Snapback And The Sabotage Of The Non-Proliferation Regime – OpEd
Rafael Mariano Grossi’s recent warning should chill policymakers: “Think for a minute about a world where instead of a few, we would have 20 or 25 countries armed with nuclear weapons.”
Grossi was not fear-mongering; he was offering a diagnosis of a system fraying under stress. That system—the non-proliferation regime—is now being tested most visibly in the Iran file. On August 28, 2025, the E3 (France, Germany, United Kingdom) formally triggered the UN “snapback” process under Resolution 2231; at 20:00 EDT on September 27, all the pre-2015 UN sanctions automatically re-entered into force. Brussels followed on September 29 by reimposing sweeping EU measures. Washington cheered the move. Moscow and, to varying degrees, Beijing rejected its legitimacy. The net effect is a fractured international response at precisely the moment the regime needs coherence.
The central danger is not only that Iran could acquire a bomb; it is that great-power mismanagement and performative coercion are making the regime itself look optional. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was designed to show the opposite—that rigorous verification, staged sanctions relief, and credible dispute mechanisms could keep a threshold state below the threshold. Concluded on July 14, 2015, and implemented on January 16, 2016, the deal worked as written while it was in force. The pivot away from that strategy came not in 2017, as some shorthand histories suggest, but on May 8, 2018, when the United States unilaterally exited the agreement and reimposed secondary sanctions that gutted the economic dividends promised to Iran.
What followed was grimly predictable. Beginning in 2019, Tehran moved in calibrated steps beyond JCPOA limits—openly and under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring—while insisting it had not made a decision to pursue nuclear weapons. By February 2021, however, Iran halted implementation of the Additional Protocol (the intrusive inspections backbone of the deal) and in June 2022 removed 27 IAEA cameras, profoundly degrading transparency. The IAEA’s ability to reconstruct a full picture has eroded ever since.
By mid-2025, the Iran file had moved from hard to combustible. In June, Israel and the United States struck multiple Iranian nuclear facilities. Public claims about the damage diverged—“obliterated,” said President Trump; “set back months,” said early U.S. intelligence; later Pentagon talking points floated “up to two years.” For the IAEA, the immediate consequence was clearer: Iran further restricted access, and prospects for restoring baseline monitoring dimmed. If snapback was intended to force compliance, the sequence so far has delivered opacity.
Against this backdrop, the enrichment data became more alarming. As of late September, the IAEA assessed that Iran had amassed roughly 441 kg of uranium enriched to 60%—material that, if further enriched, is sufficient for multiple weapons’ worth of fissile material, according to several independent assessments. After the June strikes, Tehran signaled it would not grant inspectors visits beyond essential civilian sites; by early September, Iranian officials were saying plainly that access (apart from Bushehr) was not on the table.
Supporters of snapback argue they had no choice. Termination Day for Resolution 2231—October 18, 2025—was approaching, which would have removed the very legal architecture enabling multilateral pressure. The Security Council rejected efforts to delay the E3’s move; on September 27, the UN’s pre-JCPOA sanctions regime returned: arms embargo, bans on sensitive nuclear and missile activity, asset freezes and travel bans for designated persons and entities. The E3 insist diplomacy remains open. Russia openly rejects the sanctions’ validity. Canada and the EU are implementing. The United States says removal is possible later—if compliance returns. This is textbook divergence inside a system that depends on unanimity to work.
Yet the strategic lesson of the last decade still stands: pressure alone does not durably solve nuclear problems with states that perceive existential threats. U.S. intelligence continues to assess that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that, while capabilities have advanced, Tehran has not made a decision to build a bomb. That conclusion neither absolves Iran of violations nor justifies its enrichment levels; it does, however, underscore that intent is elastic and shaped by perceived security guarantees and political incentives. Snapback without a credible offramp risks hardening the constituency in Tehran that argues only force—or at minimum nuclear latency—wins respect.
There is a quieter casualty, too: the “rules” look contingent. When a permanent Security Council member (Russia) and other states decline to recognize a Chapter VII process, implementation diffuses. When airstrikes by two nuclear-armed states target a third state’s safeguarded—or formerly safeguarded—facilities, the norm against attacking nuclear infrastructure weakens. When verification tools are first negotiated, then unilaterally abandoned, then physically removed, confidence collapses. None of this is a defense of Iran’s conduct; it is a warning about the regime’s drift.
What would a regime-preserving strategy look like now? First, anchor the crisis back in safeguards. Make restoration of the Additional Protocol, real-time online enrichment monitoring, and reinstallation of cameras the first deliverable, not a late-stage concession. Second, stage reciprocal steps: a freeze and roll-back of enrichment above 20% tied to phased suspensions (not eliminations) of specific UN/EU measures, with automatic snap-back of penalties if monitoring is impeded. Third, open a limited humanitarian/financial channel walled off from U.S. secondary sanctions to show that verified cooperation yields concrete returns. Finally, take the politics seriously: Tehran’s leadership will require face-saving guarantees; Western governments will need verifiable ceilings and time-bound clauses. None of that is easy—in an election-scarred West and a crisis-shaken Iran—but it is how non-proliferation works when it works.
The alternative is the world Grossi sketched: more states copying the lesson that nuclear latency—or worse, nuclear weapons—are the only reliable deterrent. Snapback was supposed to rescue the regime from that future. Without a diplomatic lane attached to it, it could hasten the very outcome it seeks to avoid.
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