Washington’s view
After Iran watched the United States oust regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, it stopped developing a nuclear warhead, U.S. intelligence concluded. But Tehran kept options open. It got better at enriching uranium even as it insisted the work was for power plants, medical isotopes and research.
Iran had that right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But the past five presidents feared it would be too easy for the theocracy — one that still reaches for chants like “Death to America” and threatens to obliterate Israel — to fabricate a bomb.
So Israel covertly killed a number of Iranian nuclear scientists. (Assassins wove through traffic to attach “sticky bombs” to their car doors.) The U.S. and Israel created a computer virus that seized control of nuclear centrifuges and blew them up.
The sabotage campaign helped bring Iranians to the negotiating table with the Obama administration, China, Russia and some European nations. Iran agreed to ship 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country. But the deal had weaknesses: Iran retained its nuclear-enrichment infrastructure and the deal would expire in 2030. In exchange, the U.S. and other nations lifted economic sanctions. Obama bet that, with time, a younger generation would push Iran to a more Western-leaning posture.
The agreement polarized Congress. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, lobbied against it, arguing the Iranians would cheat. Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018 — over the objections of national security aides who noted it was working. Then, in 2020, Trump ordered the U.S. military to kill a beloved Iranian general who had overseen many of the region’s deadliest strikes on Americans and their allies.
