Meghan L. O'Sullivan, Columnist

There’s No Hurry for Biden to Re-Enter the Iran Nuclear Deal

The administration wants to get both sides back into compliance before it negotiates a “longer and stronger” pact. That’s misguided diplomacy.

March 25, 2021 at 8:00 AM UTC

By Meghan L. O'Sullivan

Meghan L. O’Sullivan is a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the North American chair of the Trilateral Commission, she served on the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007.

Burning controversy.
Photographer: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

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What sounded so simple during last year’s presidential campaign has turned out, like everything related to Iran, to be quite complicated.

President Joe Biden’s administration would like to return to the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as it was negotiated and signed in 2015. The White House would be satisfied with a highly orchestrated process in which the U.S. and Iran would come back into compliance at the same time, allowing neither to claim a victory over the other. Tehran, perhaps overplaying its hand as it so often does, seems to think there is a better outcome for it in the offing.