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Ending the Costly, Unnecessary Iran War Is the Right Thing. Period.
The task now is not to reward Trump politically, nor to excuse the recklessness that produced this war. It is to prevent the war from returning.
Jun 18, 2026
I have spent years fighting against President Donald Trump’s push toward war with Iran, and I have the scars to prove it. When Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, in 2018, I warned that it would eventually bring us to this moment. Ever since, I have consistently argued against the confrontational path he set the United States on. That record speaks for itself, which is why I can say what follows without any throat clearing.
Given the circumstances, President Trump’s decision to strike a deal with Tehran and bring this costly, unnecessary war to an end is the right one. It deserves support, not partisan second-guessing. As Rob Malley—a key member of Barack Obama’s team that negotiated the nuclear deal and later Joe Biden’s lead negotiator with Iran—noted on X, comparing Trump’s memorandum of understanding to Obama’s JCPOA misses the point. What matters is not how the agreement stacks up against past diplomatic achievements, but how it compares to the alternatives before us. And on that score, Malley argued, the MOU is “far preferable to any of the alternatives on offer. Period.”
I would go further. To examine the Memorandum of Understanding and ask, “Was the war worth it?” is nonsensical.
Of course it wasn’t. How could it have been? The premise itself is deeply flawed: that a failed war of choice would somehow strengthen Washington’s hand at the negotiating table and produce more favorable terms. History offers little support for such a proposition.
Trump currently owns this failed war, but if the Democrats help torpedo the MOU and war resumes, then they will co-own the next war. Trump’s disaster will become theirs as well.
The question is also flawed in another, more consequential way. It implies that a war should not be brought to an end until it has produced better terms—even when the war itself is failing.
Taken seriously, that logic leads to a dangerous conclusion: that a failed war must continue until the battlefield fortunes somehow improve and a more favorable outcome becomes attainable. Perhaps that day will come. Perhaps it never will. In the meantime, the costs—in lives, treasure, regional stability, and strategic credibility—are treated as secondary considerations.
This is how endless wars are born.
Wars become interminable when leaders convince themselves that ending them without victory is politically more costly than continuing them without hope. Once that trap is sprung, every setback becomes an argument for one more deployment, one more escalation, one more year. The objective shifts from achieving a realistic political outcome to avoiding the admission that the original objectives were unattainable.
American history offers more than a few examples. Presidents inherit wars they did not start, recognize they cannot be won on the promised terms, yet lack the political space to end them. So they postpone the reckoning. They kick the can down the road, handing the burden to their successor, who does the same. The result is a cycle of strategic drift in which the costs accumulate while the prospects for success steadily recede.
When victory is nowhere in sight, prolonging a conflict in the hope that reality will eventually conform to political rhetoric is not resolve. It is denial.
Remember Afghanistan. For years, American officials lied to the public that victory was just around the corner—six months away, perhaps a year at most. Yet the Afghanistan Papers later revealed that these officials privately understood that victory was nowhere in sight. They knew the war was adrift, but feared the political consequences of admitting it.
So the war continued. By the time the United States finally withdrew, nearly two decades had passed, and more than $2 trillion had been spent.
And what was the end result? After 20 years of war, thousands of American and allied lives lost, and hundreds of thousands of Afghan casualties, the United States arrived back where it had begun: it had replaced the Taliban with the Taliban.
That is the curse of endless war. The refusal to accept an unfavorable reality today merely guarantees a higher bill tomorrow.
Some credit must be given to Trump for breaking this pattern, even as he should be blamed for having started this war in the first place. Political leaders should be judged not only for the mistakes they make, but also for whether they have the courage to correct them.
Trump could have followed the well-worn path of his predecessors. He could have prolonged the conflict, spent more money, sacrificed more lives, destabilized more economies, and further depleted American power—all while insisting that victory remained just over the horizon. Recall the countless times he declared that the war had been won.
Indeed, the political costs of continuing the war would likely have been lower than the costs he is paying today for ending it. In American politics, there is often greater punishment for acknowledging failure than for perpetuating it.
That perverse incentive has trapped presidents for decades. In his testimony on the Vietnam War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, George Kennan stated the following: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of the world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound policies than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”
The criticism coming from some Democrats is particularly disappointing because it echoes the same bad-faith tactics Republicans deployed against the JCPOA in 2015. To be sure, Trump has invited some of this treatment. He spent years attacking Obama’s agreement with a barrage of misleading arguments and exaggerated claims.
But that does not make it wise for Democrats to return the favor.
Trump currently owns this failed war, but if the Democrats help torpedo the MOU and war resumes, then they will co-own the next war. Trump’s disaster will become theirs as well.
This isn’t rocket science. Several Democratic lawmakers have managed to criticize the war, hold Trump accountable for it, yet avoid attack lines that could sabotage the MOU. Their criticisms are primarily over Trump having started this war in the first place, rather than the terms for ending it.
Rather than attacking the terms of the MOU, Democrats should pressure the administration to protect it from those who are determined to see it fail. The main external threat is the Israeli government and Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsession with sabotaging any opportunity for Iran and the United States to bury the hatchet.
Instead of relying solely on angry phone calls and public rebukes of Netanyahu, supporters of ending the war should press Trump to act now: Suspend military aid to Israel and curtail military and intelligence cooperation. Such measures would limit Israel’s ability to reignite the conflict and dispel any notion in Tel Aviv that Washington will automatically follow Israel into another war. If Israeli leaders understand that the United States will not be drawn into a future conflict on their behalf, their incentive to start one in the first place will be significantly reduced.
The task now is not to reward Trump politically, nor to excuse the recklessness that produced this war. It is to prevent the war from returning. Democrats can condemn the decision to start it without sabotaging the agreement that ends it. They can hold Trump accountable without helping Netanyahu drag the United States back into conflict. The choice before them is not between opposing Trump and supporting peace. It is between learning from America’s endless wars and repeating them.
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There Is No Military Solution to the Middle East's Political Issues
As difficult as it may be to imagine it now, what will be required is to work toward a regional security framework built on non-aggression, non-interference, and respect for the sovereignty of all states, and an end to the Israeli occupation and denial of Palestinian rights.
Jun 08, 2026
Back when the Obama administration was negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran, I asked National Security Council officials, “Why are you expending all of your economic leverage, and political and diplomatic resources on stopping Iran from developing a bomb they don’t have (and even if they did, could never use), while these same resources could be mobilized to pressure Iran to end its meddlesome behaviors that are destabilizing countries across the region?”
Despite this reservation, when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was announced, I supported it for three reasons. First, “the nuclear deal” was a negotiated settlement, which is always better than conflict. And despite White House spokespeople saying otherwise, Catherine Ashton, a top British diplomat involved in the negotiations, offered assurances that the deal was only a first step and that Iran’s behaviors would be next on the agenda. My hope was that sane minds would prevail and the initiated process might lead to a regional security compact and framework for peace.
