Exactly six years ago yesterday, the international nuclear agreement with Iran was implemented. Six years later, the JCPOA policy is effectively gone, and efforts to reach a new agreement are going nowhere fast. The result is an increasingly obvious national security threat.

As Politico reported, President Joe Biden’s team is increasingly eager to shine a light on who’s responsible for this mess.

The White House sought Wednesday to reframe the Washington debate about the Iran nuclear deal, asserting that former President Donald Trump’s decision to quit the agreement is what has led to an Iran on the verge of an atom bomb. The criticism of Trump came as indirect talks in Vienna between the United States and Iran to revive the deal remain unable to resolve critical differences.

At a briefing last week, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki whether the president is satisfied with the ongoing diplomatic efforts. Her response suggested she was eager to contextualize the latest developments.

“[N]one of the things we’re looking at now — Iran’s increased capability and capacity, their aggressive actions that they have taken through proxy wars around the world — would be happening if the former president had not recklessly pulled out of the nuclear deal with no thought as to what might come next,” Psaki said.

“And if you look at that step and the impact of that — the fact that the former president ripped up the nuclear deal meant that Iran’s nuclear program was no longer in a box, it no longer had the most robust inspection regime ever negotiated, no longer had the tight restrictions on nuclear activity…. Because of the last administration pulling out of the nuclear agreement, now Iran’s program has been rapidly accelerating.”

This has the benefit of being true.

Circling back to our earlier coverage, Joe Cirincione, whose expertise in international nuclear diplomacy has few rivals, wrote a piece for NBC News last spring explaining that international negotiators have been tasked with trying to “undo the damage Donald Trump caused when he left an agreement that had effectively shrunk Iran’s program, frozen it for a generation and put it under lock and camera.”

I continue to believe this is an underappreciated truth. As we’ve discussed, the Iran deal did exactly what it set out to do: The agreement dramatically curtailed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and established a rigorous system of monitoring and verification. Once the policy took effect, each of the parties agreed that the participants were holding up their end of the bargain, and Iran’s nuclear program was, at the time, on indefinite hold.

And then Trump took office.

One of my favorite stories about the Iran deal came a few months into Trump’s term, when the then-president held a lengthy White House meeting with top members of his national security team. Each of the officials told Trump the same thing: It was in the United States’ interest to preserve the existing JCPOA policy.

The Republican expected his team to tell him how to get out of the international agreement, not how to stick with it. When his own foreign policy and national security advisers told him the policy was working, Trump “had a bit of a meltdown.”

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Soon after, he abandoned the deal anyway, not because it was failing, but because Trump was indifferent to its success. The effective policy was soon replaced by a new strategy known as the “maximum pressure” campaign.

Iran almost immediately became more dangerous, not less.

Among the results is a new perspective among former JCPOA critics. It’s no secret that Israeli officials were among the fiercest opponents of the Iran deal, but Axios reported two weeks ago that the head of Israeli military intelligence told ministers during a Security Cabinet meeting “that Israel will be better off if the Iran nuclear talks lead to a deal rather than collapsing without one.”

There are plenty of other notable voices in Jerusalem delivering the same message.

In Republican circles, it’s simply assumed that the Obama-era Iran deal “failed.” That gets reality backwards: The real failure is the policy Trump tried to implement, not the policy he replaced.

Restoring what worked may prove impossible, but there should be no question as to who’s responsible for our current predicament. Trump made a great many foreign policy mistakes during his tenure, many of them driven by little more than petty ignorance. None were more important than his absurd abandonment of the JCPOA.