This is my third Iran-focused dispatch. The series began with two essays based on my experiences there in 2016: My Journey to Iran: Hope, Resistance & Fear and Hope and Heresy in 2016 Iran. In these I describe fascinating experiences I had exploring Tehran with Iranian activists and a subsequent UN-sponsored conference there that focused on religion and the environment. New readers may want to start with these essays. Here, in the first of two essays reflecting on the aftermath, I turn to what happened to the fragile hope I saw there for myself.
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As I boarded the plane for my return flight to Paris, the most poignant impression I had was the longing for greater freedom and engagement with the wider world that I found among Iranian activists, artists, and university students. At the conference, I found these students especially moving as they asked me how they might find opportunities to leave the country to study, or just to find the freedom for which they were longing. Such desires seemed especially intense among the women, for it was then and remains their freedom that is most dramatically curtailed by Iran’s theocratic forces.
None of what I witnessed would have happened without the deal.
As I briefly mentioned previously, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, was negotiated over nearly two years, leading to an agreement in July 2015 among Iran, the United States, and five other world powers. In it, Iran accepted deep limits on its uranium enrichment and the most intrusive international inspection regime ever negotiated. In return, the powers lifted the nuclear-related sanctions that had strangled Iran’s economy. The deal took effect in January 2016, when international inspectors certified that Iran had met its initial obligations.
The deal’s critics had legitimate concerns. The negotiated restrictions would begin expiring after ten years. The agreement said nothing about Iran’s ballistic missiles, nothing about its funding of proxy armies, some of which explicitly stated their intention to exterminate Israel.
Although the agreement was far from perfect and postponed addressing other critical issues that a true Middle Eastern peace would have to resolve, I strongly supported the deal, perhaps in part given my first-responder background, which understands the logic of triage. The agreement addressed the most lethal threat — a nuclear-armed Iran — and did so verifiably. After the agreement, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors repeatedly certified that Iran was honoring its commitments.
The second reason was apparent everywhere I went. Iran is a young country: the median age was around thirty, and most Iranians then living had been born after the 1979 revolution. Ten more years of connection, commerce, and contact with the world meant another decade for that generation — increasingly educated, urban, and chafing against theocratic authoritarianism — to grow stronger. The nuclear deal was designed to cap enrichment. The Western signatories had wagered that ten years hence the increasingly restless young — in concert with the still conservative but pragmatic quasi-reformers exemplified by Hassan Rouhani, whom I discussed in the second essay — would be stronger still, and that openings given a decade to bear fruit would be difficult to reverse and a platform for further openings.
The decade that followed vindicated the strategy of the Western powers that signed the agreement. In the winter of 2017–18, protests spread across Iranian cities, with economic issues in the foreground and the desire for greater freedom and international openness another key motivation. In November 2019, Iranian governmental and paramilitary forces murdered scores of demonstrators: Amnesty International documented more than three hundred killings, and a Reuters investigation, drawing on Iranian officials, put the toll near fifteen hundred.
A few years later, in September 2022, Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, died in the custody of the morality police, arrested for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab, as required by law. Iranians filled the streets shouting Zan, Zendegi, Azadi — Woman, Life, Freedom.
The political pressure on the regime’s conservative theocrats and their enforcers came foremost from young men and women and urban people more generally. The people I had met were no anomaly; they exemplified a trend that any close observer in the 2010s would have noticed.
In one more example of a petulant effort to reverse anything President Obama had implemented, on May 8, 2018, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement. The inspectors were still certifying Iranian compliance when he did it.
The agreement had put the brakes on Iran’s nuclear program, and the withdrawal released them. Iran continued honoring the deal’s limits for about a year after Trump’s withdrawal. Iran then began breaching them, eventually accumulating roughly 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium — the International Atomic Energy Agency’s own count, days before the June 2025 strikes — while rolling back the inspectors’ access — leaving it, by expert assessments, weeks rather than years from weapons-grade uranium. Thus, Trump’s decision not only reversed the JCPOA, it led directly to a more dangerous Iran.
