Most Americans already have strong views about whether the war with Iran is justified, and many political leaders speak as if the answer is obvious.
Much of that debate has unfolded without a clear understanding of what the initial Obama nuclear agreement did, why it was abandoned, or what the realistic outcomes of the current conflict might be.
Unfortunately, in today's polarized work, arguments are often formed by pre‑existing loyalties, partisan rhetoric, or the need to defend a position already taken.
This piece lays out the core facts: what the first deal contained, what its critics objected to, and what the war has changed. Readers who want to form an opinion based on evidence rather than emotion can do so with a clear picture of the possible risks and rewards.
What the Obama Nuclear Deal (JCPOA) Was
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in 2015, was an agreement between Iran and the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China, and the EU. Iran accepted major restrictions on its nuclear program and extensive inspections in exchange for relief from international sanctions.
Key elements included:
- Uranium stockpile reduction: Iran cut its enriched‑uranium stockpile by 98%, to under 300 kg.
- Enrichment cap: Enrichment was limited to 3.67%, far below weapons‑grade.
- Centrifuge limits: Iran reduced its operating centrifuges from about 20,000 to a much smaller number.
- Inspections: The IAEA gained continuous access and monitoring authority.
- Sunset clauses: Restrictions were set to expire on staggered timelines between 10 and 25 years.
- Sanctions relief: Iran received phased relief from U.S., EU, and UN sanctions.
JCPOA Sunset Clauses: What Ended After 10, 15, 20, and 25 Years. The JCPOA and UN Security Council Resolution 2231 created a layered schedule of expiration dates for nuclear and verification restrictions.
10‑Year Sunsets
• Limits on advanced centrifuge R&D
• Restrictions on manufacturing centrifuge components
• Gradual easing of procurement‑channel controls for nuclear‑related imports
15‑Year Sunsets: These were the core nuclear restrictions:
- The 300‑kg uranium stockpile cap
- The 3.67% enrichment cap
- Limits on centrifuges at Natanz and Fordow
- Ban on enrichment at Fordow (beyond limited research)
- Caps on heavy‑water production and stockpiling
20‑Year Sunset
- IAEA surveillance of centrifuge production facilities
25‑Year Sunset
- IAEA monitoring of uranium mining and milling operations
Some provisions were permanent, including Iran’s commitment never to pursue nuclear weapons and long‑term IAEA access under the Additional Protocol.
What Aspects of the Agreement Trump Did Not Like
President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA in 2018, calling it “the worst deal ever.” His objections centered on numerous important issues:
- Sunset clauses: He argued the deal only delayed Iran’s nuclear capacity.
- Ballistic missiles: The JCPOA did not restrict Iran’s missile program.
- Regional proxy activity: The deal did not address Iran’s support for armed groups in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.
- Enrichment limits: Trump said Iran could resume higher‑level enrichment once the sunset provisions expired.
- Sanctions leverage: He believed the U.S. gave up too much economic pressure up front.
What Trump Has Said He Wants in a New Deal: Trump has stated that any new agreement must be “far better” than the JCPOA. Reporting indicates the U.S., under his leadership, has sought:
- Additional nuclear restrictions beyond the JCPOA limits
- Limits on Iran’s ballistic‑missile program
- An end to Iran’s support for regional armed groups
- Longer‑lasting or permanent constraints instead of sunset clauses
- A wider regional security framework dealing with Iran’s military reach
These goals reflect the view that the JCPOA postponed, rather than eliminated, Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions.
Evaluating whether a tougher deal is “worth it” requires weighing potential benefits against the strategic costs of the conflict.
Energy Security and the Strait of Hormuz
Possible benefits of a successful deal:
- Reduced risk of disruption in the world’s most important oil chokepoint, through which 20–27% of global seaborne oil and major LNG shipments pass
- More predictable energy prices and fewer war‑risk premiums
Offsets and costs in a war environment:
- Iran has repeatedly shown it can threaten or partially close the strait, causing oil price spikes and global economic stress
- Even limited conflict can lead to tanker attacks, blockades, and insurance shocks that act as a tax on the global economy
China and Russia: Who Gains From Prolonged Crisis?
Possible benefits of a stronger deal:
- Reduced the opportunity for China and Russia to position themselves as Iran’s protectors and economic partners
- Limits on their ability to secure discounted Iranian oil or strengthen military ties
Offsets if conflict continues:
- War and sanctions push Iran further into China’s and Russia’s orbit
- China benefits from discounted oil and a distracted United States
- Russia benefits from higher global energy prices and another geopolitical front that divides Western attention
NATO Allies: Unity vs. Fracture
Possible benefits of a coordinated, stronger deal:
- Repaired transatlantic relations after the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA
- Shared sanctions and diplomacy could realign U.S.–European strategy on Iran
Offsets if the U.S. acts alone or escalates conflict:
- Secondary sanctions and unilateral decisions have already strained relations with key NATO economies
- A war that raises energy prices and harms European economies deepens concerns that U.S. actions impose costs on allies without consultation
Middle East Allies: Mixed Incentives
Possible benefits of Trump’s four asks:
- Israel and several Gulf states have long supported tougher limits on Iran’s nuclear program, missiles, and proxies
- A credible agreement could reduce proxy attacks across the region
Offsets and risks:
- If diplomacy fails, these same allies become front‑line targets for missiles, drones, and cyberattacks
- Extended conflict and high oil prices can threaten friendly governments and fuel anti‑U.S. sentiment
CONCLUSION
In the end, the question is not whether one prefers the Obama deal or a tougher Trump‑style agreement, or whether one supports or opposes the war.
The real question is whether the United States is making choices grounded in a full understanding of the costs, risks, and strategic trade-offs involved.
Facts do not settle every argument, but they do set the boundaries of what is real, and only by facing those facts, free of bias or wishful thinking about the future, can the country judge whether the road ahead leads toward greater security or deeper uncertainty.
David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.