The second reason was the way Republicans were working overtime to sabotage the agreement. It was unconscionable that they invited a foreign leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to address a joint session of Congress to urge members of Congress to vote against their own president. That was unacceptable interference in US politics.
The third (and maybe most unexpected) reason was the reaction to the JCPOA inside Iran. In a poll we conducted months after the deal was announced, we found a significant change in Iranian public opinion. Our earlier polls had demonstrated Iranians largely in favor of the regime’s spending money on allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. With the hint of peace, Iranians turned their priorities inward, with declining support for the regime’s foreign involvements. Instead of resources going abroad, Iranians wanted them to be used at home to create employment and opportunity. They also elevated their demands for greater personal freedom and political rights.
A decade after the JCPOA, the Middle East and the Gulf region are in a more precarious place than ever.
When, after Donald Trump’s election, he cancelled the Iran deal and began threatening the regime, we repeated the poll. The results had reverted. When citizens feel their country is being threatened, they tend to be less critical or to “rally around the flag.”
In the ensuing years, amid continuing signs of hostility from all sides—US, Israel, and Iran—the situation has shown no promise of improvement. Despite promising a better agreement, Trump did nothing more than deepen the animosity. The Biden administration was handed the thankless task of bringing a dead deal back to life—a task to which they never appeared to be fully committed. For its part, Iran continued to behave as a bad regional actor, all the while making threats and building its military capabilities.
Left on their own, the Arab Gulf states sought to create stability out of the possibility of chaos with which they were forced to contend. Unlike Iran, which had decided to use its wealth to export its influence and its anti-Western ideology, the Arab Gulf states had taken a different path, focusing on development, tourism, and trade. Their continued prosperity required a stable regional environment. And so, amid the tensions between the US and Israel and Iran, these Arab states made diplomatic and economic overtures to Iran, hoping for a more secure environment in the Gulf. They even hoped that the lure of joint prosperity and security might move the Iranians to join them in pursuing a more stable and prosperous future and convince the Israelis to resolve the longstanding wound of Palestinian dispossession and occupation, fostering conditions for regional peace. There was to be no such luck!
Israel wanted the economic benefits of regional peace but was unwilling to play its part. It intensified its occupation and the repression and strangulation of Palestinians. Then came October 7, and the region exploded. In short order, as Israel was pursuing a genocidal war in Gaza, Iran’s ally in Lebanon became engaged in a fateful and costly exchange with Israel in the north, a miscalculation with devastating consequences. The Israelis launched a deadly bombing campaign killing thousands of Lebanese, including Hezbollah’s leader. Months later, Israel and the US attacked Iran and killed Iran’s spiritual leader. Iran returned fire setting off a broader confrontation.
Negotiations produced what were called “cease fires” during which Palestinian and Lebanese death tolls continued to mount. When, egged on by Israel and Republican neocons, President Trump decided to “finish the job” by defeating the Iranian regime, the conflict took on a new character. Iran intensified its attacks on neighboring Arab Gulf states that housed US bases and closed the Straits of Hormuz, cutting off 20% of the world’s oil and gas supplies and negatively impacting the Gulf region’s economies.
Reading some of the Israeli, Arab, and US press is enough to make one pull out one’s hair. Some Israeli commentators from the far-right (and their American neocon acolytes) remain convinced that all that’s needed is another massive bombing campaign, coupled with yet a few more “targeted assassinations”—as if those tactics, which Israel has used repeatedly, will be any more successful than they’ve been in the past.
Meanwhile, hard-line Arab opinion writers celebrate the “brilliance” of Iranian tactics. It’s hard to see how incurring the enmity of their neighbors and putting their own and the region’s economic futures at risk can be construed as anything but reckless.
The US media is even more confounding, with its apparent addiction to breathlessly and uncritically following the barrage of confusing and contradictory posts coming from the president.
And so, a decade after the JCPOA, the Middle East and the Gulf region are in a more precarious place than ever. Although the situation is far more complicated than a decade ago, and the enmity on all sides so much deeper, the way forward is recognition that piecemeal approaches to the region, playing whack-a-mole, have only made the region less secure.
As difficult as it may be to imagine it now, what will be required is to work toward a regional security framework built on non-aggression, non-interference, and respect for the sovereignty of all states, and an end to the Israeli occupation and denial of Palestinian rights. This entails the recognition that there are no military solutions to the region’s political issues. In fact, each round of violence only exacerbates existing problems. It’s a tall order requiring leadership that is smart, courageous, and visionary. That may not exist today, but it’s necessary—and it’s the goal toward which we must direct our efforts.
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A Memorial Day Reminder: Not One Post-9/11 War Has Been Worth It
Our leaders continue to spend money on wars they think will make the United States the undisputed power in the world—wars that instead kill millions of people abroad, endanger US troops, and make life harder at home.
May 25, 2026
As Memorial Day approached, polls showed nearly two-thirds of US voters oppose the war against Iran. They’re right. After decades of war since 9/11, Americans now largely agree: War isn’t worth it.
The Iran war has killed thousands of Iranians and Lebanese and displaced hundreds of thousands more. People in poor countries around the world are facing fuel shortages, power outages, and food insecurity, with much worse to come.
Here in the United States, the war has already cost more than $50 billion, and the cost is only going up—not just at the gas pump but in opportunity. For that $50 billion, we could have paid for healthcare for 3 million people in this country and gotten about 1.5 million kids into Head Start, according to the Institute for Policy Studies National Priorities Project.
Which makes us safer?
For the $16 trillion the US had spent on the military after 9/11 before the Iran war, we could have made transformative investments in healthcare, education, and renewable energy.
President Donald Trump would like us to believe that no price is too high to stop Iran’s “nuclear threat.” But Iran isn’t a nuclear threat. Year after year, including 2026, US intelligence agencies agreed that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.
In 2015, Iran agreed to cut its stockpile of enriched uranium, reduce its reactors, and submit to unprecedentedly intrusive United Nations inspections. The United States, in return, agreed to end many of the sanctions that were crippling Iran’s economy.
It worked. Intelligence agencies around the world, including in the United States, agreed that Iran was complying. UN inspectors kept a watchful eye on Iran’s reactors, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz flowed freely, and Iran was still not trying to build a nuclear weapon, maintaining that a bomb would violate Islamic law.
However, Trump tore up the agreement in 2018. He didn’t pretend Iran was violating it; he just claimed he could “get a better deal.” He couldn’t.
Instead, Trump joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ratcheted up threats against Iran. Eventually, those threats turned into reality—first in a short-term bombing campaign in June 2025 and then a full-scale US-Israeli war this year.
Despite repeated ceasefire declarations and claims from the White House that “we’ve won,” the war continues months later. Thousands are dead, gas prices are shockingly high, and the Strait of Hormuz (which was running fine before Trump trampled the nuclear deal) remains largely closed.