The withdrawal also put the brakes on the nascent and fragile reforms underway, and cut the legs out from under the civil society actors and the cautious reformer President Hassan Rouhani and his allies, whom I described in the previous essay. Rouhani had staked his presidency on the proposition that negotiating with America could deliver a better life. The restored sanctions crushed the middle class, the same people doing the marching and the organizing. Trump’s unilateral withdrawal empowered Iran’s hardliners by reinforcing their contention that America is ‘the Great Satan’ and ought never be trusted.
The political harvest came quickly. Rouhani left office in 2021, term-limited and discredited by the collapse of the diplomacy on which he had staked everything. The Guardian Council, which vets every candidate, had already disqualified thousands of moderates before the 2020 parliamentary elections; in 2021 it cleared the field for the hardline judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi to take the presidency, in the lowest presidential turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history. Analysts across the political spectrum credit the withdrawal, and the economic collapse that followed it, with discrediting Iran’s engagers at the moment it mattered most — though the Guardian Council’s machinery needed no American help. When Raisi died in a 2024 helicopter crash, Iranian voters seized the opening and elevated Masoud Pezeshkian, a physician who campaigned on engagement with the West — to an office that proposes policy while the Supreme Leader, in conversation if not concert with the Revolutionary Guard, ultimately accepts or rejects policy proposals. Pezeshkian’s election proved that the longing I had witnessed in 2016 endured. It could not, however, restore what the withdrawal had destroyed: Iranian actors favoring a rapprochement with the West were forced to bargain from weakness because Islamic hardliners cited a decade of American bad faith.
The theocrats had predicted betrayal and Washington obliged them.
There is blame enough in this story to go around, and both governments had many years of reasons to distrust the other. No actor in this long chain of tragic events, however, has done more to prevent trust-building than Donald Trump. Under Barack Obama, the United States signed an agreement, and it was working. Trump, in synch with the right-wing forces in the US and Israel, tore it up anyway.
The Iranians who paid the price were not, of course, the clerics or the Revolutionary Guard. They were the reformers, the students, the activists, the shopkeepers producing environmental T-shirts and celebrating Western musicians in their speakeasy-like cafés, and the young people engaged in forbidden forms of mixed-gender socializing.
In the November 2024 presidential election, Trump received more votes than his opponent but not a majority of the votes cast. Nevertheless, he returned to office in January 2025. The following June, with another round of nuclear negotiations on the calendar, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, sent his country’s warplanes against Iran, and days later Trump ordered American strikes of his own. This January, when Iranians, once again, rose against their government, the American president cheered them on. In February 2026, just two days after negotiators announced a breakthrough, Trump and Netanyahu launched a full-scale war.
What that war has wrought — the hubris and delusions that led to it, the strategic ledger it has actually produced, the human and environmental toll it precipitated, and the double betrayal of the Iranian people and America’s own allies — I will take up in my next dispatch.
The people I met in 2016 longed for freedom, a government responsive to their economic and environmental needs, a chance to be not only members of a great civilization but of the entire world.
Make no mistake about it: Trump and Netanyahu — and some plausibly say Trump, played by Netanyahu — were the decisive actors in the still-unfolding debacle — which, near term at least, has crushed the aspirations of the clear plurality of Iranians who have been seeking, often at great risk, to break free from clerical rule.
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Council on Foreign Relations, “What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal?”
International Atomic Energy Agency, Monitoring and Verification in Iran (reports archive), and the Director General’s certification, “Iran is Implementing Nuclear-related JCPOA Commitments”.
Institute for Science and International Security, “Analysis of IAEA Iran Verification and Monitoring Report — May 2025” (stockpile and breakout estimates).
Amnesty International, “Iran: Details released of 304 deaths during protests six months after security forces’ killing spree” (May 2020).
House of Commons Library, “Iran: Impacts of June 2025 Israel and US strikes.”
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