The JCPOA
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The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was the 2015 agreement limiting Iran''s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. John Kiriakou''s assessment of it is unqualified: "the JCPOA was a good idea. The JCPOA worked."

The monitoring regime

The detail he adds in its defence concerns verification, and its precedent. "The monitoring mechanism that was called for in the JCPOA was exactly the same monitoring mechanism that the United Nations used in Iraq, the same lead seals, the same surveillance cameras, the same inspection regime. And it was working. It was working for the two or three years that it was actually in place. We decided to walk away from that, and that''s a shame."

The bind the withdrawal created

Kiriakou identifies a self-inflicted legal problem in the exit. "US law says that we have to impose sanctions on any country that does business with Iran. Well, under the JCPOA everybody was doing business with Iran, including the British, the French, the Germans, the Japanese, everybody." The American decision, he notes, did not bind the other signatories: "just because Donald Trump decided that we were going to pull out doesn''t necessarily mean, in our allies'' thinking, that now they should pull out as well or risk being punished."

The French, on his account, called the bluff first: "look, if you want to pull out, go ahead and pull out, but we''re not pulling out. We''re signatories to this agreement too. And if you want to sanction us, then go ahead and sanction us." His one-line coda: "and of course we haven''t."

The attempt to return

"In the first year or so of the Biden administration it seemed like there was enough of a desire on the part of the US government to want to re-enter the JCPOA, and so we engaged the Iranians in talks. Those talks went very poorly. Not much was agreed upon, and in the end both sides just gave up. It was a bilateral decision, we just gave up. So relations are not good."

See also

- Iran Nuclear Assessment
- Iraq WMD intelligence
- Sanctions Effectiveness
- The permanent multipolar world
- Trump
