Trump’s 2018 decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal has led to Tehran accelerating its nuclear program, effectively making it a “nuclear threshold state”. US, EU, and Israeli officials told Axios on Monday that they expect Trump to face an Iran crisis in 2025.
Trump and his advisors are planning a rapid return to the “maximum pressure” campaign they ran between 2018 and 2020 against Iran. Several Trump advisors privately acknowledge that the Iranian program has now advanced to the point where the strategy may no longer be effective, making a military intervention a real option, Axios reported on Monday.
Some top advisors to President Biden have in recent weeks advocated for a pre-Trump administration strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, as Iran and its proxies are weakened by war with Israel, sources familiar with the discussions told Axios.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said last week in an interview with Chinese television that Iran is ready to resume talks with the US and other world powers to achieve a new nuclear deal.
Despite all the crises on the global agenda, a high-ranking diplomat, who participated in a virtual G7 meeting two weeks ago, told Axios that Iran will be the main problem to tackle in 2025. “Everyone agreed that we need to do something, or else it will be a big crisis” the diplomat said.
This is not just due to Iran’s reduced nuclear breakout time, but also because the West has the option to reimpose the lifted sanctions on Iran by October under the so-called “Snapback” mechanism.
The Snapback refers to a possibility for the states of the 2015 nuclear deal to bring Iranian non-compliance before the UN Security Council. This can lead to the re-imposition of all international sanctions from before the agreement, without other members being able to veto it, within 30 days.
European diplomats made it clear that the 2015 nuclear deal is null and void, and a new agreement would need to take into account the current state of Iran’s nuclear program, a European diplomat and two other sources with knowledge of the meeting told Axios. They also warned that they would trigger sanctions if no agreement is reached by October. Iran has already threatened to withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and end all UN inspections and monitoring of its nuclear facilities if a similar scenario unfolds.