A deal was limiting Iran’s enrichment of uranium until Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of it. Instead the Dealmaker bombed Iran, threatening to set the region on fire, writes Joe Lauria. With a ceasefire what does he do now?
Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant before U.S. attack.. (LANCE FIRMS operated by NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) with funding provided by NASA Headquarters.)
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
In the last great achievement of international diplomacy, the United States and its allies Britain, France and Germany, concluded a deal in 2015 with Russia, China and Iran — something that today would be unthinkable — to limit Iran’s nuclear enrichment to purely civilian uses at 3.67 percent.
Negotiations on the deal began in November 2013, just three months before the U.S.-backed unconstitutional change of government in Kiev that started the long slide in U.S.-Russian relations. That did not prevent the nuclear deal from being concluded in July 2015 and endorsed by the Security Council in October of that year.
Seven years later, Washington and its European allies began fighting a hot war against Moscow through its proxy Ukraine. Relations with China have also sharply deteriorated. The idea of such cooperation on Iran now is unthinkable.
But in 2013 such wise diplomacy was still possible and the result was a peaceful resolution of the Iranian enrichment issue.
Iran agreed to stringent monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency and in exchange, the United States, Europe and the United Nations lifted economic sanctions against Tehran.
The IAEA certified that the deal was working. Iran was sticking to 3.67 percent enrichment. Diplomacy worked. Iran’s nuclear program was in check.
But the Israelis had opposed it all along because Israel’s aim has long been to overthrow the government in Iran in Israel’s quest for regional dominance.
Netanyahu could not stop Barack Obama from working with the Chinese and the Russians to conclude the deal that solved the nuclear issue and left the Iranian government in a more secure position.
Please Donate to CN’s
Spring Fund Drive!
Then Donald Trump became president. He did what Netanyahu wanted. He pulled the U.S. out of the deal, saying it was a lousy agreement and he could do better. But there was no new deal. Iran continued to cooperate with the existing agreement for a year before increasing enrichment, eventually to 60 percent for leverage in the negotiation. (90 percent is needed for a bomb, but U.S. intelligence and the IAEA said in recents months that Iran is not pursuing a bomb).
Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, did nothing to return the U.S. to the deal to save it when he got into the White House, dishonoring probably Obama’s greatest achievement.
Trump 2.0’s idea of a better deal to limit Tehran’s enrichment was to demand zero percent after Iran agreed to return to 3.67 percent. Trump would look like a fool if he accepted 3.67 percent, as that would mean agreeing to the very deal that was working well before he tore it up.
So it was bombs away instead.
Clearing Smoke Reveals Trump’s Lies
Announcing bombing of Iran, June 21, 2025. (White House screenshot)
More than 24 hours after the smoke cleared above Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities Trump’s lies during his address Saturday night came clearly into view.
The strikes were not “a spectacular military success.” Iran’s “key nuclear enrichment facilities” were not “completely and totally obliterated.” There is no evidence that a single centrifuge was damaged and Iran’s 60 percent enriched fuel had already been removed and is in a location unknown to Israel, the U.S. and the IAEA.
Trump called Iran the “bully of the Middle East” when any neutral person knows that bully is Israel backed by the U.S., the bully of the world.
In just the past few months, with U.S. backing, Israel has invaded Lebanon and Syria, launched an unprovoked attack on Iran and is committing genocide in Gaza. The last time Iran invaded anyone was Iraq in 1982 but only after Iraq had invaded it first in 1980.
Israel gets away with this by portraying itself as the perpetual victim of an imminent new Holocaust 80 years after the fact and thus needs to invade and bomb its neighbors in “self defense” to pre-empt this from happening.
Regional hostility toward Israel does not stem from a reaction to its decades of aggression against Palestinians and its neighbors but purely from anti-semitic hatred. These countries must constantly be attacked to wipe out this hatred, not to reconstitute an ancient Hebrew empire from (beyond) the River to the Sea.
One power that empire never conquered was Persia.
The United Kingdom of Israel, around the time of David and Saul (11th century B.C.) Vassal states and defeated kingdoms in red, including parts of present-day Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, but not Philistia (Palestine) including Gaza. (RobertoReggi/Wikimedia Commons)
With their overlapping empires — Israel’s regional and the U.S.’s global — Iran, the land of Darius and Cyrus, is the prime target. The U.S. has sought to control it since at least its 1953 coup restored the shah to power for its oil and because of its Cold War rivalry with Russia.
Trump mimicked Israel, calling Iran “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror,” when an objective analysis would correctly award that title to the Gulf Sunni monarchies, principally Saudi Arabia, all allied with the United States.
They have sponsored al-Qaeda and ISIS and all their offshoots and rebrandings, while Iran has mostly supported militia resisting occupations in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Gaza.
Though formed in 1982 in response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon, Hezbollah was only designated a terrorist organization by the European Union in 2013, for instance. Though founded in 1987, the EU did not view Hamas as a terrorist group until 2001.
Then Trump said of Iran:
“They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs. That was their specialty. We lost over 1,000 people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate.”
