The Obama administration spent two years negotiating the Iran nuclear deal. Signed it in 2015. Required coordinating with the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union. Thousands of diplomats. Hundreds of meetings. Trump withdrew from it in forty-five minutes while watching Fox & Friends. That's not commentary. That's just what happened.
The deal itself was simple enough. Iran agreed to stop enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels. International inspectors would verify compliance. Economic sanctions would lift. Iran could rejoin the global economy. The entire framework existed to prevent a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Trump called it "the worst deal ever negotiated" and torched it in 2018. His reasoning? Obama signed it.
Fast forward to now. Trump signals talks are progressing. Iran signals nothing is progressing. The U.S. wants a new deal. Iran wants the old deal we already broke. We're negotiating to restore a treaty we unilaterally destroyed because we didn't like the guy who made it. This is like divorcing your wife, burning the house down, then asking if she wants to get coffee and talk things through.
The nuclear ambitions part deserves attention. Iran has been enriching uranium this entire time. They're closer to weapons-grade material now than they were under the original agreement. Withdrawing from the deal didn't stop their nuclear program. It accelerated it. The strategy was "apply maximum pressure until they capitulate." The result was Iran doing exactly what the deal prevented them from doing. Flawless.
Nobody knows what the new talks will accomplish. Trump says they're going well. Iran says talks haven't started. Both statements could be true depending on what you consider a talk. Maybe Trump tweeted at them. That counts in his mind. The diplomatic equivalent of sending "u up?" at 2 AM and calling it a peace negotiation.
The whole saga proves one thing: it's exponentially easier to break agreements than build them. Takes years to construct trust. Takes one signature to destroy it. Then we act surprised when the other side doesn't rush back to the table. Iran got sanctioned for compliance, then sanctioned harder for non-compliance. Their takeaway is probably "why bother." Can't blame them. We taught them that lesson ourselves.
Photo by Craig Melville on Unsplash
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