On day four of Operation Epic Fury, President Donald Trump unleashed fury at former President “Barack Hussein Obama.” Sitting next to the German Chancellor in the Oval Office, Trump rambled about everything he didn’t like about the multinational agreement to restrict Iran’s nuclear program, which the Obama administration helped negotiate.
If I didn’t terminate the deal that Obama made giving them everything … he was giving them billions of dollars. But worse, he was giving them the right to have the path to a nuclear weapon. And that deal expired. A lot of people said, oh, you terminated it. Well, it was going to be terminated anyway because it expired.
Before assessing the veracity of Trump’s claims, it’s worth exploring why Trump is bothering to trash his predecessor’s Iranian foreign policy amid launching, managing, and selling his war with Iran.
The dubious claim that Trump mastered “The Art of the Deal” has long been central to his hyper-successful billionaire persona. It was the name of the 1987 best-selling memoir that made Trump a household name. “I’ve mastered the art of the deal and have turned the name Trump into the highest quality brand,” Trump bragged in the weekly intro of his reality TV show The Apprentice, which debuted in 2004 and memory-holed his many business failures. When Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, he declared, “We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal.” One year later, when he accepted the Republican Party nomination, he pledged, “I’ve made billions of dollars in business making deals—now I’m going to make our country rich again.”
During that 2016 acceptance speech in Cleveland, Trump also trashed “unfair trade deals,” which he largely attributed to former President Bill Clinton and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal. Trump disparaged Obama’s deal the following month on NBC’s Meet the Press, but wanted to be seen as the dealmaker so adroit he could save the president’s lousy compact: “I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘We’re going to rip up the deal.’ It’s very tough to do when you say, ‘Rip up a deal.’ Because I’m a deal person … But I will police that deal … I would police that contract so tough that they don’t have a chance.”
However, as president, on May 8, 2018, Trump abandoned his mend-it-don’t-end-it position and withdrew from the Iran deal, despite Tehran’s compliance, according to international inspectors. To salvage his dealmaker reputation, two days later on Twitter, he glibly announced plans for a summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. A bromance between the two blossomed, producing a slapdash agreement that did nothing to contain North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal. Later that year, Trump reopened trade talks with Canada and Mexico and supplanted the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement. The new trade deal was only marginally different, but it was Trump’s.
Accepting the 2020 Republican Party presidential nomination, amidst the obligatory swipes at the Iran deal and past trade deals, he bragged about his South Korean trade deal and a recent deal he brokered normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (additional “Abraham Accords” with other small Arab and Islamic countries would follow). Still, after four years of chaos culminating in a poorly managed pandemic, not enough voters believed that Trump, the negotiator, made them as “rich” as promised. He lost.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump once again sold himself as the ultimate dealmaker, while accusing Biden of stumbling us into “World War III,” pointing to the bloodshed in Ukraine and Gaza. He promised to end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours upon taking office.
But 14 months into Trump’s second term, his dealmaker braggadocio has come into stark conflict with his intensifying love of unilateral power. He craved the Nobel Peace Prize so much that he embarked on a whirlwind of superficial handshake agreements that he falsely asserts ended eight wars—a list that includes, and I am not making this up, war between Israel and Iran. Yet Russia’s war on Ukraine rages on, making a mockery of Trump’s claims to peacemaking prowess.
He even blew up his first-term trade deals with stiff tariffs on imports. Using those levies as leverage, he launched a series of bilateral negotiations and struck several “framework” agreements that allowed for partial tariff reductions. But then the Supreme Court ruled that he lacked legal authority for many of these tariffs and canceled them, prompting Trump to impose still more tariffs, which he can legally impose but only temporarily. The mess leaves his many trade negotiations in limbo. None of it has made Americans—who are paying more for imports from coffee to Camrys—feel richer or that Trump is a master dealmaker.
A true master of negotiation has knowledge, patience, creativity, and flexibility. Trump has displayed none of these skills. On the contrary, he loves stubbornly and impatiently breaking laws and norms. To exert the power needed to satisfy those cravings during his second term, Trump turned to the armed officers of the National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the Supreme Court stopped the exploitation of the National Guard, and public horror at the deaths from Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis has complicated Trump’s ICE deployments.
