American duplicity and European spinelessness could not have done more to convince Iran never to negotiate again.

In 2015, after years of painstaking negotiations, Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani presented the resulting nuclear deal, the ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,’ to the public and the institutions of the Islamic Republic for approval. While a broad coalition of Reformist, Moderate-Conservative and Principalist factions united to ensure its ratification, the terms according to which Tehran would significantly constrain its nuclear development in exchange for Western sanctions relief, saw the JCPOA vociferously opposed from the start by a cohort of ideological purists among the latter faction.

These ‘anti-establishment’ Principlists, opposed to any form of accord or concession to the West, saw their opposition legitimized by the Leader of the Revolution himself. Though Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei did ultimately permit the Rouhani administration to negotiate and ratify the JCPOA, he never made any secret of his distrust of Iran’s Western counterparts, especially the United States, regardless of any agreement reached with them.

Surely neither he, nor the JCPOA’s ardent opponents in Iran’s political class could have expected to see their suspicions confirmed so quickly. Not three years into the nuclear deal’s implementation, US President Trump unilaterally withdrew his country from the accord, illegally reimposed and expanded upon Washington’s pre-2015 sanctions regime of “maximum pressure” against Iran. This was despite his never providing a single instance of Tehran not complying with its obligations.

This drawn-out, slow-motion implosion of this crucial, and initially functioning pillar of the global non-proliferation system finally came to its end this past weekend. Britain, France, and Germany, who had remained parties to the JCPOA and who violated it terms by observing illegal American sanctions, saw that the agreement was to lapse in October, along with the ability to reimpose UN Security Council sanctions on the Iranians. So on August 28, in a breath-taking act of cynicism, the E3 invoked the “snap-back” mechanism, meaning that the full architecture of pre-2015 sanctions would immediately come back into force with the full authority of Security Council, not just the brute force wielded by Washington.

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Taking provocations head-on

Shamelessly framed by the Europeans as a tactic to pressure Iran to “return to the negotiating table,” this act came only months on the heels of “Israel’s” surprise air-attack on Iran in June. That unprovoked aggression came at the very moment Iran was negotiating with the Trump administration, whose original petulant vandalism of the deal directly caused the now spiraling hostilities.

Having effectively admitted the negotiations were a mere ruse, Trump crowned his country’s trashing of international diplomacy and security by joining his Israeli surrogate, in the final hours of its 12-day war, to bomb three of the Islamic Republic’s key nuclear facilities.

After immediately pivoting and imposing a ceasefire on the Israeli government, Washington stunningly presumed to instruct Tehran to resume negotiations in a process it had itself already admitted was a sham.

The original UN sanctions, along with their decade of additions, are now firmly back in place. While Iran has developed under such economic strangulation for over four decades and will continue to do so, the political capital of those factions so insistent on engagement (perhaps even presaging realignment) with the collective West, the Rouhani-led technocrats and Reformists now in power under President Pezeshkian has been turned to ash. Their decades-old project of economic reintegration in the global economy by attempting to address Western “concerns” about its non-existent nuclear weapons program could not possibly be more discredited. In the eyes of their political opponents, it is their straining efforts to deal in good faith with a lawless global superpower that ultimately led to the country being attacked in a way unseen since Saddam’s invasion of 1980.

Pezeshkian’s presidency, undermined by US-backed Israeli escalation from its very first day now seems listless. The very platform upon which he was voted into government has disintegrated from under him, his unceasing diplomatic outreach coming to nothing.

There is a great uncertainty over how the president will use the remaining three years of his term, to say nothing about his prospects for re-election. His likely focus will be on domestic measures to shield the public from the worst effects of the sanctions, but he has declared the Islamic Republic’s retaliation will not involve withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in response to the JCPOA’s collapse. Within the parameters Pezeshkian has set himself, it’s unclear what specific Iranian retaliation will be forthcoming. Even if he chooses not to meet the West’s blatant escalations with his own, the rank duplicity of what he thought were his Euro-American negotiating partners has all-but guaranteed his term will be succeeded by a president who will give no quarter nor indulgence of the fiction that is Western diplomacy.