"For more than a decade, Republicans have told the American people that Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran was a historic mistake.
I should know. I was the Obama administration’s senior official at the State Department working with the US House of Representatives to get that deal – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – done.
Not a day went by when Republicans didn’t haul up administration officials to Congress to demand answers about the negotiations. I organised those briefings and hearings. We gave answers, but it was never good enough for the Republicans. They believed that they could do it better.
Donald Trump built an entire political narrative around those attacks, culminating in his 2018 decision to withdraw the United States from the agreement.
Now, we see the results.
Back then, Republicans called it appeasement, and weakness, to cut a deal with Iran. They said it endangered America, abandoned our allies and paved Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. They invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington in March 2015 to attack the deal from the House floor.
After 11 years of relentless criticism, what has Trump given us? A weaker deal than the one they destroyed. This one isn’t even yet a binding agreement, and the US has already committed to giving billions of dollars to Iran through sanctions relief and cash payments. Overturning four-plus decades of economic pressure for pinky promises is downright baffling and deeply dangerous.
The logic of using sanctions in American foreign policy on Iran was always that they could be traded for concrete concessions. Instead, we’re paying Iran. It makes no sense. That reality should not just be politically embarrassing. It should force a serious reckoning. This is one of the most consequential foreign policy mistakes of the last decade.
We are terminating our pressure on the Iranians, giving them economic wins in exchange for nothing more than the vague promise to not build nuclear weapons that they’ve been making since they signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968 – a promise that they haven’t kept. We’re giving up calling on the regime to not slaughter its own people, we are treating Lebanon like a vassal state that we can hand to Hezbollah and we are arguing that Iran should have ballistic missile capabilities the likes of which enabled them to bomb nearly a dozen of their neighbours these past months.
I remember the debate over the Iran deal vividly. I lived it.
Back then, I was serving as a senior official at the State Department working on foreign policy issues, having spent over a decade in public service, including during the Clinton and Bush administrations. I had seen up close how presidents dealt with problems. In the Obama administration, I watched first hand as diplomats, scientists, military experts and intelligence professionals wrestled with one of the most difficult national security challenges facing the United States. Nobody believed Iran would stop engaging in destabilising activities throughout the region. We faced the same challenges as today, but we dealt with them in a structured methodical way. No one can claim the same for how Trump is handling these talks, as he vacillates between diplomacy and military threats, unable to make up his mind on the best path."
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