It’s easy to say that diplomacy works and war does not. That’s not just a statement of principle—it’s the truth.
Diplomacy is the only strategy that’s ever worked to change Iran’s behavior. It wasn’t because the US asked nicely. It was because the US negotiated seriously; changed its own aggressive behavior; and stopped using its economic, political, and strategic power as acts of war against Iran.
Is this war worth the human, economic, or environmental costs? Clearly not. You could say the same of Trump’s other second-term conflicts—including his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and his attacks on Somalia, Yemen, Venezuela, and Nigeria.
In fact, today most Americans would agree that none of the major wars in this country’s recent memory have been worthwhile—not in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iraq again.
For the $16 trillion the US had spent on the military after 9/11 before the Iran war, we could have made transformative investments in healthcare, education, and renewable energy. We could have erased student debt and virtually wiped out child poverty at home and globally.
Instead, our leaders continue to spend money on wars they think will make the United States the undisputed power in the world—wars that instead kill millions of people abroad, endanger US troops, and make life harder at home.
Veterans know this. “The US has been at war in one form or another since my deployment in the Persian Gulf, 36 years ago,” said Michael McPhearson, executive director of Veterans for Peace.
“Trillions of tax dollars spent, thousands of US military service members dead, and tens of thousands wounded. The toll on the rest of the world is even more staggering, while warmongers and those who send us to war get richer,” he added.
“It’s time to invest in people and life and stop spending money on death and destruction,” McPhearson said.
I agree—and so do most Americans.
This piece was originally published in DC Journal.
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Trump (and Biden) Could Have Forestalled War With Iran If They Wanted
There appears to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington against universal law-based approaches to nuclear nonproliferation through diplomacy in favor of unilateral military action.
Jun 20, 2025
The unprovoked attack by Israel against Iran and the tragic war that has resulted could have been avoided back in 2017 had President Donald Trump not broken off the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA—commonly known as the “Iran Nuclear Deal”—and if President Joe Biden hadn’t refused to return to it.
The agreement—signed by Iran, the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China, and approved by the United Nations—reduced Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile by 98% and restricted the level of enrichment to 3.67%. Given that an enrichment level of 90% is needed to build a nuclear bomb, it made it impossible for Iran’s uranium to be weaponized.
Under the deal, Iran also reduced its number of centrifuges (used to enrich uranium) to a little more than 5,000, which is far below the number that would be needed to achieve anything close to the 90% level. Additionally, the agreement prevented Iran from commissioning its Arak reactor, which is capable of producing plutonium, and restricted research and development activities in other nuclear facilities. It also cut off all of Iran’s other potential pathways to obtaining a nuclear weapon.
In effect, the United States is demanding a kind of nuclear apartheid, where allied governments can develop nuclear weapons in defiance of international law while supporting the use of military force against countries like Iran which simply have the potential to develop nuclear weapons.
In short, the agreement made it physically impossible for Iran to build a single atomic bomb. The agreement also imposed one of the most rigorous inspection regimes in history, with international inspectors monitoring Iran’s nuclear program at every stage: uranium mining and milling, conversion, enrichment, fuel manufacturing, nuclear reactors, and spent fuel, as well as any site—military or civilian—they considered suspicious.
There were no requirements that Israel, Pakistan, India, the United States, or any other nuclear power reduce their arsenals in return. Iran agreed to this one-sided proposal only in return for some relief of draconian sanctions that had been imposed, with U.S. encouragement, by the international community. When Trump broke the agreement in 2018 and reimposed sanctions—essentially forcing other nations to do so as well under threat of punishing any company or government that refused, resulting in devastating impacts on the Iranian economy—Iran no longer had any obligation or incentive to remain in compliance. While all the evidence seems to indicate that Iran’s nuclear program thus far is only for civilian purposes such as medicine and energy production, the abrogation of the agreement has allowed the country to process uranium to a level that today could potentially be diverted to military applications if Iran decided to go in that direction.
Trump insisted at the time that he could somehow make a better deal, but did not make any serious attempt to do so. In my 2019 meeting in Tehran with then-Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, he described how the JCPOA was the result of a decade of posturing and two years of intense, painstaking negotiations, during which he and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met no fewer than 50 times to hammer out every line of the agreement. It is doubtful that Trump was ever serious about a negotiated settlement, preferring to set up talks which appear to have lulled Iran into thinking its military leaders and scientists were not at risk and thereby leaving them vulnerable to Israel’s initial devastating surprise attack.
In short, if Trump was really concerned about Iran getting a nuclear bomb, he would not have ended the agreement. And if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was really concerned about that possibility, he wouldn’t have supported Trump’s doing so.
So, Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Iran is not actually about stopping Iran from potentially developing a nuclear weapon. Indeed, Israeli strikes have been hitting scores of sites completely unrelated to Iran’s nuclear industry—including the studios of the national television station. It would appear to primarily be about weakening its stronger regional rival. As unpopular as the autocratic regime in Iran is among the Iranian people, they are uniting in opposition to the devastating attacks on their cities.
While some congressional Democrats have spoken out against any direct U.S. involvement in the war, their leaders have been lining up in support of Trump and Netanyahu. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who once opposed the JCPOA, insisted that, despite the fact that Israel started the war, “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Just over a week ago, he was criticizing Trump for even engaging in negotiations with Iran.
Similarly, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has refused to criticize the Israeli attack or call for a return to the JCPOA, echoing his 2023 statement: “Our commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad.” Although Iran has no capability of striking anywhere outside of the Middle East, Jeffries claimed, “The Iranian regime poses a grave threat to the entire free world.”
Other Democrats have also rushed to Netanyahu’s defense, with Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania posting on social media, “I fully support this attack. Keep wiping out Iranian leadership and the nuclear personnel. We must provide whatever is necessary—military, intelligence, weaponry—to fully back Israel in striking Iran.” Meanwhile, Representative Richie Torres of New York insisted on X, “Israel is not the aggressor. It is defending itself.”
This U.S.-backed war of aggression could push the regime to actually move towards developing nuclear weapons as a deterrent against future attacks.
These politicians have not taken such positions due to political pressure. A May 2025 poll regarding Iran’s nuclear program showed fewer than 15% of Americans, including less than a quarter of Republicans and only 5% of Democrats, supported military action. Overwhelming majorities of Americans have long preferred diplomacy.
Despite this, there appears to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington against universal law-based approaches to nuclear nonproliferation through diplomacy in favor of unilateral military action.
For example, Iran and many Arab states have gone on record supporting the establishment of a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone (NWFZ) for the entire Middle East, similar to already-existing NWFZs in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and Antarctica. The leadership of both political parties in Washington, however, have consistently opposed this, since it would require Israel to rid itself of its nuclear arsenal and prohibit the United States from bringing nuclear weapons into the region on its planes and ships.
