We Could Have Had It All
Hi friends,
First, and most importantly, thank you for your patience during the month hiatus in Foundations following a loss in my family. I appreciate the understanding, and am happy to be back with you this week with a deep-dive on something I think is timely: The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.
The JCPOA was, in a nutshell, the Iran deal negotiated by the Obama administration—which was promptly scuttled by the Trump administration partway through his first term. As rumors of a potential deal with Iran began last week, so did comparisons of the possible terms of the deal with the JCPOA—including comparisons by President Trump himself. He has made a series of social media posts on this topic stating, among other things, that “[o]ne of the worst deals ever made by our Country was the Iran Nuclear Deal, put forth and signed into existence by Barack Hussein Obama and the rank amateurs of the Obama Administration. It was a direct path to Iran developing a Nuclear Weapon. Not so with the transaction currently being negotiated with Iran by the Trump Administration - THE EXACT OPPOSITE, in fact!”
On May 24, he posted, “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon. Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet. So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about. Unlike those before me who should have solved this problem many years ago, I don’t make bad deals!”
So what were the terms of the JCPOA exactly? What were its drawbacks? And how does it compare to what’s being proposed now? We’ll dive in below.
The Basics
Who was part of the JCPOA?
The JCPOA was negotiated by Iran, the E.U., and the "P5+1" (which refers to the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, which included the U.S., the U.K., China, France, and Russia, with Germany being the "+1"). The U.N. Security Council also endorsed the JCPOA in a resolution on July 20, 2015.
When was the JCPOA in force?
The parties reached agreement on the JCPOA on July 14, 2015. In accordance with the milestones laid out in Annex V of the agreement, the JCPOA took effect on October 15, 2015, and on January 16, 2016, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified that Iran had implemented the JCPOA’s key nuclear-related measures.
The U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA on May 8, 2018, and President Trump directed his administration to “immediately begin the process of re-imposing sanctions related to the JCPOA.”
What were its key provisions?
In a sentence, Iran committed to restrictions on its production of certain components of nuclear weapons, as well as to monitoring and inspection by the IAEA to confirm that Iran was in fact complying with those restrictions, in exchange for the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions on Iran.
In…slightly more than a sentence:
While the body of the JCPOA is under 20 pages long, there are five annexes (entitled Nuclear-related Measures, Sanctions-related Commitments, Civil Nuclear Cooperation, Joint Commission, and Implementation Plan, respectively) which bring the total to closer to 130 pages in the U.S. version, though a significant chunk of those pages is a list of entities and organizations that had been subject to sanctions that would be lifted under the agreement.
Of particular note, Iran affirmed that under no circumstances would it “ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons” (Preamble, para. iii). The annexes, in particular Annex I, contain many of the technical details required to restrict Iran’s nuclear program to peaceful uses, but the body of the text contains a good general overview, including limitations on uranium enrichment and certain research and development activities, the phasing out of certain types of centrifuges, and limitations on the amount of uranium Iran could stockpile. There were also provisions for the modification of existing facilities in Iran, and provisions for transparency and IAEA monitoring.
With respect to sanctions, as noted earlier, sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program would be lifted, including U.N sanctions that were terminated when the Security Council endorsed the JCPOA in July 2015.
Critically, the U.N. resolution provided that if a JCPOA participant notified the Security Council of significant non-performance of commitments under the agreement, the Council could allow the relevant U.N. sanctions to “snap back” into place, a process which Germany, France, and the U.K. triggered in August 2025, seven years after U.S. withdrawal from the agreement, and after Iran failed to comply with IAEA monitoring. (Iran significantly accelerated its nuclear program after U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA.)
The JCPOA also established a body called the Joint Commission, which would monitor the implementation of the agreement, and address any issues that arose in the course of that implementation.
You can find the entire text of the agreement, including annexes, here, if you’re looking for a little light reading.
Drawbacks
A common critique of the JCPOA (including as summarized by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), here, and Foreign Policy, here), is that some of the provisions restricting Iran’s nuclear capabilities had expiration dates, including the provisions limiting low-enriched uranium, which would have been lifted after 15 years. The argument goes that, after those provisions expired, Iran could have simply picked up where it left off in building a nuclear weapon, after having enjoyed years of sanctions relief that could have benefited terrorist groups like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC.
Other critiques include that, during the couple of years that Iran enjoyed sanctions relief under the JCPOA, the Iranian government continued repressing the people of Iran, as well as that the JCPOA did nothing to halt Iran’s advances in developing ballistic missiles (many of which are now being deployed in the current conflict).
My two cents
I should note, at this point, that the title of today’s newsletter is not entirely serious (and was partly an excuse to use an Adele lyric): as the section above points out, the JCPOA was not without its flaws, and it certainly was not a panacea that would have guaranteed peace in the Middle East for the foreseeable future.
But the truth is that nothing guarantees the future. Diplomacy, like most other human endeavors, operates by trying to achieve the best outcome possible at a specific moment in time, under specific circumstances, with limited certainty about whether those efforts will pay off in the long run. It is, in short, an act of faith.
And if we can’t know for sure whether we would have been better off in long run under the JCPOA, in my opinion, we are certainly worse off in this current moment than we were in 2015. We have an ongoing regional conflict, with countries across the Middle East taking collateral damage. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, and there is every indication that Iran intends to keep charging tolls (or as it is now calling them, “fees for navigation services”) for as long as it is able. The prolonged closure of the Strait threatens to bring not only the skyrocketing gas prices we are already facing, but a potential world hunger crisis. And the level of civilian suffering as a result of the conflict is heartbreaking, including what appears to have been a U.S. strike on an elementary school in Iran that claimed the lives of 175 people, most of them children.
And the conflict isn’t even over yet.
Your two cents? I would love to have them.
If this has sparked your own thoughts on whether we were better off under the JCPOA, whether in agreement with my assessment, disagreement, or somewhere in between, I would love to hear them, either over email or in the comments. Please reach out any time!
ICYMI
To provide a brief recap, our newsletters over the last couple of months have included:
- Updates on Cuba, Iran, and Nepal;
- A discussion of the law that governs the treatment of prisoners of war;
- An analysis of President Trump’s social media post threatening to commit genocide;
- A breakdown of a proposed ceasefire between Israel, the U.S., and Iran;
- An explainer on U.S. troop withdrawal from Germany;
- Our predictions for the U.S.-China summit (and a follow-up piece on its aftermath); and
- An overview of what may be included in a potential deal between the U.S. and Iran.
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Thank you for joining us this month--I'll see you back here again soon.
Alexis
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