Iran. Iran. Iran.

Iran, according to the New York Times, has enough enriched uranium on-hand to produce bomb grade fuel for roughly 10 nuclear bombs, if it chooses to do so. This is an increase from the 5-6 potential bombs’ worth of material that Iran had on-hand when President Trump took office in January. According to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s latest Annual Threat Assessment, it has not yet made that choice.

And that’s the good news.

This is because when it comes down to how the United States should deal with Iran, there really are no good options. There are only imperfect ones.

Of course, you’ll probably hear the advocates of particular policies implausibly tell you that they’ve found the unicorn to resolve all our troubles with Iran. For instance, some will say that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would most certainly end its ability to ever build a bomb; others would say that if you cut a diplomatic deal with Iran, then peace will reign and we can avert our gaze to other pressing threats, like China.

Don’t believe either of these policy poles.

That’s why I’ve decided to write a bit of a cheat sheet for you on how we got to where we are today on the Iran nuclear issue. And please forgive me for the length of this post, but trust me, this is a mega-issue.

The tough truth about Iran - an issue I’ve worked on for nearly two decades in the foreign policy and nuclear expert community, on Capitol Hill, and at the State Department - is that whatever comes next, a deal or no deal, will only be the next chapter in the difficult affairs between our two countries.

And that’s the prism through which we should judge what comes next, because specifically, it’s up to President Trump to decide about how he wants to handle this issue right now. And his track record on Iran is all over the place, to say the least.

I remember a time when President Obama was negotiating what ultimately became known, in 2015, as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or, the “Iran Deal.” I advocated for a deal for years, believing that, after the morass of military conflict we’d found ourselves in in Iraq and Afghanistan, the last thing our country needed was another war of choice in the Middle East.

But now we’re out of Iraq and Afghanistan, changing the strategic calculation about American military action in the region. Our troops are nowhere near as vulnerable to Iranian attack as they once were, with estimates that more than 600 American soldiers were killed in Iraq by Iranian and/or Iranian-backed forces. That threat is in the past.

Yet not only is our military footprint significantly smaller than it was in 2015, but we’re also diplomatically out of the game as well, operating without any guardrails on Iran’s nuclear program. Let’s remember that when President Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Iran Deal in 2018, Iran verifiably did not have enough stockpiled enriched uranium for even one bomb. Let that sink in. Not even one. Now Iran has enough material for 10 bombs. A diplomatic deal worked back then to stop an Iranian bomb. But that reality is now gone too.

It’s also worth noting some other key differences between 2015 and today.

For instance, the regional diplomatic environment towards Iran has transformed. In 2015, Iran and Saudi Arabia were adversaries, giving Trump diplomatic cover to withdraw from the JCPOA in 2018. Remember, back then, Saudi was bombing the Houthis in Yemen and the Houthis hit them back, hard, at their oil facilities. But not today. Now, these two countries are on positive terms with each other, exchanging public pleasantries and holding a robust bilateral diplomatic dialogue. The Saudis now want diplomacy with Iran.

In another significant shift, Iran’s regional terror network, organized through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has been devastated by Israel.

Remember, the IRGC created military beachheads in Arab countries like Lebanon (through Hezbollah), Iraq, Yemen, and of course, Gaza (through Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad). Iran also robustly backed Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad, helping him to stay in power as he massacred well over a half million Syrians. But Israel has now decimated Hamas and Hezbollah and the Syrian people threw out Assad (and Russia). The 2015 IRGC threat just isn’t nearly the same today.

Also different is Trump. Remember, in 2020, he ordered the assassination of the IRGC’s head Qasem Soleimani inside of Iraq. And he crowed about ordering the strikes that killed the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019 inside of Syria. Now, just six years later, he has personally met with the former leader of ISIS and now Syria’s Acting President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Trump’s willingness to shift course is enough to make your head spin.

The paradox of this situation is that in 2015, the existence of the IRGC’s regional military network was used as an argument by Congressional Republicans - and yes, then-candidate Donald Trump - to oppose the nuclear deal because it didn’t directly address the IRGC’s regional activities… but now that that network has been devastated by Israel, a new nuclear deal might not need to address it. Again.

In sum, Iran’s military adventurism and military regional alliances are on the outs while its regional diplomacy is on the upswing. It’s a new operating environment.

There are two other major X factors on Iran that we can’t ignore.

