Eight years ago, President Donald Trump took the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known more commonly as the Iran nuclear deal. In the years since, half of Washington has continued to argue that the JCPOA was “the best possible deal,” with the other half maintaining that “there was a better deal.” It has been the background music to every twist and turn in U.S. Iran policy since 2018 but has come to the fore again since Trump launched Operation Epic Fury.
Supporters of the JCPOA have argued that if the United States had remained in the deal, the Iranian nuclear program would have been limited and under international inspection, making the current war and its attendant economic costs unnecessary and unjustified.
Eight years ago, President Donald Trump took the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known more commonly as the Iran nuclear deal. In the years since, half of Washington has continued to argue that the JCPOA was “the best possible deal,” with the other half maintaining that “there was a better deal.” It has been the background music to every twist and turn in U.S. Iran policy since 2018 but has come to the fore again since Trump launched Operation Epic Fury.
Supporters of the JCPOA have argued that if the United States had remained in the deal, the Iranian nuclear program would have been limited and under international inspection, making the current war and its attendant economic costs unnecessary and unjustified.
It’s no surprise, given the partisan divide, that many people want to say, “We told you so!” But are they right? It is worth meditating on a world in which Trump had stayed in the JCPOA and asking whether it is better than the one in which we live. Understanding the counterfactual helps policymakers understand the prevailing assumptions of both sides in the JCPOA.
So, is the world in which the nuclear agreement remains in place, with about four years left until the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear work end, superior to the present reality? I’d say sort of, kind of, but not necessarily.
After reading the JCPOA twice, two things were clear to me: First, there is a reason why I withdrew from physics in high school. Second, the logic of the deal only really made sense in light of U.S. officials’ belief that the agreement could catalyze a more constructive relationship with the Islamic Republic.
At the time, U.S. President Barack Obama and his team denied that the JCPOA was anything but an arms control agreement. But they subsequently revealed their belief that the deal would have salutary effects on Iran’s international conduct, its domestic politics, and relations with the United States. Discussing the deal with the New York Times Magazine in 2016, U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes explained:
It’s the possibility of improved relations with adversaries. It’s nonproliferation. So all these threads that the president’s been spinning—and I mean that not in the press sense—for almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.
The logic seemed to be the same as U.S. President George H.W. Bush’s “goodwill begets goodwill” but put into practice. And there is some evidence to support Rhodes’s contention. Not long before the implementation of the JCPOA, two U.S. Navy patrol boats drifted into Iran’s territorial waters. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) apprehended the sailors aboard. They were released after 15 hours during which Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Secretary of State John Kerry directly negotiated their release in a number of phone calls. And, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which was empowered to monitor the JCPOA, the Iranian regime adhered to the deal. That does seem like a better world than one with war and Iran’s post-2018 race to enrich uranium (most of which occurred after 2021).
Still, the JCPOA left partially addressed or unaddressed a thorny set of issues, largely in hopes that they could be settled as the U.S.-Iranian relationship improved. The first issue revolved around how to handle sites where Iran was suspected of conducting nuclear work but that were not under the IAEA’s continuous monitoring. Here, the JCPOA had a cumbersome dispute resolution process that, despite the Iranian regime’s concerns, still would have been sufficiently flexible to help them avoid accountability. If the IAEA had concerns about what the Iranians were doing at such a site, it could request clarification. If the inspectors were not satisfied, the IAEA could take the issue to what was called the Joint Commission for consultation. The process could take up to 24 days, sufficient time for Tehran to conceal any of its questionable activities.
The more important issue, though, was what would happen after the limits on Iran’s nuclear program expired, specifically the restrictions on uranium enrichment that ended in 2030.
Advocates for the deal tend to hand-wave about follow-on diplomatic agreements or assert that Iran, having realized the benefits of the JCPOA, might not have wanted to proceed with its nuclear program. Writing in the Atlantic in 2017, Philip Gordon, Obama’s former coordinator for the Middle East, and Richard Nephew, a member of the team that negotiated the JCPOA, made this case:
If, by 2030, Iran has not demonstrated that its nuclear program is exclusively peaceful and that it is willing to live in peace with its neighbors, the United States and its international partners will have difficult decisions to make about how to handle the issue going forward. But since there is a chance that Iran will have different leaders or policies by then—the current Supreme Leader will almost certainly be gone, and a new generation may have come to power—why make those difficult decisions now? The Iran deal has bought valuable time. Squandering that time without a better plan would be foolish.
In their article, Gordon and Nephew articulated what essentially they hoped would happen as a result of the agreement. There was no evidence the Iranians shared this hope.
It thus seems that there is a world in which Trump sticks with JCPOA but after its clauses sunset, the Iranians go back to their nuclear work unimpeded. The counterargument is that the same pressures that produced the JCPOA could be brought to bear to secure follow-on agreements that would continue to restrict Iran’s nuclear program. Fair enough. But it seems unlikely that Europe, China, and Russia would be willing to renew sanctions on Tehran after a 15-year business bonanza with the regime. As for Iran’s leaders, they did not invest in a nuclear program and develop a scientific bureaucracy to support it to continue to accept restrictions. It is more likely that they regarded the JCPOA as a one-time diplomatic agreement that gave them resources without ever having to give up the nuclear program—a win. Even if the other parties to the JCPOA could muster the willingness to renew sanctions on Tehran, the regime would likely opt to resist. After all, nuclear capability is the best to ward off foreigners bent on regime change.
In the 15 years between the JCPOA’s implementation and its sunset, the Islamic Republic would have enjoyed sanctions relief, the proceeds of which Obama and his advisors hoped would go to the benefit of the Iranian people. Yet knowing what we do about the IRGC, that is a low-probability outcome. Instead, the money would likely have gone to the IRGC and its pet projects, including sowing chaos around the Middle East.
There is no doubt that had Trump adhered to the JCPOA, Iran’s nuclear work would have been delayed. Yet the country would have retained its nuclear knowledge and ambitions, ready to pick up where it left off when the deal expired.
That is certainly not the aimless war that we have today and all its economic consequences, but it is basically the 2015 world. Gordon and Nephew imply that the JCPOA bought “valuable time.” Yes, Iran would not have the 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium that it now possesses, but it seems likely that it would have started enriching once the JCPOA’s restrictions sunsetted in 2030.
The world in which Trump stayed in the JCPOA is no better for the Iranian people than the one in which we live. It is a tough call because Iranians have suffered greatly from maximum pressure and most supported the deal, hoping for better times. They didn’t get them, however. Even with the benefits of sanctions relief, the regime continued its ferocious repression and failed to use the money that flowed into its coffers constructively. For another not insignificant number of Iranians who want nothing more than for the Islamic Republic to collapse, the JCPOA did not help their cause. It was quite the opposite—a boon to an awful regime.
To supporters of the agreement, the world would be a better place if Trump had stuck to it. Maybe, but this conclusion is based on a set of defective U.S. assumptions about Iran. That world would still be fraught and struggling to manage Iran’s nuclear ambitions and predatory policies both at home and in the wider Middle East.
That does not mean war is the superior policy. In my view, there was a better alternative to both the deal and the current conflict: a policy of deterrence and containment that took regime change off the table—thereby mitigating a source of instability—but still used the threat of military action to keep the Iranian regime in check and economic tools to make proliferation as difficult as possible.
That may well be our post-Epic Fury reality, but a lot of unnecessary damage has already been done.