The former president worried that a new deal with Iran will be far worse than the one that was in place until 2018
Barack Obama is deeply skeptical that the United States and Iran will be able to work out a deal better than the one that was in place before President Donald Trump‘s first term.
The Obama administration reached a deal with Iran in 2015. That deal saw Iran agreeing to limit its nuclear program, in exchange for an easing of sanctions put in place by the United States and the UN. President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.
Obama discussed the withdrawal and subsequent war with Iran in an interview with ABC‘s Robin Roberts on Sunday.
“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,” he said.
Note that he didn’t say that violent offenses didn’t work broadly or were immoral, just that it was never going to work with Iran specifically, which from what I’ve seen has been a long-held perspective even among the same folks that were eager to bomb away on Iraq. Even people that thought they could do this with Afghanistan were more skeptical about trying the same stuff with Iran. Even as those same people would have loved it to be the case they could do this to Iran, they had to admit it wouldn’t work.
So even for more warmongering sentiment, this Iran situation was still a dumb idea.