Obama: Trump’s Iran Deal Is No Better Than Mine

Barack Obama thinks President Donald Trump’s Iran nuclear deal, still being negotiated, won’t be any different from his own 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It’s hard to disagree with him.

The former president said during an ABC interview yesterday, “It is doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place.”

• During his first term, President Trump called the Obama deal a “horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” He said it “didn’t bring peace, and it never will.” He withdrew from it in 2018.
• That deal gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for Iran suspending—not dismantling—its uranium enrichment program. Yet media leaks suggest President Trump’s negotiations are based on the same premise.

Others have noticed the similarities:

• Journalist Lee Smith wrote in Tablet: “Thus it seems that what Trump has frequently called the worst deal ever negotiated, and has identified for more than a decade as Exhibit A in the case against American loserdom, has now become the pattern of his own Iran policy.”

France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom announced on Sunday that they are ready to lift sanctions on Iran because of the nuclear talks.

• These countries, minus Italy, were party to and proponents of the JCPOA until they activated the agreement’s “snapback sanctions” last August.

Last week, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in “The Deadly Delusion in the Iran Talks”:

President Obama made this deal because he shared Iran’s goal of destroying America! President Trump doesn’t have that goal. … But now we see President Trump continuing Obama’s work! How could this possibly happen? Something is dreadfully wrong here.

There are deeper spiritual reasons behind this. If President Trump doesn’t turn this around, Mr. Flurry wrote, “We are heading toward bloody world war!”