On July 14, 2015, top diplomats from Iran and six world powers announced they had finally come to an agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear production.
Then-President Barack Obama lauded the deal – officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – as a “chapter in this pursuit of a safer and more helpful and more hopeful world,” and later called it “the strongest non-proliferation agreement ever negotiated.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, at the same time, called the landmark agreement a “historic deal and Iranians will be proud of it for generations to come.” People in Tehran danced in the streets to celebrate.
Four-and-a-half years later, this cooperation between the US and Iran has relapsed into enmity, and the optimism has faded into tensions so high they risk all-out war.
President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the deal in May 2018, citing a lack of trust in Iran and calling Obama’s work a bad deal. He then imposed punitive sanctions to cripple Iran’s economy in an unsuccessful effort to force the regime’s leaders to comply with US demands on its behavior.
Trump’s actions have been widely viewed as the catalyst of a series of escalating tensions between the US and Iran, which bubbled to a historic height in recent days.
On January 3, the US killed revered Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike ordered by Trump.
Two days later, Iran announced it was fully withdrawing from the JCPOA, having since last summer openly taken incremental steps from its commitments that could allow it to develop a potential nuclear weapon.
On Thursday, Rouhani said the country was enriching more uranium than it did before completing the JCPOA in 2015.