President Obama, defending his recent overtures to Iran, said that while the U.S. can’t fully trust the regime’s leadership he is committed to testing whether diplomacy can prevent the country from getting a nuclear weapon.

“The best way for us to assure it, is to test this diplomatic path, understanding that it’s not based on trust, it’s based on what we can verify,” Obama said at a forum on U.S.-Israel relations in Washington. “If we can’t get there, then no deal is better than a bad deal.”