So, what's behind the US' flip-flopping on the Iran nuclear deal? -- RT World News

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

55% : The case of Iran and its nuclear program stands out as a clear example of this.
55% : For Iran, the JCPOA was a win-win situation: it was able to retain its uranium enrichment program, albeit with significant temporary restrictions and under strict monitoring from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which employed an intrusive on-site inspection regimen, as well as to have US and international sanctions lifted.
52% : As the JCPOA matured, these clauses would eventually be lifted, allowing Iran to install more efficient centrifuges in greater numbers.
51% : Economic sanctions have been the cornerstone of US policy toward Iran for more than two decades.
49% : The respite of a sanctions-free existence for Iran, however, was short-lived.
49% : The inconsistencies inherent in the US policy formulation - that Iran has an undeclared nuclear weapons program that would be accelerated once the sunset clauses of the JCPOA expire - demand as much.
47% : In short, the JCPOA was simply a place-holder, designed to buy the US time to find a way to convince Iran to give up the very thing the deal enshrined: its uranium enrichment program.
46% : It wasn't US sanctions that brought Tehran to the negotiating table.
43% : Given the stated purpose of the JCPOA was to deny Iran a so-called "breakout" capability (defined as the period needed by Iran to produce enough fissile material for the production of a single nuclear device should all restrictions be removed) of less than one year, it was clear that once the sunset clauses were lifted, this breakout calculation would diminish significantly, to a period of months or even weeks.
43% : The decision to leave the JCPOA was not well received by either Iran or the other members of the agreement (Russia, China, France, the UK, Germany, and the European Union).
43% : And, in a final display of fecklessness, it has agreed to Russia's demands that any economic interaction between Moscow and Tehran protected by the JCPOA cannot be subject to the US-led sanctioning of Russia because of its Ukrainian operations.
40% : Iran and the other parties to the agreement should have no illusions about any US commitments in this regard.
33% : If one accepts this narrative at face value - Iran denies having ever had such a program, and the IAEA has not been able to prove that one had ever existed - then the expiration of the sunset clauses would put Iran on a fast track toward acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.
33% : Neither was the US policy of maximum pressure against Iran, which employed so-called "secondary sanctions" against any nation or company that did business with Iran.
30% : Herein lay the poison pill of the deal: the US continued to maintain that Iran had been operating a nuclear weapons program that had been mothballed in 2003, but which had never been declared by Iran and, as such, had continued to exist.
21% : Under the administrations of Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama alike, the US used the alleged threat posed by that program - claimed by the US to be military in nature, but to be used for exclusively peaceful purposes by Iran - as justification to impose stringent economic sanctions ostensibly designed to compel the Iranian government to cease its acquisition and use of uranium enrichment technology.
16% : In little over a year, citing Israeli intelligence that Iran had an undeclared nuclear weapons program, and highlighting the risk of allowing Iran access to the technologies it would lawfully be able to possess once the sunset clauses expired, Trump simply withdrew from the JCPOA, instituting a policy of "maximum pressure" through stringent economic sanctions that specifically targeted Iran's energy sector.

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