IN ABANDONING the nuclear deal with Iran, the Trump administration disrupted an international consensus on how to deal with Tehran. U.S. policy toward Iran will now be a story of attempted recovery from the failures of that disruption. Domestic politics drove the original decision to confront Iran, and domestic politics, in an election year, will shape Donald Trump’s attempts at avoiding war. Any hope of salvaging success will require significant change in Trump’s policy, some hints of which have already appeared. Iran, too, has changed, but in unhelpful ways that will make the recovery process all the more difficult.

THE TOO-EASILY-FORGOTTEN background to the current mess was broad agreement—expressed most strongly by proponents of a hard line toward Iran—that the sine qua non of Iran policy was to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. The response to that broadly-held concern was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a multilateral agreement that—by disposing of stockpiles of enriched uranium, filling nuclear reactors with cement and a host of other measures—closed all possible paths to such a weapon and imposed an intrusive system of international monitoring to assure the world that they stayed closed. The international consensus on the subject took the form of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231, which passed unanimously in 2015 and was the Council’s formal blessing of the JCPOA.

The Trump administration’s reneging, beginning in 2018, on U.S. obligations under the JCPOA was foreshadowed by earlier Republican attempts during the Obama administration to sabotage the negotiation of the agreement. Both the earlier sabotage and the later reneging were motivated by the identification of Barack Obama with the JCPOA. That the agreement was a signal foreign policy accomplishment of this Democratic president was reason enough to try to destroy it. A complementary motivation was opposition to the agreement by the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, whose unrelenting push to keep Iran ostracized served several political purposes, including promoting Israel’s relations with the Gulf Arab monarchies and diverting international attention from Israel’s own policies. The position of that government had, as always, profound political implications in the United States, even though in this case the JCPOA’s closing of all paths to an Iranian nuclear weapon was clearly in Israel’s interests, as many former senior Israeli security officials stated.

Vague references to a “better deal” did not clarify the Trump administration’s desired end game. Different players in the administration had differing desires. Especially evident was a division between Trump, who wants deals, and his former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who always wanted a war. For a while after the initial reneging in mid-2018, the differences did not seem to matter. As U.S. violations of the JCPOA escalated into unrestricted economic warfare against Iran, the administration pointed to the significant damage inflicted on the Iranian economy as if that were ipso facto a positive achievement. The administration took satisfaction in how the private sector’s fear of losing access to U.S. markets undermined European governments’ efforts to circumvent secondary U.S. sanctions. The administration’s policies did not even seem to dent the existing nuclear restrictions on Iran. For a year after the United States reneged on the JCPOA, Iran—reaffirming its commitment to the agreement and expressing its desire for full compliance with it—continued to observe its own obligations under the accord. 

By mid-2019, however, it was impossible to ignore how the “maximum pressure” campaign was failing on every front. Iran’s patience ran out when the Trump administration ended the last of the waivers of sanctions it had placed on purchasers of Iranian oil. Tehran then began a series of small, incremental moves beyond the JCPOA’s limits on the amount of enriched uranium that Iran could stockpile and the level of enrichment. Using the same strategy it employed before the JCPOA was negotiated, Tehran gradually ramped up its nuclear activity to pressure the United States and other foreign states to negotiate seriously about sanctions relief. Iran, in other words, has been responding to maximum pressure with pressure of its own.

The nuclear program is still below the levels it reached before the JCPOA deconstructed most of that program, and nowhere near the ability to construct a nuclear weapon. With each of its incremental steps, Iran has emphasized that what it has done is easily reversible and that its objective is a return of everyone to full compliance with the JCPOA. But for the time being, the result has not been a move toward a “better deal” but instead a series of moves in the opposite direction. Iran will continue the gradual expansion of its nuclear program as long as the maximum pressure campaign continues.

A SIMILAR story is unfolding regarding what gets vaguely but routinely labeled as “malign” or “nefarious” Iranian activity in the Middle East. The Trump administration has contended that this is the front where its economic warfare is most effective, because crimping Iran’s economic resources, the argument goes, forces Iran to curtail its regional activity whether or not Tehran signs any new agreements. But there was no discernible curtailment of Iran’s regional activity when the pressure campaign started in 2018, any more than there was any discernible expansion of that activity when the JCPOA went into effect in 2015 and Iran gained some sanctions relief. Iran does what it does in the region not according to the level of its financial resources but instead for what it regards as security reasons. Any changes in that activity have almost always been in response to someone else’s activity in the region, whether it was what Saudi Arabia was doing in Yemen, what insurgents were doing in Syria or what the Islamic State was doing in Iraq. Press reports about increased financial strains in Iran’s ally Hezbollah, for example, have not been accompanied by a corresponding reduction of Hezbollah activities on the ground.