Despite trying to justify targeting Iran due to its violations of U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolutions regarding its nuclear program, the United States has blocked the United Nations from enforcing UNSC resolution 487, which requires Israel to place its nuclear facilities under the trusteeship of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
UNSC resolution 687, which laid out the international community’s demands for Iraqi disarmament in 1991, also called for “establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery.” Though Iraq was in full compliance of this resolution, as noted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the time, the Bush administration’s false claims they were not were used as an excuse to invade and occupy that oil-rich country in 2003.
Another United Nations agreement, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), normally allows countries to reprocess uranium, though the IAEA put special restrictions on Iran as punishment for not reporting certain research back in the 1990s. What few American politicians are willing to acknowledge, however, is that the NPT—in addition to preventing new countries from developing nuclear weapons—requires the existing nuclear powers “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” In other words, the United States—along with other nuclear powers—are themselves in defiance of the NPT.
In effect, the United States is demanding a kind of nuclear apartheid, where allied governments can develop nuclear weapons in defiance of international law while supporting the use of military force against countries like Iran which simply have the potential to develop nuclear weapons.
This will not prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Indeed, given that it is highly unlikely that Israel can completely destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities or kill all of its scientists, this U.S.-backed war of aggression could push the regime to actually move towards developing nuclear weapons as a deterrent against future attacks, which until now it has refrained from doing. They can only compare the fates of Iraq, which disarmed as required but was invaded anyway, with the regime in North Korea, which developed nuclear weapons and is still in power.
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Not Just Progressives: Over Half of Trump Voters Oppose US War on Iran
A majority of respondents across all gender, race, age, and income categories don't want military action against Iran.
Jun 17, 2025
While it is widely known that American progressives overwhelmingly oppose the war on Iran at which President Donald Trump is increasingly hinting, new polling published Tuesday revealed that a thin majority of respondents who voted for the Republican president are also against U.S. involvement in the widening Israel-Iran war.
According to the Economist/YouGov survey of 1,512 U.S. adults conducted between June 13-16, 60% of all respondents oppose U.S. involvement in the war, while just 16% supported military action and 24% were unsure. Among those who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris for president last year, 71% opposed war on Iran.
So did 53% of Trump voters. In fact, a majority of respondents across all gender, race, age, and income categories opposed military action against Iran.
NEW Economist/YouGov Jun 13-16: Israel-Iran% who think the U.S. military should | shouldn't get involved in the conflict between Israel and IranU.S. adult citizens 16% | 60%Democrats 15% | 65%Independents 11% | 61%Republicans 23% | 53%today.yougov.com/politics/art...
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— YouGov America (@today.yougov.com) June 17, 2025 at 12:44 PM
The survey also found that more Republican-identified respondents supported U.S. negotiations with Iran than did Democrats, 61% to 58%. Fifty-six percent of all those surveyed back talks, while 18% oppose negotiations.
Reflecting disenchantment among people who voted for Trump because they believed his claim to be a "peace president," Trump's favorite pollster, Rich Baris, director of Big Data Poll—who calls neoconservative Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) "war whores"—warned of dire electoral consequences should the U.S. go to war.
The National Iranian American Council also partnered with YouGov to ask 585 Iranian Americans how they feel about a possible U.S. war on Iran. Fifty-three percent of overall respondents said they "strongly" or "somewhat oppose" such action, while 36% strongly or somewhat back war. Strong opposition—37%—was 20 points higher than strong support for an attack on Iran.
The poll also found that a strong majority of Iranian Americans want a new nuclear agreement that prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The Trump administration—which, like multiple preceding ones concluded that Tehran is not seeking nukes—unilaterally withdrew from the landmark Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, in 2018.
While there were hopes of a renewed deal during the tenure of former U.S. President Joe Biden, no agreement was reached, and Iranians continue to suffer under economic sanctions that critics have said are killing people and crippling the country's economy.
"We expect that Israel's military operations have only tilted opinion further against war in recent days," NIAC president Jamal Abdi said in a statement. "Regardless, these results reinforce what we already know—our community is overwhelmingly against war and demands a foreign policy rooted in diplomacy, not destruction. We will share additional results from this timely survey next week."
Trump, who has been threatening to attack Iran since his first term, earlier this year sent a letter to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei in which he claims to have written, "I hope you're going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it's going to be a terrible thing."
"If they don't make a deal, there will be bombing, and it will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before," Trump said during a March NBC News interview.
A poll commissioned by Demand Progress and conducted by the Bullfinch Group recently found that 53% of registered voters—including 58% of Democrats, 47% of Independents, and 56% of Republicans—want Trump to "obtain congressional authorization before striking targets in other countries."
Legislation that would compel Trump to get congressional approval to attack Iran under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was introduced Tuesday by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and co-sponsored by at least 14 mostly progressive Democrats, while Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have introduced similar measures in the Senate.
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Trump Threatens Iran With 'Bombing the Likes of Which They Have Never Seen'
Despite U.S. intelligence once again finding Iran is not currently developing nukes, the president is trying to force Tehran into a nuclear deal after unilaterally abrogating an existing one in 2018.
Mar 31, 2025
Iran's military has reportedly readied ballistic missiles for possible launch against U.S. bases in the Middle East after President Donald Trump renewed his threat to wage war on the country if it does not reach an agreement with his administration regarding nuclear weapons—which American intelligence agencies have repeatedly found Tehran is not building.
Trump discussed Iran during a Sunday phone call with NBC News' Kristen Welker, telling her that "if they don't make a deal, there will be bombing, and it will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before," adding that there is also "a chance that if they don't make a deal, that I will do secondary tariffs on them like I did four years ago."
Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran's theocratic government, warned Monday that "if any hostile act is committed from outside, though the likelihood is not high, it will undoubtedly be met with a strong counterstrike."
Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iran's Foreign Ministry, said on social media Monday that "an open threat of bombing by a head of state against Iran is a shocking affront to the very essence of international peace and security."
"It violates the United Nations Charter and betrays the safeguards under the [International Atomic Energy Agency]," Baghaei added. "Violence breeds violence, peace begets peace. The U.S. can choose the course."
Iranian Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) Aerospace Division, noted Monday that "the Americans have 10 bases in the region, particularly around Iran, and 50,000 troops based in there."
"This means they are sitting in a glass house; and when one sits in a glass house, one does not throw stones at others," he added.
The Tehran Times reported Monday that Iran's military has "readied missiles with the capability to strike U.S.-related positions" and that "a significant number of these launch-ready missiles are located in underground facilities scattered across the country, designed to withstand airstrikes."
The U.S., meanwhile, is amassing firepower including B-2 Stealth Bombers at its base on the forcibly depopulated island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean for possible use in strikes against Iran.
Trump today: If Iran does not agree to a deal “There will be bombing and it will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before” Can he go 1 day without threatening a new war? How many would he like? - Greenland - Panama - Gaza - Mexico - Yemen - Somalia - Gaza - Venezuela Is 8 enough?
