Rather than fight over the legacy of Iran's 2015 nuclear deal, its leaders need to look ahead

A man walks past an electronic board displaying currency exchange rates in Ferdowsi Square in Tehran on earlier this week. AFP

More than two decades after Iran’s nuclear weapons programme first grabbed global attention, it continues to shape the country’s domestic politics as well as its relationship with the rest of the world.

It has served to undermine Tehran’s relations with the international community, particularly the West; led to crippling sanctions against it; and culminated in a military conflict involving Israel and the US.

This month, Tehran suffered its latest blow in relation to the programme.

Failing to come to an agreement with the three major European powers – Britain, France and Germany – over its obligations under the 2015 nuclear deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran saw the return of the UN-imposed sanctions that the landmark deal helped to lift a decade ago. The European troika, which was party to the agreement alongside China, Russia and the US, activated the so-called “snapback” mechanism that restored the sanctions.

This means that the six resolutions that were passed in the UN Security Council between 2006 and 2010, aimed at curbing the programme, are back in full force. This has already led to the imposition of new sanctions and further limits on the Iranian economy. Japan, for example, has moved to block the accounts of 78 Iranian companies and 43 Iranian citizens.

China and Russia, partners to Iran, strived to avoid the re-imposition of the sanctions by introducing a resolution in the Security Council. But, with only Algeria and Pakistan joining the two superpowers in voting for it, Tehran’s diplomatic isolation is evident.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi have since attempted to downplay the effects of these sanctions.

Iran’s President says US and Israeli attacks inflicted ‘grievous blow’ on international trust

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Mr Pezeshkian claimed that Iran’s commitment to diplomacy was not matched by that of their western counterparts, pointing to Washington’s unrealistic demand that Tehran cease uranium enrichment completely in return for sanctions relief for three months.

The Iranian President said his country will cope with the latest crisis as it sets out to build robust ties with its neighbours as well as with non-western partners in the Brics grouping of nations and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.

For his part, Mr Araghchi defended Iran’s conduct and said his country isn’t afraid of sanctions. He added that the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was right all along in asserting that negotiating with the Americans would lead to a dead-end.

Nonetheless, the re-imposition of sanctions is likely to exacerbate Iran’s economic problems, with the US dollar currently worth a whopping 1.1 million rials. It has already ignited a political firestorm inside the country, including a fierce debate over the JCPOA’s legacy and the potential ways forward following its demise.

The man in the middle of this firestorm is Hassan Rouhani during whose presidency the deal was struck a decade ago (and in whose administration Mr Araghchi served as deputy foreign minister). Largely supported by the country’s reformists at the time, it was vociferously opposed by a number of hardliners, including Saeed Jalili, Tehran’s former nuclear negotiator.

Mr Jalili recently launched a tirade against the JCPOA and its backers in the erstwhile Rouhani administration, including the former president himself. This is unsurprising, given Mr Jalili’s penchant to take on the country’s reformists.

Not long after his defeat to Mr Pezeshkian in last year’s presidential election, the former diplomat pledged, rather controversially, to run a shadow government. He is now training his rhetorical guns at Mr Rouhani, to whom he lost in the 2013 presidential race, criticising his former rival’s conviction that Tehran should engage with the West despite long-held misgivings.

Then-Iranian president Hassan Rouhani visits the Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran in 2015. EPA

Mr Rouhani’s media team returned the compliment by re-publishing a video message from last year in which the former president calls Mr Jalili’s tenure as chief negotiator disastrous and massively costly to Iran, and asks him to “come debate me if you have the courage”. Mr Rouhani originally released the video after Mr Jalili attacked him during the latter’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Clearly, there’s no love lost between the two men. Speaking last week in Shiraz, at an event commemorating Tehran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, Mr Jalili said even a primary school pupil could defeat Mr Rouhani in a debate.

This exchange has led some local media outlets to offer to host an actual debate between the two figures. It has also rattled Iran’s political class. A newspaper aligned to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has otherwise been critical of the JCPOA, called out Mr Jalili for engaging in partisan point-scoring during a moment of national crisis.

To be sure, the rift over the 2015 nuclear deal isn’t limited to the two influential figures; reactions for and against it have percolated through to various levels of national politics.

In Tehran’s Amirkabir University, hardliner students staged a symbolic funeral for the JCPOA, complete with cardboard cut-outs representing Mr Rouhani and former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. These students said the deal did little other than to pave the path to Iran’s “economic backwardness”, undermine its nuclear advancements and lead to the assassination of its nuclear scientists.

Mahmoud Nabavian, a hardliner Tehran MP, went as far as claiming that the re-imposition of sanctions was preferrable to keeping the deal alive. The sanctions “will have almost zero effect, except for psychological effects”, Mr Nabavian said.

The question being asked right now is, should Iran return to the negotiating table or take other actions?

The reformists, meanwhile, continued to defend the JCPOA’s legacy. Azar Mansouri, who heads the Iranian Reformist Front, criticised the hardliner daily Kayhan for attacking the deal, saying that the hardliners have no regard for Iran’s national interest.

Javad Emam, a spokesperson for the IRF, said the country’s “domestic extremists” appear to be happier about the collapse of the deal than the “extremist supporters” of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Iran’s domestic extremists and its foreign enemies are two sides of the same coin,” Mr Emam added.

Such debates, heated or otherwise, are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. They are, after all, not simply arguments over country’s recent past but also deliberations over the course of action the country will eventually have to take – whatever that course might be.

The question being asked right now is, should Iran return to the negotiating table or take other actions?

Several MPs have introduced a bill in Parliament seeking to pull their country out of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, a measure that the international community would perceive as a first step towards building a nuclear bomb. Iran’s leaders, including Mr Khamenei and Mr Pezeshkian, vociferously deny this.

Their statements don’t necessarily clarify the direction the country will eventually take. But sooner rather than later, Iranians will need to get over the past and find a new path forward.