Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
• America can’t afford to retire• The US is becoming impossible to live in• I told Trump over dinner he didn’t have my loyalty – it sealed my fate• This is how the world will look after Trump• I’ve seen what ICE has done to Minnesota. Farage wants to import that to the UK• The men who want to stop women voting• Trump isn’t damaging America. He’s reinventing it’
For more than a decade, Republicans have told the American people that Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), 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 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.
Then, the question was much narrower and more urgent: How do we prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon without launching another war in the Middle East? Perhaps the greatest weakness of the Obama diplomacy was that it only focused on nuclear issues. When Trump threw that deal out in 2018, he argued that he would deal with all the non-nuclear issues to get a better deal. Eight years and two wars later, he has squandered any leverage he had from those wars and the 2018 sanctions programme. Now, he’s seeking to restore the Obama deal, and paying far more to get the Iranians to join it.
I understand why Trump is doing this now. Americans are very negative on his latest military action, meaning that he has little political space for a tougher policy. Obama was similarly acutely aware that the US had already spent years fighting costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of American lives had been lost. Trillions had been spent. Americans had little appetite for another conflict.
The JCPOA offered an alternative, imposing strict limits on Iran’s nuclear programme, dramatically reducing Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and dismantling Iran’s critical nuclear infrastructure. It established the most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated. Most importantly, it pushed Iran verifiably farther away from a bomb.
When Trump entered office in 2017, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran did not possess enough enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon. The deal was working. While it didn’t cover other crucial security issues – such as Iran’s support for terror proxies, ballistic missile development and grave human rights violations – those weaknesses were not sufficient justification to throw out the nuclear restrictions. Trump did just that, calling it “incompetent”. And mostly for political gain, as he was ginning up a presidential run.
Republicans spent years attacking the deal on cable television, in campaign speeches and in Congress.
Then, as the old saying goes, the dog caught the car. Trump had promised something better, insisting a stronger agreement was right around the corner and Iran would have no choice but to surrender to American demands.
None of it happened. The irony is impossible to ignore. The movement that spent years attacking Obama’s agreement now appears willing to support a Trump-negotiated Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Iran that may leave Iran with a more advanced nuclear programme than the one that was constrained under the original deal.
Republicans claimed the JCPOA was too permissive because it allowed limited enrichment under strict monitoring. Now they may embrace a framework negotiated and pushed by Trump after Iran has accumulated vastly larger stockpiles, mastered more advanced nuclear capabilities and gained leverage that did not exist in 2015.
That is the cost of abandoning a functioning policy without a realistic alternative.
Diplomacy with Iran has never been easy. But foreign policy is about choosing between imperfect options and worse ones.
As Americans evaluate whatever agreement emerges from Trump’s negotiations, they should ask a simple question: If the JCPOA was such a disaster, why does Trump now appear to be searching for a weaker version of the same diplomacy that he once denounced?
The answer is uncomfortable but obvious, because reality has a way of catching up with politics.
Critics may finally have to confront the fact that the alternative they promised was never better at all.
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