Former President Barack Obama said Sunday he’s “doubtful” President Trump’s emerging nuclear agreement with Iran will be meaningfully better than the 2015 deal Obama brokered and Trump later torched.
The remarks came in a pre-recorded interview set to air on ABC News this week, published as the Trump administration publicly signaled it was days away from a signing ceremony with Tehran. “It is doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place and worked, for a long stretch of time before we, the United States, pulled out of it,” Obama said.
Obama’s 2015 agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, constrained Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting certain sanctions on Iranian oil exports and releasing billions of dollars in previously frozen Iranian assets. The deal drew bipartisan scrutiny at the time and was rejected outright by Republicans, who argued it gave Tehran too much relief without permanently eliminating its nuclear capabilities.
Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA in May 2017 during his first term, calling it one of the worst agreements in American history. Last week, he renewed that criticism directly.
“Obama signed that stupid deal where he paid them billions and billions of dollars, he thought he could bribe them,” Trump told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He added that Iran continued developing weapons-grade uranium throughout the JCPOA’s duration, a claim consistent with several intelligence assessments that documented Iranian advances before and after the agreement.
Trump said his administration’s new negotiations are structured differently, with stricter constraints on Iran’s enrichment activities and no upfront cash transfers.
Obama said in the ABC interview he hoped the Trump administration would stop the military strikes against Iran and bring relief to civilians caught in the conflict. He framed diplomacy as superior to military pressure, suggesting the lessons of past wars hadn’t been learned. “Taking the time to explore diplomacy and exhaust the possibilities of coming up with deals that don’t solve 100% of the problem but solve 80, 90% of the problem while avoiding the necessity of going to war,” Obama said. “You’d think we would have learned that lesson by now, but it seems like every so often we have to relearn that lesson again.”
The ABC interview comes as Iran and the Trump administration traded conflicting signals over the weekend about whether a final deal is imminent. Trump declared Saturday that a peace agreement was “scheduled to get signed tomorrow,” but Iranian officials indicated Sunday that no final decision had been made. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Hezbollah-Israel exchange of strikes would not derail the process.
