Rajat Narang

"The reality is clear. The JCPOA is working; that is a view shared by our European allies, independent experts, and the current U. S. secretary of defense. The JCPOA is in America's interest; it has significantly rolled back Iran's nuclear program. And the JCPOA is a model for what diplomacy can accomplish; its inspections and verification regime is precisely what the United States should be working to put in place with North Korea.
Indeed, at a time when we are all rooting for diplomacy with North Korea to succeed, walking away from the JCPOA risks losing a deal that accomplishes, with Iran, the very outcome that we are pursuing with the North Koreans.", said the former U. S. President, Barack Obama in December 2017 on the scrapping of the Iran Nuclear Deal by President Trump. Two years earlier, in July 2015, a group of leaders from P5+1, the world's officially recognized nuclear powers under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); had gathered in Vienna for the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or simply the Iranian Nuclear Deal for a hard reached resolution to the long stand-off & antagonism between America & Iran over the Iranian nuclear enrichment program.
However, 2 years later, during Trump's first term in the White House, he recklessly scrapped & tore apart the Iran deal; painstakingly inked through nuclear diplomacy over years of grinding negotiations without any alternate plan or course of action, except a maximalist position and maximum economic pressure; and set in motion a series of events which led to a surge in hostility between the sides, further escalation and ultimately snowballed into a chain reaction of unexpected geopolitical events leading up to the latest U.
S.-Israel-Iran War in 2026. This work, based on detailed research & analysis, traces the origins & evolution of the Iranian nuclear program and the stand-off and outbreak of hostilities between Iran and America over it leading up to the signing of JCPOA, its scrapping and the series and chain reaction of events leading up to the latest U. S.-Israel-Iran War in early 2026 and its subsequent economic & geopolitical fallout. It provides the lesser known & behind-the-scenes story of the making and analysis about the series of less than optimal & non-thoroughly thought-out strategic & political decisions and reckless, high-handed geopolitical moves & unexpected events over the past decade which collectively led to the outbreak of the latest, opportunistic and absolutely unnecessary war in the Middle East earlier this year.
The U. S.-Israel-Iran war essentially has been the precipitation of idiosyncratic geopolitical moves led besides a series of diplomatic errors & missed opportunities by both sides, in addition, to a, so called, misjudged, unprecedented 'historic opportunity' by Trump & Netanyahu amid Iran's persistent sabre-rattling over its nuclear enrichment program. The latest war in the Middle East, thus, has quintessentially been the precipitation of an effective repudiation of years of successful diplomacy to resolve a proverbial, nuclear Gordian knot in the region with huge economic & geopolitical fallout for the entire world now and for years to come.
And if there is one single person, who could be single-handedly blamed and be held accountable for it, by pointing a direct finger at, it is the U. S. President Donald J. Trump...