The three European countries in the Iran nuclear deal — France, Germany and the UK — announced Jan. 14 that they were triggering a dispute mechanism under the accord in response to Iran's failure to "meet its commitments," a move that could potentially push the already fragile deal to the edge of collapse.
In May, Iran kick-started a phased rollback of its commitments in the multilateral deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The plan, Iran said, was an effort to save the deal rather than kill it, and a push for the European signatories to honor their side of the agreement by granting Tehran the economic relief it expected from the JCPOA after US President Donald Trump walked out of it in 2018. In the "fifth and last step" of those breaches, Iran broke entirely free from all the caps on its nuclear program, which had been severely restricted by the pact. Tehran, however, insisted that an almost immediate full compliance was possible any moment tangible measures were adopted by the other parties.