The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, effectively came to an end on September 28. The European members of the agreement accused Iran of failing to comply with its commitments under the deal and triggered the snapback mechanism, which reimposed all previous UN sanctions that the JCPOA had suspended in 2015.
Despite renewed sanctions, Tehran calculates that it has already withstood the United States’ so-called maximum pressure, while UN sanctions now carry mostly “psychological” weight. Russia and China reject the snapback’s legitimacy, echoing Tehran’s claim that Europe itself did not honor the agreement.
This all happened in the aftermath of the recent Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iran in June amid U.S.–Iran negotiations, in which Washington demanded that Tehran permanently dismantle its enrichment program—a clear walk-back from the JCPOA, which limited Iran’s enrichment to 3.67 percent for a period of ten years.
Iran is resentful that its initial compliance did not deliver the deal’s promised benefits, particularly after the U.S. withdrawal in 2018 and Europe’s failure to resist American secondary sanctions. Now further embittered by the recent attacks, it has hardened its position by suspending cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
As all parties have come to detest the JCPOA, this marks a watershed moment in two decades of Iran’s nuclear challenge. Will there be a new round of negotiations or war? Will Iran rush to build the bomb?
On the surface, Iran’s stance remains unchanged: no weaponization, no abandonment of enrichment. This suggests continuity—a façade that Tehran itself may prefer to maintain. But over the past decade, regional and internal changes point toward a potential gradual shift.
A decade ago, many Arab governments opposed the JCPOA. Today, they press for an agreement with a weakened Iran, seeing Israel as a more serious expansionist threat. They also sense their own vulnerability, should another conflict with Iran erupt. Tehran, meanwhile, appears to be pursuing a policy aimed at minimum neighborhood tensions, even hinting at folding its confrontational axis of resistance into such an approach.
The domestic landscape in Iran has also changed. The internal pressures—from the elite and the public—that once compelled the Islamic Republic to accept the JCPOA appear to have eased. The negative experience of the agreement, combined with the twelve-day war, may have given the state greater resilience to absorb pain. A population that once saw the nuclear issue as a risky burden serving regime interests increasingly demands nuclear deterrence, especially after being bombed by two nuclear states.
Together, these changes suggest that post-JCPOA Iran may prove more conciliatory toward regional neighbors—if they reciprocate—but more resistant to cooperation with international agencies, unwilling to surrender nuclear leverage, and more risk-prone if facing existential threats from the United States or Israel. Iran’s objective remains the same for now: a nuclear threshold state. But the bottom line on cooperation and minimum enrichment may have hardened.
A Controversial Agreement
The JCPOA was contentious from the start. In the United States, Republicans criticized the administration of then president Barack Obama for releasing Iran’s frozen assets and relaxing sanctions without securing the permanent dismantlement of Iran’s program. They decried recognition of Iran’s limited enrichment rights and the deal’s sunset clauses. Even the unprecedented inspection regime making Iran the most inspected country did not alleviate their concerns.
As Steven E. Miller, the director of Harvard Kennedy School’s International Security Program and a veteran arms control scholar, has observed, even supporters had a reflexive need to state the deal was imperfect, ignoring the fact that “in the history of the nonproliferation regime, no other state has ever willingly accepted as many constraints or as much transparency as Iran did in the JCPOA.” The JCPOA was, by definition, temporary—with the option of extension if all sides acted in good faith. (The agreement’s “termination day” was October 18, 2025.)
Outside the United States, the deal was no less controversial. As I wrote at the time, it injected two new insecurities: regional and domestic. Iran’s rivals in the Middle East saw the JCPOA as not only flawed but too narrow, and as a reward for Iran’s regional behavior, tilting the regional balance of power. They demanded a broader deal that addressed Iran’s ties to nonstate actors and its missile program.
Inside Iran, the JCPOA intensified factional rivalries. The conservative establishment, led by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), feared the deal was designed to reward “moderates” under then president Hassan Rouhani and tilt the internal balance of power. Rouhani and his allies sought to use the nuclear program as a bargaining chip with the United States to normalize the Islamic Republic internationally while strengthening their domestic position. Public reaction, expressed through street celebrations and voting for candidates who promised to push to resolve the nuclear issue, suggested that citizens viewed the JCPOA not as an arms-control agreement but as a ticket to improved relations with the United States.
Unsurprisingly, Khamenei was never enthusiastic about the deal, and not only because of its domestic consequences. A review of his statements over the past two decades shows that he was skeptical of the agreement from the start. Pressured by internal divisions and public demand, he allowed it to proceed but consistently voiced doubt that the United States would honor its commitments. He feared that Washington would lock Tehran into an agreement without meaningfully lifting sanctions, citing a long list of broken American promises since 1979. He praised the negotiators’ efforts but not the deal itself, later claiming they ignored his red lines on verifiable sanctions relief. Last September, he revealed that he had also opposed the JCPOA’s ten-year timeline and wanted a shorter option, but he claimed that the negotiators had disregarded his position.
Now, Khamenei feels vindicated, as do hardliners who denounce Rouhani and other pragmatists for accepting what they see as a seriously flawed bargain. They argue that never in diplomatic history has the violating party—in this case, the United States and the Europeans—been able to punish the complying party, Iran.
Rouhani and his allies, now marginalized, accuse hardliners of sabotaging the JCPOA through provocative missile tests and obstruction of revival talks during the administration of former president Joe Biden, costing Iran an estimated $1 trillion. Defending the deal, they claim that paragraph 36 of the agreement also allowed Iran to take remedial steps to expand enrichment and achieve a threshold status while remaining technically inside the JCPOA. They also argue that the agreement bought Iran ten years to strengthen its missile and drone capabilities, demonstrated in the recent war with Israel. Yet Rouhani and the other JCPOA negotiators have been subjected to attacks by state-controlled media for agreeing to a deal that critics now blame for making Iran vulnerable to renewed sanctions and coercion.
In this climate, domestic public discourse in Iran appears to be shifting—from asking “why would Iran need a bomb?” to “why hasn’t it built one already?” Surveys, government polls, and elite commentary suggest growing bottom-up support for weaponization. Two perspectives stand out:
The North Korea model: Ultra-conservatives and even some secular nationalists advocate leaving the NPT, ending all cooperation, and building a bomb. The first group argue Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons can be reinterpreted: It forbids use, not possession; it does not cover tactical weapons; and survival of the state overrides religious rulings, echoing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s final dictum.
The gradualist path: Favored by conservative ruling elites and the IRGC, this strategy emphasizes maintaining nuclear infrastructure, inching toward the weaponization option, while rebuilding and relying on the axis of resistance and conventional forces for deterrence. They are concerned that rushing to a bomb would provoke further attacks, while another JCPOA-style compromise would only invite new demands and coercion. Khamenei’s recent speech reflect this approach. He reaffirmed his fatwa against nuclear weapons but explicitly endorsed enrichment at 60 percent—of which Iran reportedly still holds around 400 kilograms. His objective thus remains unchanged, but his bottom line has clearly shifted.
The JCPOA may have provided exactly the collective “experience” Khamenei once hoped for, though at far greater cost than expected: war, assassinations of Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists, and more sanctions. Iranian society and politics appear to have changed: a shift in the internal balance of power and emerging signs of a gradual alignment of public sentiment with the state’s nuclear ambitions and national security priorities (unlike the wide state-society gap that persists on other issues). Yet it remains unclear how deep or durable this sentiment is and whether it could be reversed if a credible diplomatic alternative were to emerge.
