A man watches the news broadcast on U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal at a teahouse in central Tehran on May 8, 2018. Picture by Ahmad Halabsiaz/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images. All rights reserved. My visit to Tehran in July 2015 overlapped with a critical juncture in U.S.-Iran relations. Iranians poured into the streets to celebrate when the P5+1 and Iran struck a nuclear deal after twenty months of negotiations. Men and women danced in the middle of traffic, whilered, white, and green fireworks lit up the streets.
For the first time since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the U.S. and Iran had successfully engaged in diplomacy. No one in the crowd that day could have known that within just three years, the deal, and U.S.-Iran relations, would again unravel.
Since his election to office, U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly denounced the nuclear accord as “the worst deal ever negotiated,” and he spurred headlines around the world on May 8th with his decision to reinstate sanctions on Tehran. Such a move violates the JCPOA and signals U.S. withdrawal from the agreement. As the world waited in anticipation of Trump’s announcement, I spoke with several U.S.-Iran experts to hear their insights into why diplomacy succeeded, and why it may now fall apart. My interviews led me to the troubling finding that U.S. policy toward Iran may be driven more by psychology than by geopolitics.
Under Barack Obama’s administration, the U.S. pursued diplomacy, because as Iranian policymaker and scholar Seyed Hossein Mousavian pointed out, the alternative may have been conflict. Interestingly, Obama and former Secretary of State John Kerry’s personal backgrounds may have driven the administration’s decision to eliminate the possibility of war.
According to former White House staffer and advisor on the nuclear deal Ben Rhodes, Obama opposed war due to his upbringing in Indonesia, where “power was not some abstract thing,” given the brutal dictatorship of President Suharto. “I don’t think there’s ever been an American president who experienced power like that at such a young age,” Rhodes remarked.