— Secular Talk (@kylekulinskishow.bsky.social) March 30, 2025 at 8:36 PM
Trump's threat to attack Iran—which hasn't started a war since the mid-19th century—comes despite U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbardtestifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week that "Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003."
U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly come to the same conclusion since the George W. Bush administration.
However, Gabbard added that "Iran's enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons."
That's at least partly due to the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the landmark Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—also known as the Iran nuclear deal—in 2018 during Trump's first administration.
Since Trump abandoned the JCPOA—which was signed in 2015 during the Obama administration by China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—Tehran has been operating advanced centrifuges and rapidly stockpiling enriched uranium.
While there were hopes of a renewed deal during the tenure of former U.S. President Joe Biden, no agreement was reached, and Iranians continue to suffer under economic sanctions that critics have said are killing people and crippling the country's economy.
Earlier this month, Trump sent a letter to Khamenei in which he claims to have said, "I hope you're going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it's going to be a terrible thing."
On Sunday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian left open the possibility of indirect talks but said that the U.S. could not be trusted to keep its word.
"We don't avoid talks; it's the breach of promises that has caused issues for us so far," Pezeshkian said during a televised Cabinet meeting. "They must prove that they can build trust."
This isn't the first time that Trump has threatened Iran. In 2020, during his first term, the president vowed to strike 52 sites across Iran "very fast and very hard" if it retaliated for the U.S. assassination of IRGC commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani in Iraq. Later that year, Trump had another message for Iran: "If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before."
On the campaign trail last September, Trump told Iranians he would "blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens" if he was reelected and Iran didn't cease what he perceives as threats against the United States.
While the U.S. has never directly attacked Iran, it did help overthrow the country's reformist government in 1953 and supported a repressive monarchy for decades leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The U.S. backed Iraq during that country's eight-year war against Iran, during which then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's forces used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and his own restive Kurdish population. In 1988, a U.S. warship in Iranian waters accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 passengers and crew aboard. Then-President Ronald Reagan blamed the incident on the "barbaric Iranians."
The U.S. has also
supported the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), a State Department-designated terrorist group that had previously assassinated six American officials, and successive U.S. administrations have used international financial institutions to punish Iran, like in 2007 when Bush pressured the World Bank into suspending emergency relief aid after the 2003 Bam earthquake, which killed more than 26,000 Iranians.
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'More Unhinged by the Minute': Senior Israeli Lawmaker Suggests Nuclear Attack on Iran
"It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means," the hardline Knesset member and former Israeli defense minister said.
Jul 04, 2024
A longtime Israeli lawmaker and former defense minister took to the airwaves and social media on Wednesday to suggest his country should do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
"It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means," Avigdor Liberman of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party said during a Channel 12 interview. "And we will have to use all the means that are available to us."
"We will have to stop with the deliberate policy of ambiguity, and it needs to be clear what is at stake here," Liberman continued, apparently referring to Israel's refusal to say whether it has nuclear weapons. "What is at stake here is the future of this nation, the future of the state of Israel, and we will not take any risks."
Member of Knesset and former Minister of Defense, Avigdor Liberman, live on Channel 12, openly calls to use nuclear weapon against Iran, in order to prevent it from reaching weaponization of its nuclear program. What a fuckin' psycho. pic.twitter.com/NYGfQ1zqVp
— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) July 4, 2024
When pressed on what he meant by stopping Iran with non-conventional means, Liberman said, "I said it very clearly."
"Right now there is no time to stop the Iranian nuclear program, their weaponization, by using conventional means," he added.
Liberman made similar comments on social media, where his remarks sparked alarm and condemnation. The lawmaker's hardline call comes amid powder keg tensions between Tel Aviv and Tehran, which warned last week that any Israeli invasion of Lebanon—from which Iranian ally Hezbollah is resisting Israel's annihilation of Gaza—would trigger an "obliterating war."
According to the Arms Control Association (ACA), a U.S.-based advocacy group, Iran is a "threshold state," meaning "it has developed the necessary capacities to build nuclear weapons."
However, a February 2024 threat assessment report authored by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence stated that "Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device."
"Since 2020, however, Tehran has stated that it is no longer constrained by any JCPOA limits," the report says, a reference to so-called Iran Nuclear Deal from which the U.S. unilaterally withdrew in 2018 under former President Donald Trump. "Iran has greatly expanded its nuclear program, reduced [International Atomic Energy Agency] monitoring, and undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so."
Iran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, although Kamal Kharazi, a foreign policy advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
told the Financial Times earlier this week that his country would "have to change our doctrine" if faced with an existential threat.
The ACA and others estimate that Israel has around 90 nuclear warheads and fissile material for approximately 200 more.
Liberman isn't the first Israeli lawmaker to suggest nuclear war against Iran. Far-right Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi—who sparked outrage by saying Israeli forces are "too humane" in Gaza and should "burn" the Palestinian territory—said in April that "in the event of a conflict with Iran, if we do not receive American ammunition, we will have to use everything we have."
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Iranian Snap Elections Head to Runoff After Reformist Pezeshkian Takes Narrow Lead
A total of 24,735,185 people voted, representing a turnout of around 40%—the lowest turnout in an Iranian election since the 1979 revolution.
Jun 29, 2024
Reformist legislator Masoud Pezeshkian and conservative former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili will face off in a second round of voting after neither candidate secured a majority of the votes in Iran's election Friday.
Surprise elections in Iran were called after conservative President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash on May 19, opening what one expert called a "void in the Islamic Republic's leadership."
"None of the candidates could garner the absolute majority of the votes, therefore, the first and second contenders who got the most votes will be referred to the Guardian Council," Interior Ministry spokesperson Mohsen Eslami announced on Saturday.
"Pezeshkian appears to have done well enough to turn out a core base of support that gives him a plausible path to victory, but he will likely need to secure support from Iranians who opted to stay home yesterday in order to triumph."
Pezeshkian and Jalili will now advance to the runoff election on July 5.
After Friday's voting, Pezeshkian took a slight lead with 10.45 million votes over Jalili's 9.47 million, according to an initial tally reported by The Guardian. Both of them edged out conservative parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf with 3.38 million votes and former Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi with 206,000.
A total of 24,735,185 people voted, representing a turnout of around 40%. That is the lowest turnout in an Iranian election since the 1979 revolution, according to Middle East Eye.
"This demonstrates that a majority of the Iranian public remains disaffected from participation in the Islamic Republic's restricted elections, which are neither free nor fair," the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) wrote in a statement on Saturday. "The Iranian people have suffered manifold outrages from their government and circumstances, including the brutal crackdown on popular protests in 2022 and earlier and the failure of past moderate and reformist figures to deliver lasting change."
"As a result," NIAC continued, "a majority appear to have concluded for now that they would rather stay home than risk legitimizing a government they do not believe in. The inclusion of a reformist on the ticket in Masoud Pezeshkian may have boosted turnout in some quarters, but did little overall to arrest the slide in turnout in the first round."
