For more than two decades, American and Israeli policy toward Iran has been built around a simple assumption: if enough pressure is applied—through sanctions, isolation, sabotage, assassinations, cyberattacks, and ultimately military force—Iran will eventually conclude that it has no alternative but to surrender its nuclear ambitions. Every administration has varied the tactics, but the underlying strategy has remained remarkably consistent. More pressure today would produce a more compliant Iran tomorrow.
What if that assumption has been fundamentally wrong?
Reports that Iran’s parliament is considering fast-tracked legislation to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), repeal the domestic legal framework supporting the 2015 nuclear agreement, and pursue new strategic arrangements with friendly countries should force us to ask a much larger question than whether Iran will leave the treaty. We should instead be asking how we reached a point where leaving the NPT is now being seriously debated inside the Iranian political establishment. That, in my view, is the far more important story.
Treaties are built on incentives. Nations do not remain in international agreements because they enjoy legal obligations or international inspections. They remain because they believe those agreements leave them safer, more prosperous, or more secure than the alternatives. The moment that calculation changes, the treaty begins to lose its value, regardless of how elegantly it was drafted.
Now consider Iran’s position over the past twenty years. It remained a member of the NPT. It accepted extensive international inspections. It negotiated the JCPOA and accepted meaningful restrictions on its nuclear program. Yet during precisely that period, it also experienced crippling sanctions, the assassination of nuclear scientists, repeated acts of sabotage, cyberattacks, military strikes, open discussions of regime change, and increasingly direct attacks by both Israel and the United States. Whether one agrees with Tehran’s policies or not, it is not difficult to understand how many Iranians might conclude that remaining inside the treaty has not translated into greater national security.
This is where strategy becomes more important than politics. Every military action has consequences beyond its immediate tactical objective. Every bomb dropped on Iran’s infrastructure is also dropped into Iran’s political debate. Every assassination changes the balance between those arguing for engagement with the international system and those arguing that only military strength can guarantee the country’s survival. If the political beneficiaries of Western pressure are precisely those who have always opposed compromise, then it is reasonable to ask whether the strategy is producing the opposite of its intended effect.
History suggests that this should not surprise us. Nations that believe their survival is at stake rarely become more conciliatory. They become more united, more nationalistic, and more determined to eliminate what they perceive as strategic vulnerabilities. The expectation that sustained military pressure would eventually produce a more accommodating Iran has always rested on a remarkably optimistic reading of history. More often than not, external pressure strengthens hardliners while weakening those advocating engagement and compromise.
The irony is difficult to ignore. The governments most determined to prevent Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear deterrent may have spent the past twenty years constructing the strongest possible argument for why many Iranians now believe such a deterrent is essential. That is not because Iranian leaders suddenly changed their worldview. It is because the incentive structure changed. If remaining within the international system does not reduce military threats, the political value of doing so inevitably comes into question.
The implications extend far beyond Iran. If Tehran ultimately invokes Article X and withdraws from the NPT, every country watching this confrontation will draw its own conclusions. The lesson will not concern Iran’s nuclear program alone. It will call into question the credibility of the international non-proliferation regime itself. Other governments will ask whether treaty membership genuinely enhances national security or merely imposes legal obligations without offering meaningful protection when geopolitical tensions escalate.
That should concern every government that believes international agreements are preferable to military competition. The strength of the NPT has never rested solely on legal language. It has rested on the belief that countries are better off remaining inside the system than outside it. Once that belief begins to erode, the treaty’s authority erodes with it.
If Iran ultimately withdraws, I suspect many Western politicians will point to the decision as proof that Iran could never be trusted. History may prove less forgiving. Historians may instead ask whether decades of sanctions, military escalation, covert operations, and diplomatic abandonment gradually destroyed the very incentives that encouraged Iran to remain within the treaty in the first place.
That is the strategic tragedy unfolding before us. The objective was to prevent nuclear proliferation. The danger now is that, through a succession of policies that consistently rewarded confrontation over diplomacy, we may have weakened one of the world’s most important non-proliferation agreements while simultaneously strengthening the political forces inside Iran that always argued it was a mistake to trust it.
If that is where this story ends, Iran’s withdrawal from the NPT will not mark the beginning of failure. It will simply be the moment the failure became impossible to ignore.
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