Iran builds a compliance trap into its US nuclear deal.
Iran's Supreme National Security Council has approved a phased compliance mechanism for the imminent nuclear memorandum with Washington — every Iranian obligation conditional on prior, verified US fulfillment — after a 2018 JCPOA withdrawal left Tehran with no legal recourse and a lesson it has now written into the agreement's architecture.
The SNSC framework was reportedly presented to Iranian leadership as a binding annex to the agreement. Each US commitment triggers a corresponding Iranian step; any US failure to meet a pledge triggers immediate suspension of the related Iranian obligation. The mechanism is built to operate without a neutral arbiter, because Iran has no access to one that Washington cannot neutralize through sanctions pressure.
In 2015, Iran signed a multilateral nuclear agreement endorsed by the UN Security Council and co-signed by five permanent members. In 2018, a single US administration exited it unilaterally. No mechanism existed to compel re-entry or compensate Iran for sanctions reimposed in violation of the deal's terms. The SNSC annex is the institutional answer to that failure: Iran will not fulfill obligations against an American promise alone.
The memorandum is expected to be signed in Switzerland. The phased mechanism, approved by the SNSC and framed as a condition of implementation, is designed to prevent or neutralize US deviation from the agreement before it occurs structurally rather than after the fact diplomatically.
My take — conditionality is what post-JCPOA wise treaty design looks like.
A state that watched the US exit a UN-endorsed multilateral agreement without legal consequence has rational grounds to encode enforcement into the agreement's own implementation logic. Iran is applying the lesson of 2018 at the architectural level: no Iranian obligation activates until the corresponding US commitment is verifiably met. The mechanism is the diplomatic record of 2018 translated into contract language.