This picture worsened in the spring of 2019 as the Trump administration escalated its economic warfare with an attempt to reduce Iranian oil exports to zero. The Iranian regime, in continuing its strategy of meeting pressure with pressure, escalated in response. Despite Iranian denials, it is widely believed to have been behind the May 2019 sabotage of two Saudi oil tankers and two other vessels off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. More dramatic, and with greater immediate impact on the oil trade, was an unmanned aerial attack on Saudi Arabia’s Khurais oil field and the critical Abqaiq oil processing facility in September of the same year.

Iran was doing nothing of the sort prior to the U.S. maximum pressure campaign, and had no reason to do so. Iranian leaders have been acutely aware of how attacks on anyone else’s oil exports would invite reprisals that would damage Iran’s own oil trade. Iran’s incentives in this regard changed markedly when the Trump administration endeavored to destroy Iran’s oil trade anyway. Tehran no longer had anything to lose. Iranian leaders have explicitly stated that if Iran cannot export its oil, then other Persian Gulf producers will not be able to either. Attacks such as the one against Abqaiq were a step toward making good on this threat.

The attacks also served what in Western strategic jargon is called “establishing deterrence.” They demonstrated, to the Saudis as well as others, Iranian willingness and ability to inflict major damage across the Gulf in the event of a military attack against Iran. The message-sending nature of the operations was underscored by how they were aimed at economically vital targets but inflicted few to no human casualties.

In short, if damaging Iranian regional activity is a worry, that activity has gotten much worse since the Trump administration’s pressure campaign kicked into high gear. Iran’s actions in this regard are clearly a direct response to the administration’s policies.

A FINAL front on which to measure the results of the maximum pressure campaign—one that should be of special interest to those longing for regime change in Iran—is the effect on politics inside Iran. Two patterns stand out. One is that Iranian hardliners have risen in influence since the United States reneged on the JCPOA. Leaders who were involved in negotiating the JCPOA—notably President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif—have been on the defensive. The hardliners’ “we told you so” line about the hazards of negotiating with the perfidious Americans has been difficult to rebut. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who gave Rouhani and Zarif room to negotiate the agreement but was careful to leave himself room to dissociate himself from the result if it went sour, has taken the same line. The increased clout of the hardliners, reflected in their capturing some important senior government positions in the last several months, represents another front in which the effects of the Trump administration’s nothing-but-pressure policy have been in the opposite direction from what was advertised.

The other pattern inside Iran is that the economic hardship from sanctions is not translating into revolutionary upheaval. This has been true even of the most serious economically-driven protests in Iran since the start of maximum pressure, after the regime increased in November 2019 the price of still heavily subsidized fuel. There is no evidence that the Islamic Republic is anywhere close to collapse.

One reason the economic and political results inside Iran have not been what the authors of maximum pressure may have hoped for is that Iran—no stranger to hardship in time of war or sanctions—has had some success in sustaining its “resistance economy” at a stable, albeit much lower than desired, level. Rouhani was able to point to some signs of this—such as the fact that the non-oil part of Iran’s gdp has increased in recent months—in his speech in September to the United Nations General Assembly. Despite the overall contraction of the Iranian economy over the past year, it still is larger than it was when the JCPOA went into effect in 2015. The International Monetary Fund estimates that contraction of the Iranian economy will stop and small growth will resume in 2020. The value of the rial relative to the U.S. dollar has gained appreciably since April 2019 and is well above its record low of September 2018.

Average Iranians still have ample reason to be unhappy about their economic circumstances and about mismanagement and corruption within their own government. But they also have been given strong reasons to place the largest blame for their plight on U.S. policies. The Revolutionary Guard, with its control over smuggling and other major sectors of the economy, has probably been hurt least by the sanctions. For the Iranian public, the financial sanctions that have inhibited trade in food and medicine have negated U.S. assurances about allowing humanitarian imports. The Trump administration’s assertions that it is acting for the benefit of ordinary Iranians also have been belied by its Muslim travel ban, which has affected Iranians more than any other nationality and has kept many family members apart from each other.