This is a bizarre statement that can only be related to attacks by militia against U.S. occupation forces in Iraq after the U.S. 2003 invasion. But only some of these groups were Iranian-backed and they killed not a thousand, but 169 U.S. soldiers, whom Trump referred to as “our people,” as if they were tourists and not an occupying army.
Trump’s thousand U.S. victims appears to come from propaganda put out by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which calls itself “a leading independent research institute, serving as Israel’s global embassy for national security and applied diplomacy.”
It combats what it calls “apartheid antisemitism.” It falsely called the 2015 nuclear agreement that Trump withdrew from “a deal that would allow Iran to become a nuclear-armed state.” In 2015, Haaretz named Sheldon Adelson, Trump’s principal donor, “one of the main financers of JCFA in recent years.”
Israel had to cut short its ambitions to conquer Iran (at least overtly) and agree to a ceasefire because it was running out of interceptor missiles; it’s economy, already weakened by Gaza, was threatened at $200 million a day; and it sustained far more damage than it will admit.
Now that there is a ceasefire, Trump is back to square one. The New York Times reported:
“Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, welcomed news of a cease-fire. In a social-media post, he said he has invited Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi to meet to discuss a diplomatic solution on Iran’s nuclear program.”
That solution would be a return to 3.67 percent enrichment and Iran giving up its 60 percent stockpile, in other words, returning exactly to the deal Trump tore up to plunge the region into extreme danger with his bombing stunt.
Where will he turn now?
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
Please Donate to CN’s
Spring Fund Drive!
A great article Mr. Lauria. And very amusing, satirical replies.
“BRICS in the wall”.
“Is this statement antisemitic”
“How pleasant can life sometimes be”.
“Or a squirrel. (If you’re a dog.)”
We are in dire need of humour in these dire straits times.
“That solution would be a return to 3.67 percent enrichment and Iran giving up its 60 percent stockpile”
1. Iran now needs its 60 percent stockpile, and even a nuclear weapons program, for security against zionism;
2. Iran now has no grounds to trust the US or Israel in any agreement, so diplomacy is now only threat balancing;
3. It appears that China or Russia, perhaps Pakistan/KSA/Sunni alliance, should defend Iran’s deterrence development.
Iran could disable western aggression by forming a secular democratic republic with women’s rights.
A conservative alliance was needed to oust the Shah, but perhaps it is not too early to consider a new constitution.
If that properly regulated economic influence in government and media, it could become a model for western reforms.
Forming a secular democratic republic with women’s rights might placate the zionists, but religion, democracy and women’s rights never were reasons for US and general Western aggression. The 1953 coup was against a secular democratic government, the issue then as now being Western control over Iran’s oil.
The conservative Islamic constitution is likely to delay reform for a few generations more, but one can hope.
‘What does he do now?…’ Well, after the bombs and the lies he was just in time to happily go off to the The Hague’s NATO Summit, where he was fêted by the Dutch king and queen and will stay overnight at one of the royal palaces. how pleasant can life sometimes be…
In 1953 we sought bases from whcih to send U-2 spy planes and infiltrate covert operations likely. the USSR Then the Shah fell victim of participating in OPEC oil embargoes along with an assassinated Saudi King.
Then we cooked up religious freedom fighters against communism in Afghanistan. We thought an Iranian Muslim state was the ticket and they tricked us to believing they might support us. They took Embassy hostages instead so we threw Iraq at them so they need spare parts for war but they took Casey and Reagan over Carter and eventually GHWB suffered loss of a 2nd term over this part in Reagan/Casey stealing Carters 2nd term and all the subterfuge to get around Congress for drug lord wars.
On and on it goes and where it stops no one knows. But mostly Trump hates BRICS and all sanction bargaining is attempt to lock in countries economically away from BRICS and break the BRICS in the Wall for Wall Street.
“We thought an Iranian Muslim state was the ticket and they tricked us to believing they might support us. ”
Wait, wut? Please, please do explain this one. I can’t even figure out whom you might be referring to as “we” or how whoever that was was tricked by…again, whom exactly? I’ve tried so hard to make this comment make sense but I have to admit defeat.
No radiation was detected in these areas after the bombing? (Thank God)
Which is possessive proof of (mission & intelligence ) failure. (Thank God)
Is this statement Antisemitic?
It is patently absurd for a person or nation to serve as mediator for a conflict to which it is itself a party. I am referring, of course, to Trump and the U.S. mediating the war between Iran and Israel. The reason for the ceasefire demand now is, as Joe Laurita pointed out, that Israel is taking a severe beating and is at the end of its capacity to continue fighting. Were that not the case, Trump would not be playing peacemaker— and I do mean “playing.”
