The nuclear pact with Iran ended 12 years of crisis between Tehran and the West and was forged after 21 months of tough negotiations between the country of the ayatollahs and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Russia ) plus Germany. The goal, that Iran failed to develop its nuclear weapons program. These are the keys to an agreement, its rupture and its possible recomposition:
A few months before the end of his term as president of the United States, Barack Obama signed, on July 14, 2015, the nuclear agreement with Iran —in this pact China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union also signed—, which was historic: the United States withdrew its sanctions against Tehran and, in exchange, the Government of the Islamic Republic undertook to do not enrich uranium above 3%. With this enrichment, only useful energy for civil purposes is produced, and it is far from the 80%-90% necessary to create a atomic bomb.
Trump breaks it and imposes sanctions
The deal ran until May 2018. donald trumpthe then president of the United States, announced his departure from an agreement that, from that moment, became wet paperdespite timid attempts by Brussels to make it survive. The reason for the failure was simple: Trump imposed brutal sanctions against Iran, whose economy collapsed.
Iran enriches uranium towards nuclear bomb
Tehran’s response to the withdrawal was swift. Iran began to accelerate its uranium enrichment and, in the meantime, tensions escalated, especially with the assassination in 2020 of Mohsen Fajrizadeh, the alleged father of the Iranian nuclear program. In May 2022, the United Nations atomic agency claimed that Iran already had enough uranium to create an atomic bomb.
Biden in the White House and a new beginning
When Joe Biden became president of the United States, in January 2021, hope grew: while he was Obama’s secretary of state, Biden was one of the instigators of the agreement. However, already in the campaign —and later, in office— Biden warned that the negotiations would not begin if Iran did not first stop enriching uranium. From Tehran, the message was the same but the other way around, no one would sit at the table if the US did not first withdraw its sanctions against the Islamic Republic. the talks in Vienna with the EU as an intermediary they continued, but there were progress.
The war in Ukraine and the lack of oil
The negotiations took a turn last spring. Europeafter the Russian invasion of Ukraine, stopped importing crude in Russian -not gas- With a major energy crisis predicted for this winter, Brussels, with Joseph Borrell at the helm of the negotiations, he began to press to revive the agreement, and to be able to import Iranian oil. Despite the obstacles put up by Russia for the agreement to be revived, there remain, according to Iran, a few fringes to be resolved. In a few days or weeks, the atomic soap opera that Trump started four years ago could end.