Trump may not understand most of the reasons his Iran policy has not been working, and maybe he will not openly admit that failure. But he can see that it is failing. He is thinking of Iran policy not just in anti-Obama or pro-Likud terms, but also as an opportunity for a deal. He probably has concluded that he needs a deal with Iran because the other big items on his deal-making agenda—North Korea’s nuclear weapons and trade with China—have hit snags and have not yet furnished breakthroughs. 

Among the indications that Trump has decided a change is necessary is his dismissal of Bolton in September 2019. Differences over North Korea and other issues also were involved, but Bolton was probably the single greatest impediment within the administration to any constructive dealings with Iran. Trump also has not stood in the way of French president Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to broker a de-escalation of U.S.-Iranian tensions. And Trump has been open about welcoming a presidential-level meeting with Iran. 

The principal resistance to initiating U.S.-Iranian negotiations is currently on the Iranian side. Tehran has no interest in any meeting with Trump that would be little more than a photo op. Rouhani rebuffed Macron’s attempt to arrange at least a phone call with Trump on the fringes of the United Nations General Assembly session in September. Until current policies and circumstances change, meeting with the chief of maximum pressure would be a big political negative for Rouhani, as it would be for any other Iranian leader.

THE IRANIAN regime will continue to insist that the United States make concessions regarding sanctions before any U.S.-Iranian negotiations begin. To do otherwise would be interpreted as a sign of weakness that would undermine Iran’s bargaining position, and would be a political blowback in Tehran against whatever Iranian leader was seen as caving to American pressure. In a speech to Revolutionary Guard commanders in September, Khamenei reiterated the Iranian position that the United States must return to compliance with the JCPOA. In Khamenei’s own words, “If the enemy is able to prove that maximum pressure is effective on Iran, Iran and the Iranian people will never know comfort.” This would only embolden the United States, he explained, to make more demands of the Islamic Republic in the future “in a bullying way.” 

This does not necessarily mean Iran will adhere rigidly to its current demand to remove all sanctions that the United States imposed since renouncing the JCPOA. But there has to be a first move by the United States that is economically significant. A restoration of the waivers that had permitted oil sales to some of Iran’s biggest customers may suffice.

The Iranian leadership’s primary strategy regarding Trump has been to see him as an aberration that will pass—to outwait and outlast him. This was part of their thinking in continuing to observe the JCPOA nuclear limits for a year after Trump’s reneging on the agreement. The Iranians can read American polls. They hear what Democratic presidential candidates say about policy toward Iran, and they have reason to believe that in little more than a year they will be facing a much different situation in Washington. There are likely voices in internal debates in Tehran urging a “hang tough” approach, exhibiting the common tendency of treating sunk costs as investments and arguing that Iran, having put up with so much pain so far, should stick it out for that additional year.

Iran also still has ample reason to distrust Trump as a negotiating partner. The reneging on the JCPOA remains, for the Iranians, Exhibit A in the Trump administration’s disregard for U.S. international obligations. That disregard is not limited to trashing whatever Obama negotiated, as suggested by Trump’s declared willingness to go back on his own recently negotiated North American trade agreement to put pressure on Mexico regarding unrelated immigration issues. The Iranians also have reason to doubt, even after Bolton’s departure, Trump’s ability and willingness to rein in the hawks in his administration who still yearn for regime change. In that regard, it was not reassuring when, during the recent General Assembly session, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s most visible speaking engagement in New York was before an anti-Iran group that also hosted the Iranian cult-cum-terrorist-group known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq.

Despite all this, the Iranians are not dismissing the possibility of negotiations with the Trump administration. The economic pain of the sanctions continues, and the regime needs to demonstrate to its population that it is not passing up any possible opportunity to relieve the pain. Tehran can also see that Trumps’ domestic vulnerabilities—his need for a deal and Iran’s demonstrated ability to stand firm so far—mean that Iran, at least as much as the United States, is well positioned to drive a hard bargain. Related to this is Trump’s tendency—demonstrated in his trade deals reached in North America and with Japan—to claim as big victories agreements that differ little from arrangements that previous administrations had negotiated, and that Trump had excoriated. It is easy to envision something similar happening regarding the JCPOA and the Iranian nuclear program.

