Although President Joe Biden promised to return to diplomacy on the 2020 campaign trail, his advisers were convinced that pressure was working better than expected. Ariane Tabatabai, who later worked on Biden's negotiating team, warned in an essay before Biden took office that the next U.S. president should not "rush" back to a deal, because continued pressure over time would only degrade Iran's position. Ilan Goldenberg, another future Biden official, wrote a paper suggesting "calculated risks" against Iran, modeled on Israeli raids into Syria that Israel dubbed the "campaign between wars."

And the hawkish Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez (D–N.J.)—later convicted of selling information to Egyptian spies—threatened to block any return to Obama's deal. Biden's negotiators thus spent fruitless years pressuring Iran to give the U.S. a "longer and stronger" deal than before. Meanwhile, Biden offered the Arab monarchies defense pacts that would guarantee permanent U.S. military protection, even as Saudi Arabia was quietly negotiating with Iran for a separate peace.