What’s left? The military. A 12-day bombing raid of Iran last June. An ongoing campaign of air strikes on boats allegedly ferrying illegal drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The abduction of Venezuela’s dictator in January. The seemingly flawless execution of these operations appears to have increased Trump’s appetite for war, as he signaled last September by unofficially renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War.
A full-scale bombardment of Iran, followed by Tehran’s attacks on many neighbors, looks more like World War III than anything on Biden’s watch. Moreover, Trump attacked Iran after three weeks of negotiations, which, according to Oman’s foreign minister, had produced “significant progress.” Wouldn’t a consummate dealmaker and worthy candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize stay at the table until an agreement was forged?
Trump can’t admit he was negotiating in bad faith, brazenly executing war plans during the talks by positioning aircraft carriers in the region. So he has to accuse the Iranians of his own dealmaking sins.
But that Obama agreement lingers in the history books, reminding us that there was once a president better at deals than Donald Trump, who, along with great powers, made the Iranian regime submit to international inspections that deny it a nuclear bomb.
Trump, so palpably wracked by insecurities that he openly discussed needing to win a second election “for my own ego,” must sully the Obama deal years later. He must recycle all the smears so you would believe Obama gave Iran billions of dollars while allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons, that Trump didn’t “terminate” the deal, but it “expired.”
These are the facts. The original 2015 deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), put limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for a lifting of economic sanctions. Obama did not give Iran cash from the US Treasury; he unfroze Iranian assets, as did other European signatories.
The limits included uranium enrichment (high-enrichment is needed to make nuclear weapons), the size of its uranium stockpile, and the number and type of centrifuges used to enrich uranium. There were some sunset provisions, which critics like Trump attacked as effectively allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons eventually. In particular, the cap on enrichment level was intended to last 15 years, and the limits on centrifuges were set to last 10 years.
But that didn’t mean the deal would sunset. As the Obama administration stressed, “There is a permanent prohibition on Iran ever having a nuclear weapons program and a permanent inspections regime that goes beyond any previous inspections regime in Iran … In addition, Iran made commitments in this deal that include prohibitions on key research and development activities that it would need to design and construct a nuclear weapon. Those commitments have no end date.”
As Kelsey Davenport of the Arms Control Association explained in a 2017 article, while the end of the sunset provisions would “shorten Iran’s potential breakout time, the time it would take to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, to less than the current 12 months,” we would still have intrusive inspections which “prevents Iran from pursing activities in the future relevant to building a nuclear weapon but claiming the purpose was for conventional military applications.”
Again, the Iran deal was working as advertised for more than two years before Trump undermined it by withdrawing from it. Only then did Iran fully stop complying, and it has not since last year’s Operation Midnight Hammer. According to the Associated Press, a recent report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which conducts nuclear inspections, said that without access to Iran’s facilities it “cannot verify whether Iran has suspended all enrichment-related activities” but believes Iran maintains a stockpile “of uranium enriched up to 60% purity—a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.” As my Washington Monthly colleague Matthew Cooper observed, “In the absence of any international nuclear monitoring in Iran, we’re blind, in a situation where the U.S. and Israel supposedly eviscerated the Shia regime’s nuclear program last year, but were apparently caught unaware of its build-back efforts and are striking again.”
In an alternative timeline where we stayed in the JPCOA, might Iran have tried to subvert it at some point? Maybe. No deal can perfectly restrain a determined bad actor or predict future bad behavior. But if Iran did go rogue, we would have evidence from international inspectors. An American president who saw the need at such a point to use military force against Iran would have a legitimate basis for action and the ability to assemble a broad coalition without establishing precedents that destabilize international relations—such as one head of state ordering the assassination of another because of a “feeling” that an attack was forthcoming.
This is why international deals, however imperfect, have value. Someone who mastered “The Art of the Deal” would know that. Obama crafted such an international deal and didn’t lead us to the brink of World War III. Trump didn’t, and here we are.
