The seventh of December 2023 was supposed to be a day of celebration for Benjamin Netanyahu. Were it not for the severest strategic disaster in Israel’s history for which he bears the main responsibility – the Hamas’s 7^th October surprise barbaric attack – we would certainly by now have heard his victory speech. On that day in December the US officially announced that the original Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) had reached its end and was no longer on the table. This happened during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearings for Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State Kurt Campbell. According to the Biden administration’s assessment, in the current environment and in light of the war in Gaza and possible entanglements on the Lebanese front, there is no chance of returning to the JCPOA.

The JCPOA chapter has come to an end. Surprisingly, not a word or victory cry was heard from the Prime Minister who had invested so much energy in his attempts to dismantle the agreement. Netanyahu dealt with this into well into 2023 at the peak of the judicial overhaul that he tried to effect in Israel. And he got away with it. In my previous article, I analyzed and pointed out in detail Netanyahu’s central role together with President Trump in the collapse of the JCPOA. Netanyahu carried this out together with a few trusted cronies while keeping the IDF Chief of Staff and senior military command completely in the dark. And we should also recall his very close ties with conservative US members of Congress in the torpedoing of the JCPOA.

The result is a grave strategic mistake which has led Iran to accelerate its uranium enrichment program to the dangerous level of a nuclear threshold state. In this article, I will take a step back, and analyze for the historical record the significant role that Netanyahu played in the failed strategic thinking that led to the collapse of the JCPOA (and there were of course other international actors) and how we reached the final station. This will be a eulogy and homage to the good Iran deal that contributed to Israel’s national security and to Middle East stability. I will also point to the dangerous implications of the new situation.

The battle against the Iran nuclear program occupied a central place in Netanyahu’s world. It was a metaphysical task that he took upon himself as, in his words, the “Protector of Israel”. It is not by chance that Netanyahu devoted the last third (200 pages in the Hebrew version) of his book Bibi: My Story which was published at the end of 2022 to this issue. Reading his book, we see that the commentators erred in their identification of what they called Netanyahu’s “Iran obsession”. It seems that what bothered him more than the Iranian bomb was the great danger that he saw in the JCPOA that the US signed under the leadership of President Obama and the superpowers. What was most important to Netanyahu was the preservation of Israel’s freedom of action against Iran. This freedom was possible only in the absence of an international agreement that would grant Iran, in Netanyahu’s view, immunity from a US or Israeli attack.

In Netanyahu’s view, the JCPOA was at the top of President Obama’s priorities and therefore preventing it was “at the top of my priorities”. Netanyahu describes his battle against the JCPOA in personal terms as a duel with President Obama. In an unusual and provocative speech “the most important in my life” before the US Congress in March 2015, intended to torpedo the agreement, Netanyahu presented his central thesis against the JCPOA. His arguments became the constant accompaniment to all his speeches and meetings with leaders around the world.

The following, in telegraphic form, are Netanyahu’s arguments throughout the years of the JCPOA which in my opinion and in those of analysists in the field are incorrect both factually and strategically. They also constitute in a certain sense disinformation. Netanyahu claimed that the “bad” agreement would not only prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons but would in fact achieve the opposite because Iran would attain them via a quicker route. He claimed that under the auspices of the agreement, Iran would be a few weeks away from obtaining enriched uranium for a nuclear weapons arsenal, and this with the “full international legitimacy” that the agreement would grant. According to Netanyahu, the JCPOA would leave Iran without effective IAEA monitoring which would give it unlimited ability to enrich uranium to fissile material. His ultimate argument: this agreement would indisputably place Iran on the route to becoming a threshold state even if Iran did not commit any violations of the agreement. This is the origin of Netanyahu’s mantra “better to be without an agreement than to be with the agreement” signed by the superpowers with Iran in Vienna in July 2015.

But the facts do not support Netanyahu. In the analyses that I published in my “Strategic Discourse” blog in Ha’aretz, I showed in real time that the JCPOA was an agreement essential to Israel’s national security. This is in contrast to Netanyahu’s thesis of a “bad deal” which he repeated at every opportunity, and the discourse of commentators, senior politicians, and Israeli think tanks who tended to agree with him. In effect, the JCPOA was a nuclear non-proliferation agreement that blocked the route to nuclear weapons. It blocked the uranium route by limiting the quantity to a maximum of 300 kilograms of enriched uranium at LEU of 3.67%. And it blocked the plutonium route with the conversion of the heavy water reactor at Arak which would make it impossible to separate plutonium for a bomb. In addition, according to the JCPOA Iran was allowed to enrich uranium only for civilian nuclear energy purposes in one centrifuge site only – Nataz – and was subject to an ban on enriching uranium in the fortified underground site at Fordu which was planned to become a civil research centre.

The quantitative limit on low-grade enriched uranium was supposed to expire in 2031 (the "sunset" clause that exists in every agreement in the nuclear field). But it can be assumed that, as in any nuclear disarmament agreement, towards the end of the period, the parties would have discussed extending the agreement. A strong point of the agreement was a monitoring regime that was unlimited in time. This was to have been the deepest and most intrusive IAEA monitoring regime known in nuclear history, including the Additional Protocol for surprise inspections of undeclared suspicious sites. It would have been an intrusive and tight monitoring regime that came in addition to Iran's NPT obligations which are also not limited in time (as long as Iran abides by it).

Iran’s compliance with all the conditions of the tight monitoring regime would have been a necessary condition for Iran if it wanted to receive a full “acquittal” from the IAEA over its problematic nuclear past including the nuclear weapons program that existed until 2003. This would have been like the case of South Africa which dismantled its nuclear weapons and received such an acquittal only after a nine year IAEA monitoring probation period. In spite of Netanyahu’s declarations regarding Iranian violations from the first moment, no proof was found. As was proven in fourteen IAEA monitoring reports, Iran abided strictly with all of the JCPOA conditions until 2019 the year after President Trump left the agreement.

The cancellation of the JCPOA and the dangerous new situation that followed of Iran as a nuclear threshold state brings the region back to the decade when a grave nuclear crisis prevailed in the Middle East prior to the signing of the JCPOA in 2015. A situation of strategic uncertainty which might lead to a nuclear arms race and the emergence of more countries in the Middle East aiming to attain nuclear weapons. An example would be Saudi Arabia.

A nuclear arms race inspired by Iran and the addition of more nuclear states might cause a further shock to regional stability as the result of the loss of the Israeli monopoly. As I wrote in a previous article on the strategic implications of the Hamas attack that have received less attention , a situation would arise that would entail a dramatic conceptual shift both in Israel and in the US: a possible change in Israel’s decades long traditional nuclear ambiguity doctrine and a move to declaratory open nuclear deterrence (Netanyahu has already hinted in this direction). The unprecedented strategic support that Israel receives on this issue from the US in international forums is based on the 1969 “Nixon-Golda Meir” understandings and will last as long as Israel is committed to the ambiguity doctrine.

The combined effect of the dismantling of the JCPOA, Israel’s national and Netanyahu’s personal trauma following the October 7 attack, strategic and political pressures on the Prime Minister, and the unbased comparison that Netanyahu is making with the European Jewish Holocaust – all of these create and amplify a strategic environment full of dangers. As I said at the beginning of my eulogy, we have lost the good nuclear agreement.

Shemuel Meir is an independent Israeli strategic analyst

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Requiem for the Iran Nuclear Deal