Negotiations with a Rogue

The end of World War II marked a decades-long race towards the modernization of superpowers, culminating in the threat of nuclear warfare at the height of the Cold War. Tensions between global powers sped the world into a new era of negotiating a stop to nuclear proliferation, and in many instances, attempting to remove the possibility of nuclear weapons altogether. Mounting extremism and the threat of terrorism in recent decades has fueled this effort further, catalyzing U.S. nonproliferation negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran concurrently. While attempted talks aggravated existing animosity, they also spurred harsher sanctions internationally. The latter of which produced enough global pressure to successfully negotiate confines on Iran’s nuclear program. In an unprecedented display of diplomacy, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed in 2015 by Iran, the European Union, and the UN Security Council’s five permanent members—China, Russia, UK, France, and the United States—and Germany (the P5+1). However, the Iran Nuclear Deal began its collapse three years later when President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA