On Friday, May 11, 2018 WWAC held a talk entitled
“Revisiting the Nuclear Agreement between Iran and the US, the JCPOA”
by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator for Iran and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University.

Press: Read Write-up of the Talk in The Commons

View BCTV video of the talk below:

The 2015 nuclear deal struck between Iran and six world powers – the US, UK, Russia, France, China, and Germany – was the signature foreign policy achievement of Barack Obama’s presidency. The initial framework of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in return for limitations to the country’s controversial nuclear energy programme, which international powers feared Iran would use to create a nuclear weapon. But Mr Obama’s close association with the deal put it in the crosshairs of his successor, Donald Trump, who has claimed that the deal was too lenient and that Iran has broken parts of the agreement.

With our talk scheduled to take place on the eve of President’s Trump’s expected announcement regarding the Nuclear Agreement, Dr. Mousavian had been planning to assess the Iran nuclear deal and the lessons for US-Iran diplomacy that could be learned from it. But 3 days before the talk, on May 8, President Donald Trump announced, ahead of schedule, that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the JCPOA, and that changed our speaker’s plan.

In light of the U.S. withdrawal from the Nuclear Agreement, instead of his planned speech Dr. Mousavian reviewed the history of U.S-Iran relations and described how what had been a positive relationship devolved into extreme mistrust between the two nations. He then assessed the situation from the Iranian point of view.