Overnight, Israel attacked several of Iran’s nuclear sites and killed the Islamic Republic’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists, as well as assassinating the Supreme Leader’s key advisor on nuclear issues, Ali Shamkhani. This came      two days before the US and Iran were supposed to resume direct talks on finding a diplomatic agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear programme, which Shamkhani had publicly supported. Why has war come now, in the middle of diplomacy?

Initially, there was much speculation about whether the US and Israel had coordinated, or whether Netanyahu was trying to sabotage Trump’s talks. For some months, there seemed to be a genuine difference between Netanyahu’s government and the Trump administration over whether a nuclear deal with Iran was desirable at all. However, Trump said today that he had repeatedly warned Iran they needed to come to an agreement fast, that many hardliners were now dead and that Iran should quickly come to the table and compromise. This offer may be as blunt as: agree to dismantle your nuclear programme, or more of you will be killed, perhaps to the point of regime change.

It is genuinely unclear how Iran is going to respond, and the situation is changing so rapidly that written texts will quickly date, but some background on the recent state of nuclear diplomacy may be useful context when assessing what is next. While the short-term repercussions are highly uncertain, there may, strangely, be more certainty about the long-term ones: this is hugely undermining to non-proliferation diplomacy in general.

The recent US-Iran diplomacy

Over recent weeks, it had appeared that the US and Iranian leadership were both serious about trying to reach an agreement. This was despite the fact that Trump had opposed, and ultimately abrogated, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement. Trump’s criticisms of the JCPOA were more about the politics of dealing with Iran than about the finer details of the non-proliferation provisions: he was in part motivated by his dislike of Barack Obama, and influenced by the criticisms he was hearing from Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and the Iran hawks in his first administration, such as Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.

Yet the underlying logic of the JCPOA bargain seemed to appeal to Trump 2.0, who has styled himself as a peacemaker and appeared to be distancing himself from prominent Iran hawks. A JCPOA-like bargain would mean that Iran would verifiably give up any pathway      towards      a nuclear weapon, it would obtain sanctions relief in return, and everyone would avoid a big, messy war in the Middle East, which American voters generally oppose. Moreover, from Iran’s viewpoint, the logic went, sanctions relief would help ease some economic pressure for a regime that is well aware it faces extensive domestic dissatisfaction; and after Israel had decimated the leadership of Hizbollah, Iran also had a heightened interest in obtaining some security assurances from the US, the only country that could plausibly promise to help restrain Israel from attacking it. By contrast, Iran’s partnership with Russia has conspicuously not brought it protection against attacks from Israel.

So when Trump’s special envoy Steven Witkoff began talking, experts asked, isn’t this basically the same as the JCPOA? One answer to this has been: yes, but politics demands pretending that it isn’t. Others have answered that any Trump deal would need to be conspicuously “bigger and better” than the JCPOA to pass muster with the president. Various ideas were proposed.

One idea that has been floated was to make an agreement permanent and irreversible. That would mean an agreement without the “sunset” time limits of the JCPOA, which were widely criticised in the US, while from Iran’s point of view, there was an interest in trying to obtain economic development benefits that couldn’t be quickly reversed. It is essential to remember here that Iran had been burned by its very recent experience of the US withdrawing from the JCPOA when it was still in full compliance with what had been agreed. Meanwhile, some experts floated the idea that the US could provide the technology and supplies for Iran’s civilian nuclear programme, in an attempt to appeal to Trump’s business interests. Others resurrected the idea of a regional consortium for joint enrichment with some of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, as the UAE already has civilian nuclear power, and Saudi Arabia is developing it too.

But in recent weeks, US officials had started to say that Iran should give up enriching uranium altogether. In return, Iranian officials emphasised that this was a “red line” for them, arguing that their right to peaceful uses of nuclear technology under the Non-Proliferation Treaty also entails a right to domestic enrichment. Politically this goes back to the question of how to create a “better” deal than the JCPOA: zero enrichment would be better from the point of view of the US, but conspicuously worse for Iran, which spent years building a nuclear program whilst isolated under sanctions and negotiating acceptance of its ability to enrich uranium at lower, limited levels under the JCPOA. After the US stopped complying with the      JCPOA, Iran started to produce highly enriched uranium, breaching JCPOA limits, which could have been intended primarily for negotiating leverage but also created suspicions in Europe and the US that it wanted to get as close as possible to the threshold of getting a nuclear weapon, without taking the kind of unambiguous step, like a nuclear weapons test, that could trigger an Israeli attack.

Uranium enrichment was clearly becoming a serious sticking point, but it did not seem insurmountable. Rather, it looked like a question of which side would back down, or whether the enrichment consortium idea might be able to bridge the gap and save face for both.

