Iran nuclear talks were progressing. But US backed Israel’s attack plan, like with Iraq in 2003

Progress on new nuclear deal with Iran

The military offesive in Iran now comes despite credible progress by US and Iranian officials in the high-stakes nuclear talks that wrapped up earlier this week in Geneva.

Oman’s foreign minister Badr Albusaidi, who was mediating between the two sides, said the draft agreement involved Iran expressing willingness to furnish some undertaking that it would not possess nuclear material that could be used to make a bomb. That, Albusaidi said on CBS News, was something that was not in the old deal negotiated during former President Barack Obama’s time, and marked a completely new concession from the Iranian side.

That really rendered the enrichment argument against Iran less relevant, because zero stockpiling was now on the table. He also said part of the breakthrough was that Iran would give up its existing stockpile of enriched material, “down blended and restricted from enrichment”, while expressing confidence that Tehran would also allow in inspectors to look at its nuclear sites, including possibly the Americans.

The problem for Donald Trump was that offering major sanctions relief to Iran could have been seen as him having chickened out, given that he has ordered the largest US military build-up in West Asia since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while Iran had vowed to respond to an attack with force. Trump was also the one who jettisoned the deal inked during Obama’s time, and going back to something broadly similar after nearly a decade would have been construed as a defeat of sorts.

Traces of an air defence missile interception are seen, over Jerusalem’s Old City, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

For the better part of the last two decades, the US and Israel have accused Iran of trying to secretly develop a nuclear weapon, something that Tehran has repeatedly denied. Iran has said its programme is only for peaceful purposes, though the country is the only non-nuclear-armed state to have stockpiles of enriched uranium at near weapons-grade levels.

Iranian state media quoted by the BBC said its negotiators insisted that Tehran had the right to peaceful nuclear energy and rejected US demands to completely stop the enrichment of uranium in Iranian territory and to transfer its stockpile of an estimated 400kg of enriched uranium out of the country.

But the Iranians are believed to have offered concessions in the latest talks, as attested to by Oman’s foreign minister, even though the proposals have not been made public. One of the reported options was for Iran to be allowed to enrich uranium at a minimal level after a three-to-five-year suspension, under international monitoring. In return for a deal, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi told Iranian television that the negotiators sought the lifting of sanctions that have debilitated Iran’s economy.

Iran had earlier turned down discussing limits to the country’s ballistic missile programme and ending support for its proxies in the region, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. The American government considers Iran to be the biggest state sponsor of terrorism, spending more than one billion dollars on terrorist financing annually.

Iran’s nuclear programme

According to New York-based think tank Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Iran has pursued a nuclear programme since at least 1957, with varying degrees of success. During a war with Iraq, Iran decided to develop nuclear weapons to ensure its security in the late 1980s. Consequently, Iran pursued agreements with China and Russia to support the programme’s research throughout the 1990s. In early 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an umbrella organisation made up of Iranian dissident groups, exposed the existence of two Iranian nuclear sites that were presumably hidden from the IAEA.

By 2003, diplomats launched an intensive effort to stop Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran agreed, insisting only on keeping its centrifuges for nuclear energy. However, it did not follow through on its commitment to transparent reporting to the IAEA and continued covert activities, leading to a June 2004 rebuke and a September 2005 finding of non-compliance by the IAEA, paving the way for a future referral to the UN Security Council (UNSC).

In 2006, the UNSC adopted Resolution 1696, the first legally binding call for Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program, the CFR noted. Over the next few years, the UNSC adopted a series of resolutions “imposing crippling economic sanctions on Iran for its failure to suspend its enrichment-related activities”.

Between 2011 and 2015, the compounding effects of international sanctions led Iran’s economy to contract by 20% and unemployment to rise to 20%, the CFR report noted. In 2013, Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, won Iran’s presidential election, campaigning on a promise to lift sanctions and restore the economy. Over the next two years, the US convened several rounds of bilateral talks and led the other P5+1 coalition members—China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom—in negotiations with Iran’s new leadership.

These efforts culminated in the adoption of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was spearheded by President Obama in 2015. Once key parties signed the agreement, the UNSC approved UN Resolution 2231, paving the way for sanctions relief.

Because the JCPOA only addressed Iran’s nuclear programme, and not its ballistic missile programmes, the first Trump administration withdrew the US from the agreement, pledging to seek a more comprehensive deal. In 2018, the Trump administration began reimposing sanctions on Iran and demanded that European countries withdraw from the JCPOA as part of a new containment strategy.

The latest talks in Geneva marked a bid by both sides to reengage to get Iran to commit to fresh commitments, where fresh progress was presumably made, before these fresh attacks on Iran by the US and Israel.