IF U.S.-Iranian negotiations do begin while Trump is still in office, Iran will have additional reasons to drive a hard bargain, including the political drift in Tehran in favor of hardliners and Iran’s continuing interest in not appearing to cave under pressure. The Iranians are also encouraged by the knowledge that it is the United States, not Iran, that is most isolated internationally on the issue at hand. Only the United States under Trump, and none of the other six parties to the JCPOA, wanted to abrogate the agreement. Although the White House has used U.S. economic clout to coerce most European businesses to stay away from Iran, Russia and, especially, China represent partial economic lifelines for the Iranians. And despite rhetoric within the United States about what it would take to get Iran “to return to the negotiating table,” it was the United States, not Iran, that left that table. The table in question belongs to the joint commission that the JCPOA established, and it is the prescribed forum for countries to address any issues relating to the agreement. Khamenei indirectly made this point when he said in his speech that if America “repents and returns to the nuclear agreement it violated, then with the group of countries that are part of the agreement and talk with Iran, America can also participate.”

U.S. isolation is increasing as key Gulf Arab states move toward rapprochement, or at least a modest détente, with Tehran. The uae did so first, and now the Saudi regime of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is following suit. The failure and high cost of the Saudi-led war in Yemen is one reason for Riyadh’s rethinking. Another is the fear of the damage that a war in the Persian Gulf could do to Saudi Arabia and its economy. In this regard, the attack on Khurais and Abqaiq, with its precision and apparent ease in evading Saudi air defenses, was a wake-up call for MBS. Saudi Arabia and Iran will still very much be rivals, but any détente will knock away a major leg on which the whole maximum pressure concept was standing. The Saudi redirection also demonstrates that there are other ways of dealing with an adversary than simply heaping on more pressure, more hostility and more tension.

A major reason for Iranian diplomats to stand firm on issues related to the JCPOA is their knowledge that their side is the one in the right. It was the United States, not Iran, that reneged on its obligations. Iran’s incremental exceeding, after its year of patience, of some of the limits on uranium enrichment is technically not even a violation, given language in the JCPOA that—as Iranian officials take pains to point out—explicitly relieves Iran of its obligations if other parties do not live up to theirs. Iranians will, like anyone else in a similar position, strongly resist demands to make additional concessions to buy the same amount of sanctions relief they already bargained for with the JCPOA. As Foreign Minister Zarif put it, he will not “buy the same horse twice”—the same aphorism that former U.S. secretary of defense Robert Gates once used in deriding North Korea’s habit of repeatedly demanding fresh economic benefits in return for nuclear and missile restraints that Pyongyang had earlier agreed to.

The JCPOA was laboriously negotiated over the course of several years. Negotiators on each side returned to their capitals knowing they had squeezed as much as they could out of the other side. The agreement represents the limits of what could have been achieved consistent with the legitimate interests of all the parties. Given that the JCPOA and UNSC Resolution 2231 already exist, they now serve as what the late bargaining theorist Thomas Schelling would call a focal point—a salient spot in the bargaining space that suggests itself as a place for agreement in the absence of good reasons to select any other place. If there is to be a new deal within the next year on the Iranian nuclear program and associated sanctions, it will look very much like the JCPOA. Like some of those trade deals the Trump administration negotiated, it will be a fairly small reworking of what is already on the books.

As long as Trump is president, there will have to be just enough difference from what is on the books for him to be able to claim that the new deal is a vastly “better deal.” But if the U.S. administration wants more out of Iran, it will have to agree to more of what Iran wants. President Rouhani said so in his speech to the General Assembly, making clear that Iran would be satisfied with everyone returning to full compliance with the JCPOA but that “if you require more, you should also pay more.” 

The sunset clauses in the JCPOA, which place expiration dates on some of the JCPOA’s restrictions on Iranian nuclear activity, might be candidates for the sort of minor reworking that could go into a new deal. Given how prominently the clauses have played in the rhetoric of American opponents of the JCPOA, any change in them could be rhetorical fodder for the administration to claim a “better deal.” Such a change would be less substantively significant than the rhetoric suggests. What takes place in Iran’s nuclear program several years from now will depend less on the fine print of an earlier agreement than on what Iran and other parties will assess to be in their interests at that future date—just as the Iran that negotiated the JCPOA saw it as in its interests to be integrated into the world economy rather than being a nuclear-armed pariah. Indeed, the Trump administration’s point man on hurting Iran, Brian Hook, has justified the U.S. reneging on the JCPOA by saying that because the deal “has no legal status” and was just “a political commitment by an administration that’s no longer in office,” any other U.S. administration was free to junk the deal whenever it decided the accord was not in its interests. Of course, acceptance of this reasoning would mean applying it also to the other parties to the agreement, including Iran—which will have its own leadership changes in the next few years—making the sunset clauses, by Hook’s logic, meaningless.

