With the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran, the real negotiations over a new nuclear deal have begun. The article argues that this comes eight years after Donald Trump left the previous agreement, calling it “stupid,” “rotten” and “embarrassing,” and now appears to be seeking a new understanding with Tehran on the same issue. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the main difference is that “we did it from a position of strength.”
To explain what is at stake, the piece reviews the road to the 2015 deal. According to Dr. Shuki Friedman, Iran’s nuclear sites at Arak and Natanz were exposed in 2002 as facilities Western experts believed were designed to enable nuclear weapons capability. Iran then signed the IAEA Additional Protocol in 2003, accepted tighter monitoring, and in 2004 agreed to stop uranium enrichment. After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005, Iran pulled back from those commitments and accelerated its program, prompting sanctions starting in 2006. The UN Security Council focused mainly on the nuclear project, while the European Union, the United States and Israel targeted the Iranian economy, which Friedman says pushed Tehran toward talks and concessions.
The JCPOA was signed in 2013 as an interim deal, then finalized after lengthy negotiations between Iran and the five permanent UN Security Council members, the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain, plus Germany. Under it, Iran cut its stockpile of unenriched uranium from 10,000 kilograms to 300, limited enrichment to 3.67 percent, capped centrifuges at 6,104, shut down advanced centrifuges, and accepted intrusive IAEA inspections and a return to the NPT protocol. Those limits were meant to last 10 to 15 years, while sanctions were lifted gradually. The deal also included a snapback mechanism, which Britain, France and Germany later used in 2025 to restore UN sanctions.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led the opposition, warning the agreement would give Iran “hundreds of billions of dollars” and remove incentives for it to change behavior. Friedman said the main flaw was that it was short term and left the world uncertain about what would happen once the limits expired. Trump later withdrew the U.S. from the accord after arguing Iran was still seeking a bomb, and in 2020 he tried to trigger snapback himself. Analysts cited in the article say Iran responded by reducing cooperation with inspections and, by 2019, had begun violating the agreement.
