defining not only ASEAN’s internal cohesion but also the shape of U.S.–China relations in the Indo-Pacific.

President Donald Trump’s participation will be the first by a U.S. president in an ASEAN-led summit since 2022. President Biden skipped the last two such summits in 2023 and 2024, sending then-Vice President Harris instead.

keep readingShow less
iran, china, russia
Top photo credit: Top image credit: Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi shake hands as Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu looks on during their meet with reporters after their meeting at Diaoyutai State Guest House on March 14, 2025 in Beijing, China. Lintao Zhang/Pool via REUTERS

'Annulled'! Russia won't abide snapback sanctions on Iran

Middle East

“A raider attack on the U.N. Security Council.” This was the explosive accusation leveled by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov this week. His target was the U.N. Secretariat and Western powers, whom he blamed for what Russia sees as an illegitimate attempt to restore the nuclear-related international sanctions on Iran.

Beyond the fiery rhetoric, Ryabkov’s statement contained a message: Russia, he said, now considers all pre-2015 U.N. sanctions on Iran, snapped back by the European signatories of the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) — the United Kingdom, France, Germany — “annulled.” Moscow will deepen its military-technical cooperation with Tehran accordingly, according to Ryabkov.

This is more than a diplomatic spat; it is the formal announcement of a split in international legal reality. The world’s major powers are now operating under two irreconcilable interpretations of international law. On one side, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany assert that the sanctions snapback mechanism of the JCPOA was legitimately triggered for Iran’s alleged violations. On the other, Iran, Russia, and China reject this as an illegitimate procedural act.

This schism was not inevitable, and its origin reveals a profound incongruence. The Western powers that most frequently appeal to the sanctity of the "rules-based international order" and international law have, in this instance, taken an action whose effects fundamentally undermine it. By pushing through a legal maneuver that a significant part of the Security Council considers illegitimate, they have ushered the world into a new and more dangerous state. The predictable, if imperfect, framework of universally recognized Security Council decisions is being replaced by a system where legal facts are determined by political interests espoused by competing power blocs.

This rupture followed a deliberate Western choice to reject compromises in a stand-off with Iran. While Iran was in a technical violation of the provisions of the JCPOA — by, notably, amassing a stockpile of highly enriched uranium (up to 60% as opposed to the 3.67% for a civilian use permissible under the JCPOA), there was a chance to avert the crisis. In the critical weeks leading to the snapback, Iran had signaled concessions in talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Cairo, in terms of renewing cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog’s inspectors.

keep readingShow less
On Ukraine and Venezuela, Trump needs to dump the sycophants
Top Photo Credit: (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)

On Ukraine and Venezuela, Trump needs to dump the sycophants

Europe

While diplomats labored to produce the Dayton Accords in 1995, then-Secretary of Defense Bill Perry advised, “No agreement is better than a bad agreement.” Given that Washington’s allies in London, Paris, Berlin and Warsaw are opposed to any outcome that might end the war in Ukraine, no agreement may be preferable. But for President Trump, there is no point in equating the illusion of peace in Ukraine with a meaningless ceasefire that settles nothing.

Today, Ukraine is mired in corruption, starting at the very highest levels of the administration in Kyiv. Sending $175 billion of borrowed money there "for however long it takes" has turned out to be worse than reckless. The U.S. national sovereign debt is surging to nearly $38 trillion and rising by $425 billion with each passing month. President Trump needs to turn his attention away from funding Joe Biden’s wars and instead focus on the faltering American economy.

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.