Biden administration unable to put Iran nuclear deal back together

President Joe Biden didn't achieve his goal of rejoining a nuclear agreement with Iran.

"It is an unfulfilled pledge, though to be fair, it takes two to tango," meaning the United States and Iran, said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a group monitoring efforts to reduce nuclear weapons.

Then-President Barack Obama forged the 2015 agreement with Iran and the international powers China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the U.S. and the European Union. Iran agreed to caps on uranium enrichment — a precursor to nuclear weapons — and limits on how much nuclear material it could stockpile. Iran also curtailed its use of advanced centrifuges for enriching uranium. In exchange, it was free of most international trade sanctions.

But after winning election in 2016, Donald Trump, backed by many Republicans who never liked the deal, unilaterally exited it in May 2018 and reimposed sanctions. The U.S. exit made the agreement essentially nonfunctional. Trump had promised to "renegotiate" the deal to be tougher on Iran, but he never did so, despite tweeting optimistically, as late as June 2020, that he could renegotiate it.

Despite its desire to reconstitute the deal, Biden's administration expressed frustration with Iran, over its human rights record. 

"The Iranians have made very clear that this is not a deal that they have been prepared to make," U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said Oct. 12, 2022. "A deal certainly does not appear imminent. Iran's demands are unrealistic; they go well beyond the scope of the" 2015 agreement.

Global events also scuttled the deal. Russia's invasion of Ukraine made any united front between Russia and western nations unlikely, and China and the U.S. have been increasingly at odds. Then came the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks against Israel, a U.S. ally, by Hamas, which Iran has long supported.

"The Iranians were unwilling to return to the deal," said Matthew Kroenig, a Georgetown University government and foreign service professor. "Instead, they ramped up their nuclear program, and now they are closer than ever to a bomb."

The overall experience of the Iran nuclear deal "demonstrated the limitations of transactional bargaining," an Arms Control Association analysis concluded, adding that there's an increasing risk of other nations in the region considering pursuing their own nuclear weapons. "The United States should be thinking now about alternative frameworks for negotiating a longer-term nuclear deal, or series of deals, that take into account Iran's nuclear advances and mitigate regional proliferation risks."

The Biden administration couldn't resurrect the Iran nuclear deal. We rate this Promise Broken.