On July 14, 2015, Iran, the European Union, and the P5+1 states—Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States plus Germany—agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), crowning a diplomatic process that had stretched over twelve years. The JCPOA is intended to resolve one of the most serious international security problems of the past two decades. Both the form and the content of the current document remain complicated. This article reviews the background and political aspects of the Iranian nuclear problem from a Russian perspective, analyzes the technical and military-political dimensions of the JCPOA, and evaluates the likely impact of the agreement and key implementation challenges. 

Of particular value for Western readers is the analysis of Russia’s conflicting interests regarding the implications of the nuclear deal with Iran and the rationale that lay behind Moscow’s ultimate choice to support the conclusion of the JCPOA. Those motives are all the more important because they provided a workable framework for U.S.-Russian cooperation on this singular problem even amid an atmosphere of increasingly tough confrontation and competition in Europe and beyond in the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis. Another point of interest is the insights into the substance and motives of the Russian position on the applicability of the Iranian deal as a precedent for other possible proliferation cases and global nonproliferation regimes in general. [...]

Read the full article at the Carnegie Moscow Center.