Reform leader Abbas Akhoundi said: "About 60% of voters did not participate in the elections. Their message was clear. They object to the institutionalized discrimination in the existing governance and do not accept that they are second-class citizens and that a minority impose their will on the majority of Iranian society as first-class citizens."
The outcome on July 5 could depend on whether or not turnout increases.
NIAC observed that Pezeshkian's lead was surprising, given that low-turnout elections usually favor more conservative candidates.
"Typically, reformists have only triumphed when turnout reaches near record highs with a vast majority of public participation," the group wrote. "Pezeshkian appears to have done well enough to turn out a core base of support that gives him a plausible path to victory, but he will likely need to secure support from Iranians who opted to stay home yesterday in order to triumph."
Because power in Iran is ultimately held by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the winner of the presidential election is unlikely to substantially shift policies such as Iran's nuclear program or its support for militant groups in the Middle East, according to Reuters.
However, NIAC said the difference between the two candidates was "about as wide a difference as the Islamic Republic's restricted elections would allow."
Pezeshkian, a former health minister who represents Tabriz in Parliament, advocates for economic and social reform. He expressed regret over the death of Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab incorrectly—an event that sparked nationwide protests in 2022—and also criticized the Raisi government for lack of transparency during the protests.
"We will respect the hijab law, but there should never be any intrusive or inhumane behavior toward women," Pezeshkian said after voting on Friday.
In foreign policy, he supports direct diplomacy with the U.S. and has expressed interest in renegotiating the 2015 Iran nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Jalili, who represents Khamenei on the Supreme National Security Council, supports even stricter hijab laws, advocates for internet restrictions, and opposes the JCPOA or any negotiations with Western countries.
Because Pezeshkian was the only reformist in the first round of elections, he may struggle in a second round unless turnout increases, as supporters of the other conservative candidates would vote for Jalili, according to The Guardian.
However, a reformist newspaper editor told the Middle East Eye that many people who had sat out the first round of elections may vote in the second round to prevent a win by Jalili. The editor also predicted that many people who voted for Ghalibaf in the first round would back Pezeshkian in the second.
"At least 40% of his supporters, who are moderate and pragmatic conservatives, would vote for Pezeshkian as they fear Jalili's domestic policies and dead-end foreign policy," the editor said.
Ahead of the election, Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft predicted that voters would ultimately decide based on a desire to improve "their increasingly dire economic situation in the medium term."
"They are looking for the candidate who will most likely be able to reduce the price of meat," Parsi wrote.
He did predict the winner could make a difference in Iran-U.S. relations, but only up to a point.
"Expectations for an opening between the U.S. and Iran should be kept low, even if Pezeshkian wins," Parsi concluded. "The problems between the U.S. and Iran are deeper today than they were in 2013, the trust gap is wider, reversing Iran's nuclear advances is going to be more difficult and politically more costly. On top of all that, Iran has more options in today's increasingly multipolar world."
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Is There Hope for Reviving the Iran-US Nuclear Accord?
After former President Donald Trump blew up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, President Joe Biden has so far failed to re-negotiate it.
Apr 24, 2024
One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Barack Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel.
In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they’d trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions with Tehran across a Middle East now in crisis. The war in Gaza has already intensified the danger of an Iran-Israel conflict—with the recent devastating Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria and the Iranian response of drones and missiles dispatched against Israel only upping the odds. In addition, Iran’s “axis of resistance”—including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria—has been challenging American hegemony throughout the Middle East, while drawing lethal U.S. counterstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
It was former President Donald Trump, of course, who condemned the U.S.-Iran agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) while running in 2016. With his team of fervent anti-Iran hawks, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, he took a wrecking ball to relations with Iran. Six years ago, Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and, in what he called a campaign of “maximum pressure,” reinstituted, then redoubled political and economic sanctions against Tehran. Characteristically, he maintained a consistently belligerent policy toward the Islamic Republic, threatening its very existence and warning that he could “obliterate” Iran.
The question remains: Could some version of the JCPOA be salvaged in 2025?
Joe Biden had been a supporter of the accord, negotiated while he was Obama’s vice president. During his 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to rejoin it. In the end, though, he kept Trump’s onerous sanctions in place and months of negotiations went nowhere. While he put out feelers to Tehran, crises erupting in 2022 and 2023, including the invasion of Israel by Hamas, placed huge obstacles in the way of tangible progress toward rebooting the JCPOA.
Worse yet, still reeling from the collapse of the 2015 agreement and ruled by a hardline government deeply suspicious of Washington, Iran is in no mood to trust another American diplomatic venture. In fact, during the earlier talks, it distinctly overplayed its hand, demanding far more than Biden could conceivably offer.
Meanwhile, Iran has accelerated its nuclear research and its potential production facilities, amassing large stockpiles of uranium that, as The Washington Post reports, “could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks.”
Trump’s Anti-Iran Jihad
While the U.S. and Iran weren’t exactly at peace when Trump took office in January 2017, the JCPOA had at least created the foundation for what many hoped would be a new era in their relations.
Iran had agreed to drastically limit the scale and scope of its uranium enrichment program, reduce the number of centrifuges it could operate, curtail its production of low-enriched uranium suitable for fueling a power plant, and ship nearly all of its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. It closed and disabled its Arak plutonium reactor, while agreeing to a stringent regime in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would monitor every aspect of its nuclear program.
In exchange, the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations agreed to remove an array of economic sanctions, which, until then, had arguably made Iran the most sanctioned country in the world.
Administration officials made it clear that the goal was toppling the regime and that they hoped the sanctions would provoke an uprising to overthrow the government.
Free of some of them, its economy began to recover, while its oil exports, its economic lifeblood, nearly doubled. According to How Sanctions Work, a new book from Stanford University Press, Iran absorbed a windfall of $11 billion in foreign investment, gained access to $55 billion in assets frozen in Western banks, and saw its inflation rate fall from 45% to 8%.
But Trump acted forcefully to undermine it all. In October 2017, he “decertified” Iran’s compliance with the accord, amid false charges that it had violated the agreement. (Both the E.U. and the IAEA agreed that it had not.)
Many observers feared that Trump was creating an environment in which Washington could launch an Iraq-style war of aggression. In a New York Times op-ed, Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, suggested that Trump was repeating the pattern of unproven allegations President George W. Bush had relied on: “The Trump administration is using much the same playbook to create a false impression that war is the only way to address the threats posed by Iran.”
