The Iran nuclear deal was sold as a mechanism to constrain Tehran. In practice, it constrained Washington. Ali M. Ansari, director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews, laid out this case in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, arguing that the agreement was "reasonable" on its face, "but people treated it as if it were some sort of holy grail."
"Hvylya" reports, citing the WSJ's interview with the historian, that the consequences played out most devastatingly in Syria. "The Russians and Iranians piled in and half a million Syrians died in that war," Ansari said. President Obama didn't intervene for fear of upsetting Iran and scuttling the nuclear deal. "The agreement was meant to tie Iran's hands," Ansari said. "Not tie your own hands."
The deal's problems began earlier than Syria, according to the historian. President Obama had started by accepting that Iran's problems were ultimately America's fault. Then, when Iranian protests broke out in 2009 over a stolen election, Obama "served notice, to all who could hear, that a nuclear settlement trumped the rights of individual Iranians," Ansari wrote in his 2024 book. The deal's salesmen claimed it would set Iran on a path to political liberalization. "The reality was that Iran's approach to its international relations would be dictated by domestic politics, which were hardening by the day."
The U.S. military option, supposedly "on the table" as a threat, was instead weaponized against American opponents of the nuclear deal. Mere weeks after "probably the most appalling slaughter of Iranians by their government in 200 years," Ansari noted, "we get into negotiations, and suddenly, we're all talking about centrifuges and the Iranians have stolen the narrative." That polarized the U.S. discussion along partisan lines, ensuring that almost all Democrats would oppose the eventual war.
When President Trump quit the deal in 2018, Ansari recalled, "we in the West were all saying, 'Oh my God, isn't Trump a son of a bitch?' But most Iranians didn't care. They hadn't seen any benefit from the deal." The regime had dithered rather than take steps necessary for U.S. economic engagement. For Iranians, the real story was 2009, when hope for domestic political reform died. "But of course we miss that in the West," Ansari said. "We're so fixated on what we think we're doing about security and nuclear - which has its place - that we don't understand what's going on inside the country."
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