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Tracking the Volatile Conflict Between the U.S. and Iran

A miscalculation could lead to a war that neither the U.S. nor Iran say they want.

Tracking the Volatile Conflict Between the U.S. and Iran
A woman wearing a chador walks past an anti-American wall mural outside the former U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran. (Photographer: Ali Mohammadi/Bloomberg)

President Joe Biden has pledged to work toward returning the U.S. to an era of diplomacy with Iran, after four years of his predecessor’s campaign of “maximum pressure” on that country. He’s proposed that the two nations return to complying with the 2015 international agreement under which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear work in exchange for relief from economic sanctions imposed by countries worried it was trying to develop a nuclear bomb. The U.S. and Iran both insist the other goes first, however, creating a sequencing problem that underscores the difficulty of calming tensions between them.

1. What has Biden proposed?

Biden campaigned for president on a pledge to get the nuclear accord back on track. Iran has been gradually abandoning its commitments under the deal in response to sanctions imposed under U.S. President Donald Trump, who pulled the U.S. out of the agreement in 2018. In mid-February, Iran upped the ante by notifying the International Atomic Energy Agency that it would stop allowing the group to conduct snap inspections as of Feb. 23. Days later, Biden’s government said it would be willing to meet with Iran to discuss a “diplomatic way forward.”

2. What was Iran’s response?

Officials there said that if the U.S. wants talks, it must first return to the nuclear deal and lift sanctions on Iran. Biden’s government has said it’s rescinding Trump-era travel restrictions on Iranian envoys that severely limited their movements in New York City. And it has reversed a Trump-era claim that the U.S. had reimposed -- or “snapped back” -- United Nations sanctions on Iran. But it has left in place the bulk of the penalties on Iran imposed under Trump, arguing that Iran should comply with its nuclear commitments before those are revoked. Since 2019, Iran, notably, has been violating the 2015 accord’s limits on its uranium enrichment.

3. What was the ‘maximum pressure’ policy?

Trump argued he could get a better deal than the 2015 accord from Iran and began reimposing old sanctions and adding new ones. In May 2019, the U.S. stepped up the pressure by letting waivers expire that had permitted eight governments to buy Iranian oil. As with other sanctions campaigns, U.S. leverage rests with the central role American banks -- and the U.S. dollar -- play in the global economy. Rather than leading to a renegotiation of the 2015 accord, the pressure provoked Iran to start violating the deal and, according to its critics, to strike out at the U.S. and its allies largely through proxies and covert actions. U.S. and Saudi officials say that Iran was behind attacks in September 2019 on two Saudi oil production plants that created the single biggest disruption in supply on record. And the U.S. blames Iran for a spate of vessel attacks in the Persian Gulf. Iran denies the accusations.

4. What was Trump’s problem with the nuclear deal?

Trump and other critics of the deal complained that it failed to deal with the Iranian missile program, which poses a credible threat to U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East, and that the agreement’s “sunset” provisions allow restrictions on processes like uranium enrichment to expire over time. The accord, they argued, went too far in easing existing sanctions on Iran in exchange for too few limits on the country’s longer-term nuclear ambitions.

5. What does Biden’s government say about that?

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that if Iran returns to compliance with the deal, the U.S. would seek to build a “longer and stronger” agreement to address what he called “deeply problematic” issues. However, the Iranians are adamantly opposed to expanding the scope of the original deal. They’ve said they won’t be drawn into missile talks because the arms are one of the few effective deterrents they have in a region with many U.S. bases and states equipped with military technology far more advanced than theirs.

6. What’s the history between the U.S. and Iran?

Discord between the two countries is rooted in U.S. backing for the 1953 coup ousting Iran’s nationalist prime minister and re-installing the monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was sympathetic to the West. When Islamic revolutionaries took over Iran in 1979, forcing the shah to flee to the U.S., militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year, demanding the shah’s return. The U.S. severed relations and began to impose sanctions, which grew over the years. The U.S. has listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984.

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