Iran Doesn't Need to Leave the Treaty. It Has Already Left the Inspectors.

Two Iranian messages went out in the same week of September. On September 20, a group of lawmakers in Tehran submitted a bill under the parliament’s “triple urgency” procedure calling for Iran to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. One of the bill’s sponsors, Hossein Ali Haji-Deligani, had separately called for nuclear-weapons tests to be conducted as soon as possible. Days later in New York, President Masoud Pezeshkian told CBS News that Iran would let United Nations inspectors back into the country as part of a long-term ceasefire.

Iran does not need to leave the treaty to leave the inspectors. It has already done that. Now it is offering to sell access back.

The withdrawal bill needs Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s approval before it can reach the floor, and Tehran has spent the past week talking it down. One lawmaker said senior officials had decided that “for now, we are not leaving the NPT.” On September 27, Mohammad Mehdi Shahriari of parliament’s National Security Committee said the proposal would get “perhaps 70 votes at most,” and that leaving the treaty in wartime would amount to pursuing a weapon, which he said Iran does not intend. Then he added something more interesting: someone had been systematically sending messages to lawmakers urging them to back the bill, and he asked the Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence organization to find out who.

As of June 13, 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that Iran had 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched up to 60 percent — a short technical step from weapons grade. The agency had verified 432.9 kilograms of that material. Since then, with Iran blocking access to the sites that were hit, the agency has reported that it “cannot provide any information on the current size, composition or whereabouts” of the stockpile. In April, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said he believed much of it was still at Isfahan, but conceded: “We haven’t been able to inspect or to reject that the material is there.” The agency’s June report named the Isfahan tunnel complex as a storage site and said nothing about Fordow, a tunnel site at Natanz or Pickaxe Mountain, where analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security believe more of it may be entombed.

That is fifteen months. In counterintelligence, the number that should worry you is rarely the largest one. It is the known quantity that has lost its address.

The institutions have not stopped producing paper. On September 9, the IAEA’s Board of Governors referred Iran to the U.N. Security Council for the first time in twenty years, by 23 votes to three; Russia, China and Niger voted no. Six days later, on September 15, the agency’s General Conference elected Iran to its General Committee by secret ballot, 44 votes to 35, with 42 abstentions, over American objections.

The referral now goes to a Council that has not agreed for a year on whether its own Iran sanctions exist. The U.N. Secretariat says they snapped back last September; Moscow and Beijing dispute that interpretation, and both hold vetoes. Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group called the referral “an exercise in futility.”

The paper keeps moving. The outcomes have gone elsewhere.

Where they went is New York, through Qatari mediators. On September 24, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi set out Tehran’s terms: Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and begin talks “on mutually agreed subjects” if Washington lifted its naval blockade, released frozen funds, and waived oil sanctions. Pezeshkian added the inspectors. On September 26, President Trump said he had rejected the offer: “They want to make a deal where they open the strait immediately because they’re losing so badly.” U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz said the president was not confident Iran would “truly negotiate the end of their nuclear program.”

Inspection is not a concession. Under its NPT Safeguards Agreement, Iran is obligated to provide the IAEA with the access and information necessary to carry out verification. An offer to readmit inspectors in exchange for a ceasefire is an offer to sell what Iran already owes. If Washington pays for it, every future proliferator will have seen the price list.

With the Council deadlocked, enforcement has become national, and it runs through places Americans rarely look. On August 7, the Treasury Department sanctioned Shelbit, an exchange operated through a company registered in my native Georgia. According to Treasury, wallets belonging to the Revolutionary Guards sent it more than $1 million and received more than $2 million back. Georgia’s central bank said afterward that the company had never even applied to register as a virtual asset provider.

Verification by satellite. Enforcement by Treasury. Adjudication by no one.

When the verifier cannot see, the decision passes to whoever has the intelligence and the aircraft. Trump told the General Assembly that he would never allow Iran a nuclear weapon and that he expects a deal after the midterm elections; he has also called more strikes before them “possible.” Iran’s military has named the American bases in the Gulf and Iraq it would hit in return. The absence of inspectors does not lower the risk of war. It raises the cost of being wrong, in both directions: a strike on intelligence that turns out to be mistaken, or restraint on reassurance that turns out to be false.

Now the other column. The IAEA has not concluded that Iran has decided to build a weapon, and Tehran blames the loss of access on the American and Israeli strikes that damaged the sites. Its own lawmakers are arguing in public that a bomb is not the goal. And a U.S. official describes the talks through the mediators as “positive and constructive.” None of that is nothing.

But none of it tells anyone where 440.9 kilograms of highly enriched uranium are. Any agreement worth signing should treat inspector access as the entry fee, not the prize, and the first inspection should answer that question before any other is asked.

The bill in Tehran asks whether Iran will leave the treaty. The better question is whether anyone can still see inside it.

Emzari Gelashvili is a former senior Georgian counterintelligence officer and a former member of the Parliament of Georgia. From 1996 to 2008 he served across Georgia's Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Defense, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian operations. He is a veteran of the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.