ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

American officials demanded that Iran account for and roll back the advances it had made in its nuclear program before the United States agreed to remove punishing sanctions reimposed by President Trump after he pulled out of the deal in 2018.

Iranian officials demanded that the U.S. make the first move--and lift sanctions as well as unfreeze Iran's financial assets.

The Iranians had the better side of the argument. After all, the U.S. had unilaterally withdrawn from the JCPOA, while the other nations that were party to the deal (the P5+1: basically, major European powers plus Russia and China) stayed with it.

Since most of the sanctions on Iran are based on executive action, there was nothing stopping Biden from going back into the deal offering the caveat that if there was no progress on Iran coming back into compliance, he'd simply reimpose them.

When I asked Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, why the U.S. didn't adopt this strategy, he offered me a simple, though pungent answer: "Biden is a wimp."

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