The ceasefire between the United States and Iran is unraveling into daily exchanges of missiles and drones, and the core disputes over the Strait of Hormuz and Tehran’s nuclear program remain structurally unresolved after months of negotiations. The reason is not a shortage of military pressure. Washington has applied more coercive force against Iran over the past eight years than any previous administration, and the result has been a harder Iranian negotiating position, not a softer one. The lesson that the historical record of successful nonproliferation agreements consistently teaches — that positive inducements are essential alongside pressure — has yet to fully penetrate the administration’s diplomatic toolkit.
The 2015 JCPOA is the most instructive available precedent. The offer to lift sanctions simultaneously across US, European, and UN Security Council frameworks was the decisive element that brought Iran to accept unprecedented nuclear restrictions: surrendering 98 percent of its enriched uranium stockpile, shutting down most enrichment capacity, halting plutonium production, and accepting intrusive IAEA inspections. The sanctions relief was not offered as a gift. It was structured as a direct exchange — specific Iranian actions unlocked specific economic benefits, with reversibility built into the architecture if Iran violated its commitments. That structure worked precisely because it gave Iranian decision-makers a concrete economic interest in compliance rather than simply a threat to avoid.
Libya and the Logic of Inducements
The Libya case offers a complementary example from a very different political context. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s decision in 2003 to abandon weapons of mass destruction programs and end support for terrorism was driven primarily by the desire to modernize the Libyan economy and attract Western investment — objectives that were structurally blocked as long as US and UN Security Council sanctions remained in place. The removal of those sanctions in exchange for verified policy compliance provided the economic logic that made compliance attractive to Libyan leadership. Coercive pressure had created the conditions; the inducement closed the deal.
Iran’s situation differs in scale and complexity, but the underlying decision-making logic is analogous. Tehran has demanded the release of $12 billion in frozen assets held in Qatar as a precondition for substantive negotiations — a position that is not realistic as a starting point but signals clearly that guaranteed asset release is a powerful inducement. With multiple layers of US sanctions in place against hundreds of designated individuals and entities, Washington has significant flexibility to construct a graduated relief architecture — beginning with exemptions and entity-specific relaxations, progressing through additional steps toward suspension and formal lifting, with each move linked to reciprocal Iranian concessions.
Secretary of State Rubio’s recent Senate testimony acknowledged that sanctions relief is being considered in negotiations, with the caveat that relief would not be offered upfront and would be tied to nuclear concessions as well as Hormuz access. That framing is constructive as far as it goes. The gap between a framework that acknowledges relief as a negotiating tool and one that deploys it with sufficient calibration to make Iranian compliance genuinely attractive remains significant.
The Investment Fund as a Structural Incentive
The most ambitious element of the economic statecraft framework being discussed in the emerging memorandum of understanding is a post-war investment fund, with preliminary language in the draft reportedly referencing a figure of $300 billion. The concept draws on Iran’s own February proposals for what Tehran described as a “commercial bonanza” — a framework in which a signed agreement would open US participation in Iran’s civil nuclear program, joint interests in oil and gas development, mining investment, and civilian aircraft purchases.
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had separately raised a variant of this concept during earlier negotiating rounds, proposing investment in Iranian real estate and commercial projects. The underlying logic is sound: a post-war investment fund transforms the agreement from a purely coercive transaction — Iran surrenders capabilities in exchange for reduced punishment — into a commercially structured arrangement that gives Iranian economic actors a material stake in the deal’s survival. Businesses, financial institutions, and economic ministries that benefit from the agreement create domestic political constituencies for compliance that are harder for hardliners to dismantle than any externally imposed restriction.
The maximum pressure campaign that has defined US policy since 2018 has produced measurable damage to the Iranian economy without producing political compliance. Eight years of intensifying sanctions have contributed to exactly the internal political consolidation that makes negotiated outcomes harder — empowering the hardliners who argued that engagement with Washington was naive and marginalizing the pragmatists who built the JCPOA. Reversing that dynamic requires tools that coercion alone cannot provide. A diplomatic strategy that combines graduated sanctions relief with a structured investment framework would give Iranian decision-makers the economic logic they need to justify concessions domestically — which, in the end, is the only path to an agreement that actually holds.
Original analysis inspired by David Cortright from The National Interest. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
