Former President Barack Obama broke his silence on Donald Trump’s tentative peace agreement with Iran but says the U.S. is “worse off” than before the president started striking Iran.
Trump, 80, has gone out of his way to insist that the memorandum of understanding he struck with Iran is better than Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran that the MAGA president ripped up during his first term.
But in an interview aired on Friday, the former Democratic president questioned whether progress had been made after Trump launched the U.S. into a full-scale war with Iran, only to strike the current agreement, which is already in jeopardy.
Obama was asked directly by NBC News’ Today co-host Craig Melvin what he made of the deal so far.
“We’ve now fought a war, spent billions of billions of dollars, you know, put enormous strain on our military, a lot of people have died, and it feels like we’re back where we were before we started the war, except maybe a little bit worse,” Obama said.
The former president indicated he was grateful that a ceasefire was in place, but he was quick to point out that Trump was the one who shredded his agreement to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon to begin with.
“I am very happy to see a ceasefire, and I’m hopeful that it holds,” Obama said.
“In terms of what was the original rationale for this war, which was—there was a deal in place in which Iran had agreed not to develop nuclear weapons. This administration, or a prior version of this administration, pulled out of it, which caused then Iran to develop more nuclear capacity,” he added.
Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement the Obama administration reached with Iran in 2018. The president has repeatedly claimed he would obtain a better deal than his predecessor to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
The 2015 agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), between Iran and several world powers, including the U.S. under Obama, laid out steps to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and open its facilities to international inspections.
While Iran committed to not developing nuclear weapons in Trump’s memorandum of understanding (MOU), it does not include the mechanisms for enforcement or the disposal of enriched uranium. Instead, it commits to 60 days of further negotiations to reach a deal.
Earlier this week, before details of Trump’s deal outlining further talks were known, Obama said he doubted it would be significantly different or an improvement over the 2015 deal, and slammed the notion that the U.S. could simply bully or bomb its way to solutions.
Despite Trump signing the MOU at the Palace of Versailles this week, talks set to begin on Friday were postponed, and Vice President JD Vance did not fly to Switzerland to kick off further negotiations.
Democrats have slammed Trump’s tentative agreement as a total surrender to Iran after the president’s war dragged on for months. But Republicans on Capitol Hill have also raised a series of concerns about it.
The MOU includes provisions to unfreeze Iranian assets, remove sanctions, allow Iran to sell oil, and give at least $300 billion for Iran’s reconstruction.
The Trump administration has argued that those provisions will become a reality based on Iran’s behavior, but GOP lawmakers who were once critical of the Obama agreement were deeply concerned.
Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Thursday that the $300 billion fund in Trump’s agreement “would make Iran’s payoff under President Obama’s 2015 deal look like a pittance by comparison.”
Sen. Ted Cruz called the MOU “highly concerning” and argued Trump was getting poor advice.
“History teaches a very simple proposition, which is that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a very, very bad idea,” Cruz said on his podcast.
He said funneling $300 billion to Iran would be a “very serious mistake.”
