Who is driving the Iran-Israel-US escalation?: Diplomatic realists
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The compliance reports nobody reads
The JCPOA was signed on July 14, 2015, in Vienna. We can still recite the sunset clauses. The Arak heavy-water reactor redesigned to produce less than one kilogram of weapons-grade plutonium. We know where every comma was negotiated because some of us were in the room.
On May 8, 2018, the United States withdrew. Not because Iran violated the deal — every IAEA report confirmed adherence. The withdrawal was ideological. It did not produce a better deal. It produced what we are living through now. Under the JCPOA: breakout over twelve months. After withdrawal: enrichment to 60 percent by April 2021, particles at 84 percent by 2025. Every number moved in the wrong direction, and every number moved after the deal collapsed.
The deterrence hawks describe a regime that only understands force. We describe a regime that complied with the most intrusive verification regime ever imposed on a non-NPT signatory — until compliance stopped being rewarded. The April 2024 exchange proved our case: both sides calibrated for managed escalation. That grammar requires a channel to formalize it. No channel exists because the United States dismantled the only one that worked.
The non-interventionists want disengagement. American withdrawal from the JCPOA is precisely what detonated the current crisis. Disengagement is not neutral. It has a blast radius. The Catch-22 of arms economics applies with particular cruelty: every strike creates demand for the systems that intercept the next strike.
Where we concede ground: The JCPOA’s sunset clauses were a genuine vulnerability we undersold.
What would change our mind: A military campaign halting enrichment without regional war or Saudi proliferation.
Read the full synthesis: Who is driving the Iran-Israel-US escalation?