Finally, on May 8, 2018, Trump blew up the JCPOA and sanctions on Iran were back in place. Relentlessly, he and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin piled on ever more of them in what they called a campaign of “maximum pressure.” Old sanctions were reactivated and hundreds of new ones added, targeting Iran’s banking and oil industries, its shipping industry, its metal and petrochemical firms, and finally, its construction, mining, manufacturing, and textile sectors. Countless individual officials and businessmen were also targeted, along with dozens of companies worldwide that dealt, however tangentially, with Iran’s sanctioned firms. It was, Mnuchin told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “a maximum pressure campaign for sanctions… We will continue to ramp up, more, more, more.” At one point, in a gesture both meaningless and insulting, the Trump administration even sanctioned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, a move moderate President Hassan Rouhani called “outrageous and idiotic,” adding that Trump was “afflicted by mental retardation.”
Then, in 2019, Trump took the unprecedented step of labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s chief military arm, a “foreign terrorist organization.” He put a violent exclamation point on that when he ordered the assassination of Iran’s premier military leader, General Qassem Soleimani, during his visit to Baghdad.
Administration officials made it clear that the goal was toppling the regime and that they hoped the sanctions would provoke an uprising to overthrow the government. Iranians did, in fact, rise up in strikes and demonstrations, including most recently 2023’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, partly thanks to tougher economic times due to the sanctions. The government’s response, however, was a brutal crackdown. Meanwhile, on the nuclear front, having painstakingly complied with the JCPOA until 2018, instead of being even more conciliatory Iran ramped up its program, enriching far more uranium than was necessary to fuel a power plant. And militarily, it initiated a series of clashes with U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf, attacked or seized foreign-operated oil tankers, shot down a U.S. drone in the Straits of Hormuz, and launched drones meant to cripple Saudi Arabia’s huge oil industry.
“The American withdrawal from the JCPOA and the severity of the sanctions that followed were seen by Iran as an attempt to break the back of the Islamic Republic or, worse, to completely destroy it,” Vali Nasr, a veteran analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and one of the authors of How Sanctions Work, told me. “So, they circled the wagons. Iran became far more securitized, and it handed more and more power to the IRGC and the security forces.”
Biden’s Reign of (Unforced) Error
Having long supported a deal with Iran—in 2008, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, in 2015, in a speech to Jewish leaders—Joe Biden called Trump’s decision to quit the JCPOA a “self-inflicted disaster.” But on entering the Oval Office, Biden failed to simply rejoin it.
Instead, he let months go by, while waxing rhetorical in a quest to somehow improve it. Even though the JCPOA had been working quite well, the Biden team insisted it wanted a “longer and stronger agreement” and that Iran first had to return to compliance with the agreement, even though it was the United States that had pulled out of the deal.
Consider that an unforced error. “Early in 2021 there was one last chance to restore the agreement,” Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. “He could have just come back to the JCPOA by issuing an executive order, but he didn’t do anything for what turned out to be the 10 most critical weeks.”
Against the possibility of a revived accord, according to Vali Nasr, Iran has concluded that Washington is an utterly untrustworthy negotiating partner whose word is worthless.
It was critical because the Iranian administration of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, responsible for negotiating the original accord, was expiring and new elections were scheduled for June 2021. “One of the major mistakes Biden made is that he delayed the nuclear talks into April,” comments Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Princeton University scholar and a former top Iranian official who was part of its nuclear negotiating team in 2005-2007. “This was a golden opportunity to negotiate with the Rouhani team, but he delayed until a month before the Iranian elections. He could have finished the deal by May.”
When the talks finally did resume in April—“gingerly,” according to The New York Times—they were further complicated because, just days earlier, a covert Israeli operation had devastated one of Iran’s top nuclear research facilities with an enormous explosion. Iran responded by pledging to take the purity of its enriched uranium from 20% to 60%, which didn’t exactly help the talks, nor did Biden’s unwillingness to condemn Israel for a provocation clearly designed to wreck them.
That June, Iranians voted in a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric and militant supporter of the “axis of resistance.” He took office in August, spent months assembling his administration, and appointed a new team to lead the nuclear talks. By July, according to American officials, those talks on a new version of the JCPOA had reached “near complete agreement,” only to fall apart when the Iranian side backed out.
It was also clear that the Biden administration didn’t prioritize the Iran talks, being less than eager to deal with bitter opposition from Israel and its allies on Capitol Hill. “Biden’s view was that he’d go along with reviving the JCPOA only if he felt it was absolutely necessary and to do it at the least political cost,” Parsi points out. “And it looked like he’d only do it if it were acceptable to Israel.”
Over the next two years, the United States and Iran engaged in an unproductive series of negotiations that seemed to come tantalizingly close to an agreement only to stop short. By the summer of 2022, the nuclear talks once again appeared to be making progress, only to fail yet again. “After 15 months of intense, constructive negotiations in Vienna and countless interactions with the JCPOA participants and the U.S., I have concluded that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted,” wrote Josep Borrell Fontelles, the foreign policy chief for the European Union.
By the end of 2022, Biden reportedly declared the Iran deal “dead” and his chief negotiator insisted he wouldn’t “waste time” trying to revive it. As Mousavian told me, Iran’s crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom revolt in the wake of its “morality police” torturing and killing a young woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested on the streets of Tehran without a veil, and increased concern about Iranian drones being delivered to Russia for its war in Ukraine soured Biden on even talking to Iran.
Nonetheless, in 2023, yet another round of talks—helped, perhaps, by a prisoner exchange between the United States and Iran, including an agreement to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues–resulted in a tentative, informal accord that Iranian officials described as a “political cease-fire.” According to the Times of Israel, “the understandings would see Tehran pledge not to enrich uranium beyond its current level of 60% purity, to better cooperate with U.N. nuclear inspectors, to stop its proxy terror groups from attacking U.S. contractors in Iraq and Syria, to avoid providing Russia with ballistic missiles, and to release three American-Iranians held in the Islamic Republic.”
But even that informal agreement was consigned to the dustbin of history after Hamas’s October 7 attack doomed any rapprochement between the United States and Iran.
The question remains: Could some version of the JCPOA be salvaged in 2025?
Certainly not if, as now seems increasingly possible, a shooting war breaks out involving the United States, Iran, and Israel, a catastrophic crisis with unforeseeable consequences. And certainly not if Trump is reelected, which would plunge the United States and Iran deeper into their cold (if not a devastatingly hot) war.
What do the experts say? Against the possibility of a revived accord, according to Vali Nasr, Iran has concluded that Washington is an utterly untrustworthy negotiating partner whose word is worthless. “Iran has decided that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans and they decided to escalate tensions further in order to gain what they hope is additional leverage vis-à-vis Washington.”
“Biden’s intention was to revive the deal,” says Hossein Mousavian. “He did take some practical steps to do so and at least he tried to deescalate the situation.” Iran was, however, less willing to move forward because Biden insisted on maintaining the sanctions Trump had imposed.
The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi, however, catches the full pessimism of a moment in which Iran and Israel (backed remarkably fully by Washington) are at the edge of actual war. Given the rising tensions in the region, not to speak of actual clashes, he says gloomily, “The best that we can hope for is that nothing happens. There is no hope for anything more.”
