Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Iran Nuclear deal)

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known informally as the Iran Deal, was an agreement reached between Iran and the six countries that negotiated it. These countries known as the P5+1, made up of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, China—plus Germany. The European Union and the United Nations also participated in the negotiations. The Iran Deal was a complex agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear weapons production capabilities over the next decade and more, in exchange for the gradual easing of economic and other sanctions. The deal was of interest as one of the most intricate and involved examples of a complicated aspect of international relations: nuclear arms control. It also spoke to the domestic politics of two of the nations most concerned by possible Iranian nuclear weapons, Israel and the United States. In 2018, the withdrawal of the US from the JCPOA complicated the agreement and made its future uncertain. Negotiations aimed at revising the deal continued during the early 2020s.

Background

The Iran Deal was finalized in July 2015 and took initial effect in October 2015, after the United States Congress failed to block it. The deal’s roots go back to the 1970s when the United States provided Iran, its ally at the time, with rudimentary nuclear technology under the Atoms for Peace Plan. This collaboration ended in 1979 when the Iranian Revolution deposed the pro-American shah (monarch) of Iran, the autocratic Mohammad Reza Shah, and instituted an Islamist regime under the Ayatollah Khomeini. (Note that the term Islamist, in its proper usage, refers to violent, expansionist nations and movements, not to the Islamic faith as a whole.)

Following the revolution, Iranian-American relations were frozen throughout the 1980s and 1990s as a result of a number of factors, including the US decision to grant the deposed shah asylum in the US; the hostage crisis, during which American diplomats and others were held by Iran for over a year, and the Iran-Iraq war, where the United States supported Iraq. A series of Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks on American forces and individuals further chilled relations, as did revelations of American covert and other activities in support of the Shah going as far back as the 1950s.

In the early twenty-first century, it became known that Iran was engaged in building a significant nuclear infrastructure: dozens of facilities, some buried deep underground, throughout the country. Iran denied any intention of acquiring nuclear weapons, and many felt that Iran had adopted a sensible policy of becoming a nuclear threshold state, lacking weapons but capable of producing them. Official and private estimates of this capability to go nuclear varied wildly, from years and months to, in some cases, weeks. In essence, no one knew.

American President Barack Obama decided that the way to deal with this emerging menace was via negotiation and what is known as rules-based international relations. He favored a multilateral approach. The November 2013 Joint Plan of Action provided an interim agreement. Nearly two years later, after marathon negotiations, plus revelations and speculations on all sides, the final agreement was reached.

Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Iran Nuclear deal) Overview

The agreement itself deals with the technical aspects of Iran’s nuclear program: issues such as degrees of enriched uranium, centrifuges, heavy water facilities, and the like. As inspections conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demonstrate compliance, economic and other sanctions are scheduled to be eased. However, it is far from clear that the inspection/verification regime outlined in the unclassified version of the JCPOA is adequate. The world now has over fifty years’ experience with nuclear arms control, and surveillance and sensor technologies have improved immeasurably. However, the deal does not allow for no-notice surprise inspections, especially of facilities as yet undiscovered. Indeed, critics hold that even if Iran abides scrupulously by the terms of the deal, they will still remain a nuclear threshold state, capable of producing weapons.

Further, critics note, the agreement deals only with the nuclear program and says nothing about Iranian development of ballistic missiles or other weapons and is silent on the matter of Iranian support for Islamist terrorism. In effect, those opposed argue, President Obama made drastic concessions while getting nothing very material in return.

As the final negotiations dragged on, amid conflicting pronouncements and rhetoric on all sides, within the United States, three positions emerged. These were held primarily by the political, policy, and academic elites involved; the American people as a whole seem not to have regarded the matter with any great concern.

Support for the deal was measured at best. Even President Obama portrayed it as a last best hope for avoiding possible regional, even global war, not as a miracle cure. Some supporters wondered aloud whether Obama and John Kerry, his secretary of state, had fallen prey to the "success of the talks" syndrome common among negotiators after extended and arduous talks and did not want to just walk away with nothing.

Opponents of the deal consisted almost entirely of President Obama’s Republican and conservative adversaries. Their rhetoric ranged from reasoned opposition to outright hysteria. Tens of millions of words were crafted and released into the debate via the think tanks and advocacy groups, the Internet, and well-funded opposition advertising campaigns. In the end, President Obama prevailed via a bit of political legerdemain. He decreed the JCPOA a nonbinding political commitment, not a treaty or formal international agreement, and thus not requiring Senate approval. He also indicated that he would veto any congressional resolution opposing the deal, and when it became apparent that he had the votes to sustain his veto, the opposition faltered and then collapsed.

