With Israel preparing to respond to the ballistic missile attack by Iran last week, Biden administration officials are more worried than ever that the United States could be dragged into an all-out war between the two countries.
It is among the most explosive moments for Iran and the United States since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. And it has opened a debate about whether the crisis might be less combustible had U.S. policy toward Iran not veered from cautious cooperation to angry confrontation several years ago.
That shift happened in May 2018, when President Donald J. Trump abruptly withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, an agreement clinched by the Obama administration three years earlier in an effort to contain the country’s nuclear program.
Mr. Trump had labeled it “the worst deal in history.” But critics of his action say that withdrawing emboldened Iranian hard-liners and prompted Iran to accelerate its nuclear program. Iran’s progress has alarmed some Israeli officials, who argue that their military should use the current moment to hobble the program by striking nuclear facilities in the country.
U.S. officials estimate that Iran could be within weeks of possessing enough homespun nuclear material for a nuclear bomb, although they believe constructing a usable device could take six months or more.
“I think it’s obvious that the decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal, which Iran was complying with, both removed the guardrails on Iran’s nuclear program and removed any incentive for Iran to move in any direction other than a more confrontational, harder line,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration who played a major role in promoting the agreement.
Mr. Rhodes said it was obvious that Hamas bears primary responsibility for the current Middle East crisis because it launched the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. But he added that the trajectory of U.S.-Iran relations after the failure of the nuclear agreement meant “that Iran has no opening for diplomacy with the United States. That leaves you with no alternative but conflict.”
He noted that the United States tried without success to revive the deal but criticized the Biden administration for not pushing earlier and harder.
A Western official who played a role in the negotiations said that, had Iran been more successfully integrated into the global economy over the past decade, it might have tried to prevent Hamas, which it supports, from striking out at Israel. Failing that, Iranian leaders might have done more to de-escalate tensions with Israel in recent months, the official said.
But many conservatives make no apology for Mr. Trump’s exit from the agreement, which they argue was misguided from the start. They say it provided Iran with a cash infusion to fund regional terrorism, and that its temporary restrictions allowed Iran to play for time. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who made similar arguments, praised Mr. Trump’s decision to exit as “a historic move.”
This week, some conservatives also noted that the deal did not include meaningful limits on Iran’s development of the sort of missiles fired on Israel last week.
President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden designed the deal “knowing that Iran was ramping up ballistic-missile development,” but, in their focus on Tehran’s nuclear activity, did not prevent it, the conservative legal analyst Andrew McCarthy wrote for National Review last week. He said Iran had proceeded to give those missiles to its proxy groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and others in Yemen, Iraq and Syria.
Obama officials have argued that they got the best deal available, and that Iran would not have agreed to both nuclear and missile limits. Nor did Mr. Trump’s strategy of sanctions-based “maximum pressure” against Iran succeed in stopping its missile program.
Mr. Obama said his goal was to find an alternative to conflict. At the time, Israeli leaders — including Mr. Netanyahu, then serving an earlier term as prime minister — were warning that their country might launch airstrikes to take out Iranian nuclear facilities.
In 2013, Mr. Obama responded to Iran’s election of a moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, by initiating talks with Tehran to impose limits on its nuclear program. In return, Iran would get relief from harsh American and European sanctions on its economy.
The deal was never meant to be a cure-all. Mr. Obama insisted its purpose was to restrict Iran’s nuclear research and development to delay its ability to build a nuclear bomb by at least a decade, and nothing more than that.
But for many supporters of the agreement, the nuclear deal offered something more exciting: A possibility that Iran and the West might begin moving past decades of hostility to peacefully coexist and perhaps even work together.
Some, including the nuclear deal’s chief American negotiator, Secretary of State John Kerry, hoped the deal would empower Tehran’s political moderates and liberalize Iran by opening up its economy to greater Western investment and influence. The Islamic radicals who came to power in the 1979 revolution would be ousted not by military force, the thinking went, but by putting an iPhone into every Iranian hand.
But Republicans in Washington insisted that the deal should be tougher and that Iran could not be trusted to comply anyway.
In May 2018, Mr. Trump announced that the United States would no longer abide by the agreement, ignoring the advice of many of his top national security officials and the fact that international monitors had found that Iran was in compliance with its terms. He then imposed a slew of new economic sanctions on Iran.
Mr. Trump’s decision enraged Iranian leaders, including conservatives who said it proved their longtime warnings that the United States and its allies were the untrustworthy ones. Iran began to accelerate its nuclear program, increasing its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and moving steadily closer to bomb-making potential. In its next presidential election, Iran installed Ebrahim Raisi, a far more combative successor to Mr. Rouhani.
Iran also continued to support proxy groups throughout the Middle East.
Although the Trump administration insisted that Iran used billions of dollars in assets unfrozen by the nuclear deal to invest in those groups, Mr. Trump’s policy had no discernible effect on Iran’s support for its proxies either.
The Western official involved in the Obama-era nuclear negotiations conceded that Iran would most likely have directed more money to proxy groups and its missile program if Mr. Trump had remained in the deal, but added that it was impossible to say with confidence how things might be different today.
What is undeniable, the official said, is that Iran’s nuclear program advanced, and its proxies grew stronger, in the years after Mr. Trump ruptured the deal.
Conservatives retort that Mr. Biden bears much of that blame, for failing to vigorously enforce restrictions on Iranian oil sales imposed by Mr. Trump, particularly to China. Those sales have soared during Mr. Biden’s tenure, enriching Iran’s government.
Biden administration officials have resisted calls to crack down on the black-market trade — in part to maintain limited Iranian cooperation on matters like prisoner exchanges and informally containing its nuclear activity, analysts say. Taking action would also mean scrutinizing Chinese importers at a time when Mr. Biden has sought to steady relations with Beijing.
Suzanne Maloney, a vice president at the Brookings Institution and an expert on Iran, said she was skeptical that the nuclear deal’s survival would have made the current Middle East crisis any more manageable.
Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement “had disastrous implications for containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but it had no appreciable impact on Tehran’s regional activities or its approach to Israel and the broader Middle East,” Ms. Maloney said.
Fervent defenders of the deal mistakenly “attached wider ambitions” to it, she added.
The presumption was that Iran would “find the benefits of cooperation with the West sufficiently attractive to abandon their external troublemaking and that greater integration with the international economy would empower more liberal politicians,” Ms. Maloney said. “That was always illusory.”
However Iran’s confrontation with Israel ends, the debate over the nuclear deal is likely not over. In recent weeks, Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, another relative moderate in the Rouhani mold, has signaled his openness to reviving negotiations to restore the agreement.
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