Will Tehran take this deadline more seriously than the mullahs did with the last one? Our Magic 8 Ball says: Most likely. The smoking ruins of Natanz and Isfahan, not to mention the destruction at Fordow, have to have made some impression on Ali Khamenei and his much-reduced band of incompetents.
Donald Trump has not finished with Iran and its nuclear-weapons program yet. Operation Midnight Hammer set those efforts back by several years and billions of dollars, but the Iranian regime claims it will proceed with renewed efforts anyway. Trump will give them 45 days to change their mind, Axios reports, and this time he’s not alone In fact, Trump may not even be in the lead in this new ultimatum:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the foreign ministers of France, Germany and the U.K. agreed in a phone call on Monday to set the end of August as the de facto deadline for reaching a nuclear deal with Iran, according to three sources with knowledge of the call.
Why it matters: If no deal is reached by that deadline, the three European powers plan to trigger the “snapback” mechanism that automatically reimposes all UN Security Council sanctions that were lifted under the 2015 Iran deal.
Interestingly, Axios suggests that Trump initially resisted this idea. He reportedly wanted clean negotiations with Tehran in order to get a deal that would supposedly stick. Don’t forget that Trump hated the JCPOA and withdrew the US from that pact in 2018, but also don’t forget that the Europeans chose to keep it in place. Trump may not have wanted to premise any new deal on the terms of the JCPOA, but it remains active between Iran and its European signatories. Netanyahu had to appeal personally to Trump to use the snapback provision as leverage, along with France, Germany, and the UK.
This allows for a combined Western effort to truly end Khamenei’s nuclear pursuits. Additional US sanctions may not have meant much to the Iranians, but a new round of sanctions with other trading partners will prove very difficult to endure. The Iranian economy is already reeling toward collapse as it is, making this a dangerous time for Khamenei and the IRGC, not to mention the humiliation the regime just suffered in the 12 Day War with Israel.
How bad is it already without the snapback sanctions? The regime has begun ejecting more than a million Afghans who provide mainly unskilled labor in eastern Iran. Some have lived and worked in Iran for decades, likely since the Soviet invasion in 1980, and their return will create even more instability in Afghanistan. The Iranians claim that they can’t afford to house and feed them any longer:
Iran hosts the world’s largest refugee population, and about 95 percent — estimated to be around four million — are Afghans, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency. Iran says the real number is closer to six million, after decades of war and upheaval in Afghanistan.
Tehran limits where Afghans can live and work — only in 10 of the country’s 31 provinces — and they are usually allowed only arduous, low-skill work.
Iran’s government has said that it can no longer absorb Afghan refugees given its own economic crisis and shortage of natural resources, including water and gas.
In March, the government said undocumented Afghans would be deported and set a July 6 deadline for voluntary departures. But after last month’s 12-day conflict with Israel, the crackdown intensified.
The Iranian regime claims that the Afghans worked for Israel and supplied the Mossad with intel for the 12 Day War. That seems highly unlikely, given their travel and residency restrictions, but it points to a perceived need for a cover story. The expulsion of so many low-cost workers will hit an already reeling economy particularly hard, and the Khamenei cult want to frame it as a form of national sacrifice.
They are also already admitting to an economic crisis as another basis for this action, and it seems unlikely that the populace will buy into the cover story when the reason for the mass expulsions is plainly obvious. The Iranians can’t prop up their economy without having a clear path for sales of oil and gas, and current sanctions are already creating a crisis. If Europe joins in by snapping back to pre-JCPOA sanctions, that situation will get exponentially worse in an environment where economic collapse has advanced much farther than in Moscow — and the regime is much less popular anyway, especially in Tehran itself.
Khamenei is still trying to offer delusions of adequacy to the Iranian populace:
The US attacked Iran, and our retaliatory strike against it was very significant. God willing, once censorship is removed, it will become clear what Iran has truly done.
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) July 16, 2025
Censorship? Who’s making possession of a Starlink device a crime punishable by public flogging? Which country turned off its Internet connections repeatedly during the period in which the IDF had air supremacy over the Iranian capital and much of the country?
This regime may very well be on its last legs already. Any push may topple it — and if the EU decides to shut down trade with Iran as well as the US, the Iranian regime has to know what will come as a result. Now that the EU is intervening, though, the regime probably hopes that they can pull the wool over European eyes again long enough to restart the nuclear-weapons program without retaliation. Or have our European partners finally learned a lesson about the nature of Khamenei and the radical cult he leads?
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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