The first, of course, is Israel. This is a country whose leader, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, has been legitimately clamoring for years about the Iranian threat to his country. Yet Netanyahu is also a leader who vocally opposed the nuclear deal in 2015 and then pushed President Trump in 2018 to leave it, putting us in the precarious nuclear situation that we’re in today. Netanyahu sees a narrow window to attack Iran’s nuclear sites now, but so far, has been rebuffed by President Trump.

Which leads us to the second, crucial X factor: domestic American politics. Back in 2015, it was safe for Republicans to oppose the Obama nuclear deal. Why? Because they knew that the implementation of the deal allowed them to oppose it (great politics!) without fear of killing it (which would have been damaging to national security). This is because, by a legislative quirk, where Presidential sanctions waivers enabled the deal to be implemented, the deal only needed a Presidential veto proof minority to save it, which progressive Democrats provided to President Obama.

So Republicans were able to have their cake and eat it too. For three years, in fact, Republicans clung on to the fiction that they could criticize an international agreement (made with our European, Russian, and Chinese partners too!) while not worrying about the negative consequences of terminating it.

But then, as the saying goes, the dog caught the car.

In 2017, Trump became president after running on a platform that included killing the nuclear deal, and he lived up his promise, or at least to half of it. He got out of the JCPOA, but never negotiated anything else to replace it, allowing Iran the freedom to enrich uranium without the kinds of inspections they had agreed to under the deal. And enrich they did.

Of course, it’s important to note that President Biden, when he entered office, attempted to reenter the deal. But the negotiations were never direct and dragged on, with the Iranians wanting stronger guarantees that an American president wouldn’t do what Trump did (imagine that!). Biden also chose to not lift the sanctions on Iran that Trump had reimposed in 2018 until a full agreement was in place. Nuclear diplomacy was stuck, with Iran continuing to enrich.

And then October 7th happened.

The Hamas attack on Israel put on ice the idea of more diplomacy with Iran, including stopping the transfer of $6 billion to Iran that was part of a prisoner swap that had sprung five Americans from Iranian jails. Instead, since that date, we have seen major military activity in the region. In addition to the back and forth strikes between Israel and multiple adversaries, the U.S. mobilized twice under Biden to shoot down Iranian missiles targeting Israel and then, under Trump, conducted a two-month bombing campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthis that ended in an informal truce.

That truce between the U.S. and the Houthis has held, but it has done nothing to address the Houthi attacks on Israel… meaning that the core tensions in the region, between Israel and Iran, are still not being addressed.

So now here we are, once again, with an American president seeking a nuclear deal with Iran that prevents it from getting the bomb. Yet because of Trump’s actions during his first term, Iran’s nuclear program is significantly more advanced than it was in 2015. At the same time, Iran’s regional militarism is in a worse place than it was in 2015. And Trump has cut a military deal with a core Iranian proxy (while also talking to Hamas about the Gaza war and the Israeli hostages there).

2025 is most definitely not 2015, and after half a dozen rounds of talks between Iran’s foreign minister and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, the parameters of a deal are coming into focus.

Politically, it also goes without saying that this is neither the same Republican party nor the same Democratic party on Iran as we had in 2015. Trump’s MAGA America First wing leans towards non-interventionism while some powerful Republicans still hold hawkish positions towards Iran. On the Democratic side, the pro-diplomacy wing still feels scorned by Trump’s disavowal of the Obama nuclear deal but will swallow hard if a new deal is made, irrespective of the details, while more centrist Democrats worry that Trump is leaving Israel isolated on this issue while chasing Iran to the table. These Democrats just don’t trust Trump to make a good deal.

It goes without saying then, that the political, diplomatic, and military dimensions of the Iran nuclear issue are more complicated today than they have ever been.

And why is this the case right now? Because Iran is enriching uranium at levels that are in contravention of its past commitments, putting it on the precipice of a diplomatic censure by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), where it will be described as being in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years.

It’s these actions that have brought the complex intensity of the Iranian nuclear issue to the fore in the most visceral way.

Add to this the fact that President Trump’s own self-proclaimed two-month clock for getting a new nuclear deal has passed, and we are truly in the grey zone, sitting on the cusp of an Iranian nuclear program that, absent action, won’t be able to be turned around. Remember, Trump himself said that if he didn’t get a deal, he’d shift to bombing Iran. Both his and the Iranian clocks are ticking.

This much is clear: something must - and will - be done soon. Imperfect as it may be.