And that’s where hope is today in a Middle East that seems to be heading for hell in a handbasket.
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It’s the 70th Anniversary of the US’ ‘Original Sin’ In Iran
Since the CIA-backed coup in 1953, both nations have a long list of nefarious things that the other side has done to them; some may be more legitimate than others.
Aug 19, 2023
The history of U.S.-Iranian relations dates to the time when the once mighty Persian Empire, thanks to the Great Game played by Russia and Great Britain, was anything but mighty.
The “Yengi Donya” or new world, as the Persians called the United States, was an emerging global power with no colonial aspirations in Persia. Iranians admired America for its ideals of liberalism, democracy, and individual freedom. For Iranians, the U.S. was the land of Howard Baskerville, the martyr of their 1906 Constitutional Revolution, and Morgan Shuster, the young financier who tried against all odds to help Iran stand on its feet against British and Russian colonialism. That history is long forgotten, however.
The romantic relationship that once existed between the two countries came to an abrupt end when Washington played a critical role in toppling the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on August 19, 1953.
Unbeknownst to Iranians, Eisenhower had personally approved “Operation Ajax,” which we know now was assisted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence, to remove Mosaddegh. The U.S. had committed its “original sin” in Iran.
In the runup to the coup, Washington cut off its financial assistance to Iran, which, due to a British-sponsored boycott of Iranian oil, was facing a severe financial crisis. Indeed, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in response to Mosaddegh’s pleas for an emergency loan, had asserted that “it would not be fair to the American taxpayers… to extend any considerable amount of economic aid to Iran.” After the coup, Eisenhower approved an emergency loan in the amount of $45 million to help the new Iranian government.
But unbeknownst to Iranians, Eisenhower had personally approved “Operation Ajax,” which we know now was assisted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence, to remove Mosaddegh. The U.S. had committed its “original sin” in Iran.
This episode marked the transformation of the U.S. image from a benevolent power sympathetic to Iranian aspirations to one similar to that of the British and Russians. To many Americans, however, the significance of the coup remains unknown.
Indeed, in the middle of the 1979-80 U.S. embassy hostage crisis, President Jimmy Carter called Mossadegh’s ouster “ancient history” and “something that happened 30 years ago.” But, for many Iranians, the episode’s trauma remains a living memory. Iranian students who stormed the embassy in November 1979, including Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, believed that Washington was “plotting” another coup in Iran by giving refuge to the ailing, exiled Shah. But, with the embassy seizure and subsequent hostage crisis, Iran, too, had committed its “original sin.”
These two episodes have left a deep wound in the relationship between the two countries. As the veteran American diplomat John Limbert observes, “The hostage crisis still casts its long shadow over how America and Americans view Iran. The event lurks behind some American analysts’… descriptions [of Iran] as rogue state, axis of evil…” Indeed, other than sporadic and tactical cooperation on issues of mutual interest, Iran and America have failed to overcome the ghosts of their history.
Obama’s presidency offered an exceptional opportunity to overcome the past decades of squandered opportunities. Except for the breakthrough on the nuclear issue, however, he was faced with Ayatollah Khamenei’s “clenched fist.” Trump’s renunciation of Washington’s commitments under the JCPOA only exacerbated Khamenei’s deeply held suspicions of the U.S.
It Is Time to Move On
Recently, Iran’s former foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, who had advised Khamenei to accept secret talks with the U.S. over the nuclear issue, urged the leadership to hold more comprehensive talks with Washington on the broadest possible range of issues.
“Because of our tensions with the west, especially with the U.S., they pressure us at every opportunity… It is time to sit and talk with the U.S…. maybe we call it political negotiations,” he observed. Salehi, who also served as chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, warned that so long as Iran was at loggerheads with the U.S. it cannot sustain healthy relations with any country, even including its most powerful partners, China and Russia.
Iran’s nuclear program has long been a source of tension between the two countries. The dispute actually dates back to the Shah’s time when Tehran and Washington fought over Iran’s rights under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the U.S. categorically rejected the existing nuclear program in Iran and pressured other countries not to cooperate with Tehran to reconstitute it.
A negotiating framework that addresses mutual interests and concerns, such as the security of the Persian Gulf, is not only desirable and long overdue; it’s necessary.
Realizing that Iran would never agree to halt all uranium enrichment, President Barack Obama accepted a limited but strongly verified program, which led to the signing of JCPOA (which included the four other members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) in 2015. However, Trump’s withdrawal from JCPOA unshackled Tehran’s nuclear program from the limits established by the 2015 accord.
While President Joe Biden promised to return to the agreement during his presidential campaign in 2020, the two sides have failed to come to a formal understanding in the two-and-a-half years that followed his inauguration. The Biden administration has thus been pursuing its own “maximum pressure” campaign although its rhetoric has been considerably more diplomatic than the Trump administration’s.
Dismantling Iran’s nuclear program might be an ideal outcome for the U.S., but it is very unlikely that any ruling regime would accept it. Thus, the only viable solution for the U.S. is an agreement that verifiably keeps Iran’s nuclear program checked. For now, the prisoner swap and Iran’s dilution of its 60% enriched-uranium stockpile is a positive step toward deescalation.
Another source of tension between Iran and the U.S. is Iran’s regional ambitions, especially its activities in the Persian Gulf. Washington sees Iran’s harassment of foreign-flagged oil tankers as a threat to international maritime security and the free flow of oil. For the Islamic Republic, as it was for the Shah, the security of the Persian Gulf is indispensable to Iran’s security. When Washington, in violation of international law, confiscated Iranian oil shipments, Iranians responded by seizing and harassing foreign-flagged tankers in the Persian Gulf.
Most recently, the U.S. has escalated by dispatching 3,000 troops to the region with the aim of deterring Iran.
However, the U.S. already has a substantial military presence in the region that is fully capable of deterring Iran. Dispatching more troops will only increase Iran’s insecurities in its immediate periphery. Accidents and miscalculation could drag both sides into an unwanted direct conflict at a time when Washington is more focused on the Ukrainian war and tensions with China over Taiwan and the larger Indo-Pacific region.
Because of its size, population, and strategic location, Iran is one of the pillars of security and stability in the region and cannot be excluded from regional calculations or be expected to capitulate to U.S. ultimatums. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 2018 list of 12 demands on Iran totally failed to address any of Iran’s legitimate concerns. This is why the “maximum pressure” policy pursued by Trump, who insisted rhetorically that he would talk to the Iranians without preconditions, failed miserably.
A negotiating framework that addresses mutual interests and concerns, such as the security of the Persian Gulf, is not only desirable and long overdue; it’s necessary.
Iran and the U.S. both have a long list of nefarious things that the other side has done to them; some may be more legitimate than others. But, in the words of former President Ronald Reagan, “between American and Iranian basic national interests there need be no permanent conflict.” It is time for Iran and the U.S. to talk based on recognition of the other party’s core interests and mutual respect.
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