In the fall of 2020, as Trump administration foreign policy officials anticipated their time in office would soon be over, they sought to perpetuate one of their most unsuccessful polices — the maximum pressure campaign against Iran — by erecting what they called a “sanctions wall.” The purpose, which they made no attempt to hide, was to undermine the next administration’s ability to restore the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Right after Trump lost the election, his aides hatched a plan to announce a new set of sanctions on Iran every week until the inauguration of President Joe Biden on Jan. 20, according to Axios.

With negotiations in Vienna now proceeding steadily to address the necessary steps for JCPOA restoration, architects of the sanctions wall again are anticipating defeat. And they are not happy that the ramparts appear to be about to crumble. Leading Republican senators and members of the House of Representatives have penned letters insisting they would work to overturn any “one-sided concessions.” Mark Dubowitz, who in his role as president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies hatched the sanctions wall concept, has released a torrent of tweets, charging on April 9, for example, “Biden offering regime in Iran billions of dollars in terrorism-sanctions relief that will subsidize the IRGC & reward ongoing nuclear deceit.” The IRGC is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was designated as a terror organization by the Trump administration.

On April 6, negotiators in Vienna established two working groups, one to compile the sanctions the US needs to lift and another to inventory the constraints that Iran must readopt to return to compliance. With regard to the former, the US special envoy for Iran, Rob Malley, and State Department spokesman Ned Price both stated that the United States will “remove those sanctions that are inconsistent with the deal.” Although Price would not clarify whether this would include any counterterrorism sanctions, the answer must be yes, since some of those measures were expressly imposed for the express purpose of impeding the deal.

Iran hawks thought that by piling on new sanctions under the guise of counterterrorism they had created a politically failsafe parapet. Because who wants to ease such sanctions and thereby risk being called a facilitator of terrorism? When the designations were so blatantly politicized, however, the risk of undoing them became politically manageable. The majority of Americans support a return to the JCPOA, a deal that clearly requires the lifting of sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran, the National Iranian Oil Company and other Iranian organizations involved in the oil business.