As I once stated in response to Ambassador Craig Murray’s May 3, 2023 article “The USA – What Democracy?” (in which I made an effort to complicate the oft-repeated premise that “Trump, for all his many faults, was the only President in recent memory not to have started any wars [during his first term]”):
“[I]magine the Soviet Union assassinating the late CIA directors Admiral Stansfield Turner, William J. Casey, or William H. Webster with a targeted airstrike while they were on foreign soil due to covert US support for Mujahideen terrorist insurgents that were (often brutally) killing Soviet troops invading and occupying Afghanistan (alongside the occasional BBC journalist on the side – see Phil Miller, “To Charm ‘Seriously Evil’ Warlord, Foreign Office Overlooked Journalist’s Murder,” Declassified UK, November 9, 2021), whose ruthlessness already was or should have been well-known to those figures (for instance, see “‘Grim’ Nickname Fits Afghan Tales of Torture, Murder,” The Washington Post, May 11, 1979). There would be no love lost on my part for the loss of any of them (as with [Qassem] Soleimani himself), but it is obvious that it would have been a provocation that only made things geopolitically worse for the world at large.”
“Iran continued to cooperate with the existing agreement for a year before increasing enrichment, eventually to 60 percent for leverage in the negotiation.”
“Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, did nothing to return the U.S. to the deal to save it when he got into the White House, dishonoring probably Obama’s greatest achievement.”
So Obama supported the Yemeni genocide by the Saudis for nothing?
John Kerry, who had established a relationship with Iran during the JCPOA negotiations, advised the Iranians to wait out Trump for a better deal from the next President. Kerry was acting as a private citizen without registering as an agent of a foreign power, but of course it was more important to Kerry to interfere with Orange Man Bad. It was also against the law: 18 U.S. Code § 953 – Private correspondence with foreign governments. But some Americans are above the Law.
freebeacon.com/national-security/watch-kerry-defends-secret-meetings-with-iran-during-trump-admin/
Great article. Thank you.
The very LAST PERSON I would trust trying to broker an agreement is Trump! His constant lies certainly do not inspire confidence…at least not in me. Generally speaking, America has caused too many disturbances all over the world.
Why the heck shouldn’t Iran have nukes? It’s deemed the arch enemy of a militarist armed to the teeth with nukes psychopathological paranoid state that’s shown no compunction over killing 60,000 civilians in 20 months with the cameras rolling.
Two psychopathological paranoid states armed to the teeth with nukes.
Very comical, your attempt at both sides ism. Iran’s a peace loving nation and always has been. Hasn’t invaded anyone in well over 100 years. You should know that the only reason it’s been constantly vilified in the Western press is bc it’s in the crosshairs of a paranoid sadistic and repulsive hegemonic artificial state.
Come back with some rational facts next time. It could possibly work if you even have a sensible point to make.
I did not mention Iran in my comment for good reason. I said two states. I leave it to you to figure out which two states I could conceivably have in mind. (Hint: nobody to my knowledge, not even Trump or Netanyahu, has claimed Iran even possesses nuclear weapons, let alone is armed to the teeth with them.)
My bad. I misinterpreted what you meant. I’ve been reading too many Mark Levin tweets — have to know what the lunatic side is up to — so I sometimes knee jerk expect the worst in online commentary.
A great article Mr. Lauria. And very amusing, satirical replies.
“BRICS in the wall”.
“Is this statement antisemitic”
“How pleasant can life sometimes be”.
“Or a squirrel. (If you’re a dog.)”
We are in dire need of humour in these dire straits times.
Your article is an excellent summary of the history of the origin of the Iran-US et. al. nuclear deal. Unfortunately it will not be read, understood, or believed by the masses. One example? In “America First Re-Ignited,” today’s lead article is “Trump saves world, Democrats complain.”
Why bomb Iran instead of using diplomacy to limit its enrichment of uranium?
Because the argument has never really been about uranium. It has always been about the sovereignty of Iran. It has always been about the desire of the US to undermine that sovereignty to the point where a change of regime could be induced. For almost five decades, ever since the overthrow of the Shah Reza Pehlavi in 1978, the US has been trying to dislodge Iran’s government, whether by war using Iraq as the US proxy (1980-1988) or by funding anti-government groups in hopes of achieving a color revolution (1980-present), the US has never stopped meddling in Iran and has never lost its desire to reinstall an obedient client regime.
Iran’s nuclear program simply offered a new, distracting target for US propaganda, with Israel as the US proxy. Israel, armed with its own illicit nuclear bombs, would be used to moan and weep and cry out against the imaginary threat of antisemitism from Iran, providing cover for the long-term plan of violent overthrow.
What has happened now is simply that the US monarch dog and its Israeli colonial vassal tail see that the chances of success for violent overthrow are dwindling as Iran, China, Russia, and others develop cooperative means to reduce the dominance of the US Empire’s economic and military power. The proximal indicator that time is running out lies in the failure of the Empire’s proxy war pitting Ukraine against Russia.
When Russia did not crumble under US economic sanctions and the military weapons it gave to Ukraine, the US empire reached a point of crisis.
The US war against Iran is just another part of the empire’s flailing efforts to survive. And if it looks absurd for the US to attack Iran, that’s because it is absurd. Desperately so.
When the US says it’s about uranium, it’s trying to distract you with a small shiny object. Or a squirrel (if you’re a dog).
There is an article attached to the headline in the form of a question. Not a quiz.