President Trump made “a serious mistake” in withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, former President Barack Obama said in an extended defense of his signature foreign policy agreement.
“[T]he decision to put the JCPOA at risk without any Iranian violation of the deal is a serious mistake,” Obama said, using the acronym for the deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “Without the JCPOA, the United States could eventually be left with a losing choice between a nuclear-armed Iran or another war in the Middle East.
Obama sought to rebut Trump’s case for withdrawing from the pact, point-by-point, as he argued that the deal had defused a nuclear crisis by putting major constraints on the regime’s illicit program. Trump rejected the pact as a “decaying and rotten structure” that would only delay, not prevent, a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
“The deal lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime’s nuclear activity, and no limits at all on its other malign behavior, including its sinister activities in Syria, Yemen, and other places all around the world,” Trump said Tuesday. “The agreement was so poorly negotiated that even if Iran fully complies, the regime can still be on the verge of a nuclear breakout in just a short period of time.”
Obama contradicted that assessment, although he acknowledged that some sunset clauses exist within the JCPOA. “The prohibition on Iran ever obtaining a nuclear weapon is permanent,” he emphasized. “Some of the most important and intrusive inspections codified by the JCPOA are permanent. Even as some of the provisions in the JCPOA do become less strict with time, this won’t happen until ten, fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years into the deal, so there is little reason to put those restrictions at risk today.”
Although it is rare for a former president to criticize his successor, Obama has done so a handful of times, particularly when Trump took aim at some of his major policies. He described Trump’s decision to exit the Paris climate agreement as “an absence of American leadership,” for instance, and condemned the reversal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — a 2012 decision to shelter children brought into the country illegally from deportation — as “cruel” and “wrong.”
Trump didn’t shy from criticizing “the previous administration” as he explained his reasoning for the withdrawal.
“The agreement was so poorly negotiated that even if Iran fully complies, the regime can still be on the verge of a nuclear breakout in just a short period of time,” he said from the White House. “Not only does the deal fail to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but it also fails to address the regime’s development of ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads. Finally, the deal does nothing to constrain Iran’s destabilizing activities, including its support for terrorism. Since the agreement, Iran’s bloody ambitions have grown only more brazen.”
