Analysis Of Factors Leading To The Trump Administration's Withdrawal From The Iran Nuclear Agreement From The Perspective Of Two-tier Gam

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action(JCPOA)was reached after lengthy negotiations and was finally unanimously adopted by the UN Security Council on July 20,2015.The agreement was not only seen as one of the biggest achievements of the Obama administration,but also the result of diligent negotiations among Iran,China,Russia,the United States,Britain,France and Germany,which not only strongly limited the development of Iran’s nuclear capabilities,but also helped Iran reintegrate into the international community and was a major milestone in the international nuclear non-proliferation regime.However,Obama’s successor,Donald Trump,made repeated statements of dissatisfaction with this agreement before coming to power and finally announced the U.S.withdrawal from JCPOA on May 8,2018,a move that also sparked intense discussions and many speculations around why the U.S.withdrew from JCPOA.At present,the academic community mainly explores the economic and security threats of Iran to the United States,domestic political factors in the United States and other dimensions to analyze and study the motives of the Trump administration’s withdrawal from JCPOA.Two-level game theory is a classic theory on international negotiation,proposed by American scholar Robert Putnam in 1988.The theory constructs a multi-level analytical framework to explain the interaction of international factors within international negotiation,breaking the single-level explanation.On this basis,many scholars have explored the two-level game theory in depth and continuously expanded its connotation and extension to make it richer.The two-layer game theory mainly involves three important concepts: “two boards”,“two stages” and “win-sets”.This thesis uses the two-level game theory as the main analytical framework to analyze the multi-level reasons for the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear issue.This thesis argues that the fundamental reason why the Trump administration chose to withdraw from the agreement is that the “win-set” of the decision to withdraw has increased in the United States compared to the Obama era,and that the Trump administration believes that the JCPOA is not in the interest of the United States and therefore cannot reach a “win-set” with other countries at the international level,which eventually led to the Trump administration’s choice to withdraw from JCPOA.