The JCPOA Didn’t Prevent War. It Funded This One.
Flawed from the start, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal gave Tehran the funds to arm its proxies thus enabling the October 7 war that eventually reached the skies over Tehran.
The ceasefire that came into effect Tuesday morning may have ended the fighting, but the war it interrupted was historic in scale and in what it exposed. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal didn’t prevent conflict, it financed it. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was presented as a diplomatic breakthrough. However, it was built on a dangerously narrow premise: that Iran’s nuclear program could be contained separately from its regional expansionism. It couldn’t.
The JCPOA unlocked tens of billions in sanctions relief without requiring Iran’s regime to halt its support for terrorism, ballistic missile development, or proxy warfare. Iran’s regime took the deal, claimed diplomatic legitimacy, and kept moving forward.
While Western diplomats celebrated a signature, Iran’s leaders laid the groundwork for war by reinforcing Hezbollah in Lebanon, arming the Houthis in Yemen, buttressing Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, propping up the Assad regime during the Syrian civil war including sending Iranian forces, and pouring weapons, training, and funding into Hamas. This was a coordinated network directed and sustained by Tehran in its long-war strategy for regional dominance.
Supporters of the JCPOA say Iran was simply reclaiming its own funds, but that misses the point. What matters is what Iran did with that money. It didn’t invest in its people, but in its terror infrastructure. Hezbollah’s rocket stockpile grew. The Houthis acquired drones and missiles. Militias across Iraq and Syria strengthened their grip. Hamas received Iranian funding, training, advice. The result was October 7, the opening salvo in the current war.
Iran’s nuclear strategy closely mirrored the path North Korea blazed to the bomb: use diplomacy to delay consequences, extract economic relief, and quietly advance the program behind a facade of compliance. A Wilson Center analysis argues that authoritarian states like Iran and North Korea use diplomacy not to disarm, but to shield and advance their nuclear capabilities, treating agreements as smokescreens while quietly crossing red lines.
Like Pyongyang, Tehran signed agreements it never intended to keep, exploiting negotiations as cover while continuing illicit procurement, enrichment, and weaponization research. Both regimes mastered the art of “negotiating under fire” that leveraged international engagement not as a path to peace, but as a shield to protect their nuclear ambitions from disruption.
Neither North Korea nor Iran was ever deterred by sanctions alone. Both regimes survived economic pressure by cultivating geopolitical lifelines, China and Russia in Pyongyang’s case; and for Tehran, a combination of oil revenues, opaque trade networks, and support from powers unwilling to risk confrontation. Both employed deception, shell companies, and front groups to smuggle dual-use technologies and materials, even under supposedly tight monitoring regimes. And both leveraged the West’s conflict avoidance by turning diplomacy into a delay tactic while crossing nuclear thresholds one red line at a time.
From the early 2000s, Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah launched wars against Israel. Hezbollah sparked the Second Lebanon War in 2006, and Hamas in Gaza initiated major conflicts in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021. In each case, Israel responded defensively, only to face international pressure, especially from Western powers, to halt its operations before meeting its goals. This gave Hamas and Hezbollah time to regroup, rearm, and redeploy only to fight again another day and October 7 was the result.
Israel learned the lesson: striking the outer edges of Iran’s network while shielding its leadership from consequences hasn’t deterred aggression but invited more of it. After October 7 Israelis learned that real deterrence means confronting the source, not just absorbing one shockwave after another.
And, that’s what Israel did by first delivering a crushing blow to Iran’s regional proxies decimating Hamas’s key leaders, taking out Hezbollah’s top echelons and dismantling its missile infrastructure. Hezbollah’s defeat led to the collapse of the Assad regime, Iran’s most critical Arab ally. Then, by going after the “mothership,” Israel and the U.S. delivered a one-two punch to Iran’s regime: Israel gained air dominance and eliminated key military leadership and dismantled delivery systems. The U.S. for its part obliterated, or at the least severely damaged, the regime’s core nuclear infrastructure in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Iran’s nuclear and regional warfare capabilities are acutely crippled.
The JCPOA was not a brake on the Islamic Republic’s ambitions, but a subsidy for Tehran that bought time, not peace.
While Western policymakers chased diplomatic trophies that Tehran never respected, Iran’s leaders built a nuclear weapons program, long-range missiles and funded, armed and trained terror proxies. The lesson that should be learned is that restraint in the face of relentless aggression doesn’t preserve peace, it invites war.
Has the West finally learned this? Only time will tell.