Former President Barack Obama said it is “doubtful” that President Donald Trump’s emerging agreement with Iran will differ significantly from the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated during his administration.
Speaking to ABC News’s Robin Roberts in an interview preview released Sunday, Obama said any agreement reached by the Trump administration would likely resemble the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the multinational accord Trump withdrew from during his first term.
“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 had worked for for a long stretch of time before we, the United States, pulled out of it,” Obama said.
The comments come as Trump says the U.S. is in the final stretch of finalizing an agreement with Tehran following months of military conflict and negotiations. The president has repeatedly suggested a deal could be reached quickly and argued that any accord produced by his administration would be stronger than the Obama-era framework.
“Unlike Obama’s Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in payments to them, including 1.7 Billion Dollars in green, cold cash, no money will exchange hands,” Trump wrote on Saturday.
The 2015 nuclear agreement, negotiated by the United States, Iran, and five other world powers, imposed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the accord in 2018, calling it one of the worst agreements ever negotiated and reimposing sanctions on Tehran through a “maximum pressure” campaign.
Obama defended diplomacy as a tool for addressing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, saying the latest negotiations demonstrate the limits of military force alone.
“In retrospect, it’s a reminder that on a lot of difficult foreign policy problems, the notion that we can just bully our way or bomb our way to solutions may sometimes seem appealing,” Obama said. “The fact of the matter is 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, you’d think we would have learned that lesson by now.”
The Trump administration has rejected the comparison between the emerging agreement and the JCPOA.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued Sunday that the key distinction is the leverage Trump created through military action against Iran.
“We bombed Iran and then put in a blockade and then ran ships through and then have restarted when necessary to ensure that they come to the table for a great deal,” Hegseth said. “That’s the big difference between this and JCPOA and the way Obama did it.”
Hegseth said the administration negotiated “from a position of strength” and pledged to maintain military pressure on Tehran as talks continue.
“President Trump led with military might,” Hegseth said. “That military might will stay as long as necessary.”
Under the proposed deal, which is under review by Tehran, Iran would agree to end all nuclear ambitions and would meet with Washington to find a path to removing all remaining uranium from the country.