In any more-for-more deal, the reciprocal Iranian demand probably would involve greater assurance that the economic benefits of sanctions relief will take place. Even during the Obama administration, the fear among banks and other private sector businesses about inadvertently crossing some still-forbidden lines made the baleful effects of some sanctions live on even after they had been formally lifted. That administration made some good-faith efforts to clarify to the private sector the new rules, but Iran can be expected to insist on more formal and positive steps by the United States to make the process work better next time.

Any attempt to load up a new deal with non-nuclear, non-sanction issues would run into the same problem the makers of the JCPOA faced: grievances of one side would be met by grievances from the other side, and soon the agenda would become intractable. Similarly, demands to do something about Iran’s proverbial “malign, nefarious, destabilizing” behavior would be a problem because such a vague mantra does not translate into a feasible international agreement unless it can be reframed in terms of specific, defensible demands. And any attempt in the current case at such reframing would quickly run into the reality of how much of what Iran does in the Middle East parallels rather than conflicts with U.S. interests (as in combating violent Sunni extremism in Iraq), or is what Iran understandably considers a basic right of tradecraft (as in maintaining its alliance with Syria), or is patently less destabilizing than what Iran’s rivals have been doing (as in the war in Yemen).

Also unfeasible would be any attempt to impose on Iran, and only Iran, restrictions on the development and testing of ballistic missiles. Iran considers its missiles to be an essential deterrent against hostile regional adversaries that not only have ballistic missiles themselves but also can project power through air forces superior to Iran’s own. Tehran has affirmed the role of its missiles as a regional deterrent rather than an extra-regional threat by declaring and observing a 2,000-kilometer range limit. A feasible agreement to curb missile proliferation in the Middle East would require all regional states, not just Iran, to subject themselves to range limitations or possibly other restrictions.

BOTH DONALD Trump and Iran’s current leaders want a deal and want it soon. They might not get it. Any number of developments might occur. Perhaps Trump won’t find a face-saving and politically safe way to back off from the economic warfare that precludes a deal. Or maybe unplanned events such as an accidental military clash in the Persian Gulf will kill needed diplomacy. Or perhaps spoilers who do not want a U.S.-Iranian détente—including the Israeli government and some hardliners in the Revolutionary Guard or elsewhere in the Iranian regime—will devise ways to kill it. Without an agreement that reinstates something like the JCPOA and removes nuclear sanctions, Iran would continue its incremental exceeding of the JCPOA limits, and the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon would become as prominent a topic as it was before the JCPOA. Renewed talk about militarily attacking Iran would be sure to follow. This would make it more difficult for Iranian leaders to rebut any arguments within their own regime that the specter should become a reality, and that a nuclear deterrent is the only reliable way for Iran to protect itself against its enemies.

If there is no U.S.-Iranian agreement before the U.S. presidential election of 2020, the prospects for such an accord would be better after the election. This would most obviously be true if a Democrat unseats Trump, but the prospects conceivably might improve even in a second Trump term. Freed of election-related dependence on financial backers firmly opposed to doing any business with Iran, Trump might be better able to focus on building a legacy of deals rather than of wars.

Reinstating the JCPOA or something like it would restore a modicum of trust and communication that would make it possible for Washington and Tehran to reach other understandings on other topics, with or without formal agreements. Such progress also would require U.S. policymakers to recognize that the Islamic Republic is not going away any time soon, and that it is a major player in its region—albeit only a mid-level power that does not pose an intercontinental threat to the United States. 

Even with such adjustments, the damage that the Trump administration’s policies have inflicted will take a long time to repair. The hostage crisis that began during Jimmy Carter’s administration, and several other resentment-stoking events during the 1980s such as the U.S. downing of a civilian Iranian airliner, poisoned how Americans and Iranians have seen each other for more than a generation. The poisonous effects of the last couple of years in the relationship are likely to be long-lasting as well.

Paul R. Pillar is a Contributing Editor at the National Interest and the author of Why America Misunderstands the World.