Iran has a long history of underhanded diplomacy when it comes to its nuclear program.
For decades, the country has sought to enrich uranium — the key building block to a nuclear weapon — leading to years of effort from the international community to halt the program.
Iran has long insisted its nuclear efforts are for peaceful purposes, but the International Atomic Energy Agency, Western intelligence agencies and others say Tehran had an unchecked weapons program up until 2003.
“Ever since the Islamic Regime’s clandestine program to obtain a nuclear weapon was first exposed almost a quarter century ago, the ruling mullahs have pushed the fiction that their ambitions are exclusively peaceful,” Retired Adm. Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow and a senior director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote in 2025.
“At the same time, they led the United States, Europe, and the International Atomic Energy Agency down a path of obfuscation and outright lies.”
In 2015, President Obama signed America onto the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which hoped to limit Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
The Trump Administration pulled America out of the non-proliferation agreement in 2018, with the president calling it “defective at its core.”
“The deal’s inspection provisions lack adequate mechanisms to prevent, detect, and punish cheating and don’t even have the unqualified right to inspect many locations, including military facilities,” he said at the time.
“Not only does the deal fail to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but it also fails to address the regime’s development of ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads,” he continued.
In the years since the JCPOA faltered, Iran has routinely limited the IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, from conducting inspections inside the country and stopped the international agency from accessing surveillance footage of Tehran’s heavily fortified underground nuclear enrichment facilities.
The regime also blocked an inspector, accusing him of testing positive for explosive nitrates, a claim the agency denied.
In June 2025, the IAEA found Iran had failed to cooperate with United Nations inspectors and was “repeatedly” unable to show that it wasn’t using nuclear material for military purposes, the watchdog said.
Iran was accused as recently as February of blocking international inspectors from reaching three nuclear facilities struck by the US in June — leaving the world in the dark about how much weapons-grade uranium it may have, the IAEA found.