There was also the possibility of UN sanctions snapback coming into play as a potential but highly controversial source of Western leverage (based on JCPOA provisions which expire in October this year). Trump’s statement today suggests that he may still be betting that a deal can be made in which Iran will back down and accept zero enrichment, on the basis that drastic military action will have erased the apparent “red line”.

The US and Israel may be drawing conclusions from Lebanon, where Israel assassinated Hizbollah’s senior leadership in the middle of international diplomacy to obtain a ceasefire, and was ultimately able to reach another US-brokered ceasefire because the Lebanese group was too weakened to have any other realistic options. They will also be drawing conclusions from Syria, another case where the “axis of resistance” turned out to be much weaker than many had thought.

Threats to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

The next steps are uncertain and fraught with extreme risk. For two decades, the fundamental rationale for nuclear diplomacy with Iran has been preventing war. The aim has been to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East through diplomacy rooted in international law, consistent with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The NPT has been one of the most successful international arms control agreements but has been coming under increasing strain in an era of heightened international insecurity.

Over the past two decades, the fears about nuclear proliferation centred on two deeply insecure countries, North Korea, which did build nuclear weapons, and Iran, which has built up the technical capabilities to do so but has remained below the threshold of weaponisation. But this landscape has changed. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and with many questions being asked about the political sustainability of the US “nuclear umbrella”, risks to the non-proliferation regime have become much wider, with countries from South Korea to Poland hinting that they might have an interest in acquiring their own nuclear deterrent. Faced with the prospect of “friendly proliferation”, the US (under Biden) responded to South Korea with stronger security assurances, and (under Trump) responded to Poland and others by emphasising the need for Europeans to step up their conventional deterrence with much higher defence spending.

It is unclear if this will be enough. The fact that nuclear-armed Russia invaded Ukraine has shaken the credibility of security assurances over the long term, as Ukraine joined the NPT in exchange for security assurances from Russia as well as the US, UK, China, and France. Meanwhile, nuclear-weapons states, including the UK, are placing more emphasis on the value that they see in nuclear deterrence for their own security. This inevitably encourages at least some other states to see nuclear weapons as the gold standard guarantors of security, creating a tension with non-proliferation objectives.

In this fraught context, there will undoubtedly be influential voices inside Iran who say they would be much better off if they’d already built a bomb; better to go down the route of North Korea than that of Libya. Earlier this year, Netanyahu called for a “Libya model” for dismantling Iran’s entire nuclear programme; hardly an attractive model given what subsequently happened to Qadhafi. It also seems pretty clear who will win the domestic debate in Iran about whether the US can be trusted as a negotiating partner.

So far, Iran’s nuclear sites have been damaged but not destroyed. The political impact on the Iranian system is harder to discern for now, as this may be the most significant shock to it since the Iran-Iraq war, and there may be even more internal fragilities today, but assuming that the system survives, Iran’s internal politics might well shift towards support for weaponisation.

The future of the IAEA’s access to Iran is also in question. The Agency’s director, Rafael Grossi, has today condemned the Israeli attacks and emphasised that while the Agency’s Board of Governors this week found Iran to be in noncompliance with nuclear safeguards, it sought a diplomatic way forward. Nonetheless, this resolution will be widely touted as a retrospective justification for Israel’s attack. That is a stretch. It is primarily related to unanswered questions about Iran’s undeclared nuclear activities in the early 2000s. Israel has multiple reasons for striking Iran, because the two countries are entangled in a conflict that has been escalating since October 7 2023 and the Gaza war, and which has a variety of regional and domestic political dimensions that don’t have much to do with enforcing the international non-proliferation regime.

According to Reuters, one Israeli TV channel, Kan, is already citing an official saying the US had helped lull Iran into a false sense of security. There is often a complex interplay between threats of force and offers of diplomacy, but depending on what happens next, the recent weeks of talks may well come to seem less like a good-faith attempt to reset regional diplomacy and more like a trap.

The E3 should be extremely careful about this as they weigh their diplomatic response to the attack; while the UK and the EEAS have taken a very cautious approach to public statements, Germany has emphasised Iran’s noncompliance with the NPT and France has flagged its concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme. There is a risk that Iran may conclude that if it is already being bombed for noncompliance over a safeguards issue, it does not have much else to lose by exiting the NPT altogether. Europeans might still be able to help prevent that scenario, but it will be hard to do so if they’re simultaneously unwilling to call out strikes on nuclear sites that were still under IAEA safeguards. Politically, European governments do not want to be seen as taking Iran’s side, but they should be aware of the long shadow that will be cast on future nuclear diplomacy and non-proliferation.

The European Leadership Network itself as an institution holds no formal policy positions. The opinions articulated above represent the views of the authors rather than the European Leadership Network or its members. The ELN aims to encourage debates that will help develop Europe’s capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security policy challenges of our time, to further its charitable purposes.

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