The third set of opinions dealt with the effect of the deal on Israel, which has hinted repeatedly that it might bomb the Iranian nuclear program. Supporters of the deal suggested that this might be the real threat to peace; opponents saw no reason to believe that the deal would make Israeli action even more likely. In March 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the unprecedented step of addressing a joint session of Congress in order to oppose the policies of a sitting president. Among those who are neither hard-line conservatives nor hard-line Israel supporters, this left a certain distaste. Others saw Netanyahu’s nonconfrontational but resolute speech as a moment of moral clarity amid Obama’s ambiguity regarding the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran poses to the US, the Middle East, and the world.

After Republican president Donald Trump took office in 2017, he refused to recertify the deal, accusing Iran of violating the "spirit" of the agreement, though the IAEA stated that there was no evidence that Iran had taken any actions to develop any nuclear explosive device since 2009. Trump stated that he would leave it to Congress to decide whether to reimpose sanctions; the possibility that this might occur led to a drop in the value of Iran's currency. The other signatories to the agreement continued to support it, though in May 2018, following Trump's announcement of US withdrawal from the deal, Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, announced seven conditions for Iran to remain in the deal. These conditions mainly related to Europe maintaining commerce with Iran regardless of any pressure that the United States might place on European powers. By November, the United States had officially reinstated all of the sanctions that the deal had lifted in addition to imposing some new ones against targets such as financial institutions.

Over the following months, Iran's economy experienced severe constrictions and its currency dropped to some of its lowest values. In April 2019, the withdrawal by the United States of sanction waivers from five of Iran's biggest oil buyers was designed to further pressure Iran, which soon responded by announcing intentional, steady breaches of the deal, including exceeding the limits on enriched uranium stockpiles. It was reported that between November 2019 and March 2020, the country's stockpile had approximately tripled, and a greater number of centrifuges were in use even at prohibited sites such as its Fordow facility. At the same time, the IAEA claimed that Iran had blocked some access to inspection and had not disclosed all activities.

Though Democrat Joe Biden, who took over the presidency in January 2021 following the 2020 general election, began making efforts toward negotiations with Iran to bring the United States back into the deal, this resulted in an impasse when Iran required the United States to first lift its sanctions before beginning to reverse its violations. When formal talks between the signatories began in 2021, the United States could only participate indirectly. By May 2022 this new round of talks had stalled, at least in part due to opposition from some Republicans in US Congress who urged the Biden administration to oppose a renewed deal with Iran and keep existing sanctions in place. In July of that year the US issued a fresh round of sanctions on Iran and continued to classify the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a branch of the Iranian military, as a terrorist organization. This terrorist classification drew criticism from Iran and became an additional obstacle to negotiations.

Negotiations, as well as inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities, continued throughout 2023 and 2024. By September 2023 observers reported that the different parties were close to finalizing a deal, although this ultimately fell through. By that time, Western negotiators had also expressed concerns over human rights abuses committed in Iran by the Iranian government, as well as Iran's alleged supplying of military drones to Russia following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also reported that its observers had been prevented from carrying out comprehensive inspections in Iran, and in early 2023 reported that it had discovered uranium particles that Iran had enriched to 83.7 percent. Weapons-grade uranium is enriched to 90 percent, which led investigators to express concerns, although the IAEA later accepted the Iranian government's justification for its supply of this highly enriched uranium.

The pursuit of a renewed and comprehensive diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear program was further complicated by the outbreak of war in Gaza in October 2023 between Israel, a longtime adversary of Iran, and Hamas, a Palestinian political and military organization which controlled Gaza, enjoyed backing from the Iranian government, and was designated a terrorist group by Israel, the US, and a number of other countries. This war had begun in October 2023 following a series of Hamas terrorist attacks on military and civilian targets in Israel and prompted a massive Israeli military response, including widespread bombardments of Gaza and a ground invasion of the territory. By April 2024 over 31,000 Palestinians, many of them civilians, had been killed.

The Israel-Hamas War spilled into neighboring countries as other groups backed by Iran, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, periodically exchanged fire with the Israeli military. This long-running proxy war between Iran and its enemies in the Middle East escalated into direct conflict with Israel in April 2024 after Israel killed several Iranian military officials with an airstrike on the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus, Syria. In response, Iran fired hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. Although the attack was signaled in advance and apparently designed to allow Israel and its allies to shoot down nearly all of the Iranian projectiles, this confrontation raised concerns over a wider war breaking out between Israel and Iran.

These increased tensions, combined with the failure to successfully reach a new or revised deal with Iran regarding the country's nuclear program following the 2018 US withdrawal from the JCPOA, led some observers to speculate that Iran could double down on its pursuit of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. By that time, Iran had increased its stockpiles of uranium fuel and other nuclear weapon components, according to reports from international teams who inspected Iranian facilities, although observers noted that the country did not appear to have plans to build an actual nuclear weapon. Still, in the aftermath of the April 2024 confrontation with Israel, some Iranian officials publicly advocated for rethinking some aspects of the country's nuclear strategy. In May 2024, amid rising concerns over ongoing nuclear enrichment in Iran, Rafael Mariano Grossi, the head of the IAEA, planned a visit to Iran.

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