Trump condemned Obama’s Iran deal. Here’s how his own compares

The current agreement is still an early outline, with key questions yet to be addressed.

By Sammy Westfall

President Donald Trump left no ambiguity as to how he felt about the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

In Trump’s first term as president, he withdrew from the accord, having called it “horrible,” “defective at its core,” “one sided,” a “road to a nuclear weapon,” and “one of the worst and dumbest” agreements “ever made by the U.S.”

Now, Trump has a preliminary deal with Iran of his own.

It is difficult to compare directly with Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. While that was a fully developed arrangement, Trump’s is still an early outline, with key questions yet to be addressed.

And the context has changed: Iran’s nuclear know-how has grown, and it is negotiating after months of war, its military capacities eroded and supreme leader assassinated in U.S. and Israeli strikes.

On Wednesday, speaking at the Group of Seven summit in France, Trump said the Iranians had “laughed at Obama, and they said, ‘He’s a stupid son of a bitch.’”

Trump has long said he would find a “real” and “lasting” solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. Eight years later, Trump says he is on the verge of a deal that is “FAR BETTER” than the last.

What he has brokered so far is in its early stage: A document of less than two pages, meant to end fighting, including in Lebanon, and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with the issue of nuclear enrichment still to be deliberated over a 60-day “extendable” window.

The JCPOA was finalized in July 2015 by Iran and powers including the European Union and the United States following more than a year of painstaking negotiations. It limited Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting of U.S. and international sanctions, in agreement between Iran, the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, Britain and the United States) and the European Union.

The Obama-era deal allowed minimal enrichment of uranium at 3.67 percent for 15 years — a level suitable for nuclear reactors, and below the 20 percent considered highly enriched and 90 percent level typically considered weapons-grade. The deal also mandated that Iran eliminate 98 percent of its existing enriched uranium stockpile; and capped the number and type of centrifuges Iran could have, as well as their locations.

The aim, Obama’s State Department said at the time, was to “ensure that Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful” and maintain transparency.

In May 2018, Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran.

“If we do nothing, we know exactly what will happen,” Trump said, announcing the withdrawal. He said remaining in the agreement would put Iran “on the cusp of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons.”

Defenders of the JCPOA say its verification regime allowed transparency into Iran’s nuclear program that would ensure Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. It was also hailed as evidence that diplomacy could peacefully resolve complex conflicts.

Some two years later, Iran began dodging International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and installing advanced centrifuges able to produce enriched uranium at faster speeds, according to the IAEA and Center for Arms Control and nonproliferation.

After the collapse of the JCPOA, which had been set to expire in October 2025, Iran became far more capable of swiftly building a nuclear weapon than it had been under the arrangement, according to confidential inspection reports, experts, and officials.

Sanctions relief

“The Democrats and President Obama gave Iran 150 Billion Dollars and got nothing, but they can’t give 5 Billion Dollars for National Security and a Wall?” Trump tweeted in 2018.

“They gave billions and billions of dollars after that, and they got a deal that was a road to a nuclear weapon. I get so angry. I guess I’m allowed to get angry,” he said Wednesday.

The Iranian assets returned to Iran for complying with the JCPOA had been frozen under international sanctions. When sanctions lifted, funds were unlocked — but Treasury and State Department officials at the time put the amount of usable funds closer to $50 billion.

Trump’s memorandum of understanding also sets out a plan for sanctions relief and unfreezing assets. It says that the U.S. would “terminate all types of sanctions against” Iran, including U.N. Security Council resolutions and unilateral primary and secondary U.S. sanctions.

A senior U.S. official who read the text out to reporters Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive information, said Iran would be able to access the restricted assets if its leaders implement the memorandum’s terms.

In the manner of the JCPOA, the Trump deal says the U.S. will “make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets” of Iran. The senior official said the assets would be released in response to Iran’s “good behavior” in seeing through other tenets of the deal.

When he pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018, Trump said: “After the sanctions were lifted, the dictatorship used its new funds to build nuclear-capable missiles, support terrorism, and cause havoc throughout the Middle East and beyond.”

While dollar-amount comparisons remain difficult, given the lack of specifics, Trump appears willing to pursue a similar approach.

On Wednesday, Trump at the G-7 summit said: “We have taken a lot of their money, and we have their money. We have taken their money. It’s not our money, it’s their money, and we froze it at a certain point in time. I guess we’re going to have to give it back.”

Trump’s agreement says the U.S. would work with regional partners “to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development” of Iran. The White House says this would not include U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Over the years, Trump has often invoked the claim that the Obama administration flew $1.7 billion in “pallets of cash” on planes to Iran as part of the JCPOA.

Obama “loaded up a plane with $1,700,000,000 in green cash from banks all over Washington, Maryland and Virginia,” Trump said in his Wednesday G-7 briefing. “They were stripped of all their cash, they had no cash to do payrolls.”

He was referring to the 2017 return of $400 million in principal — Iran’s money, in cash to bypass international sanctions — and later $1.3 billion in interest, related to the settlement of a decades-old claim between the two countries.

In the 1970s, the then-pro-Western Iranian government paid $400 million for U.S. military equipment — but it was not delivered after the countries broke off relations.

The initial payment in 2017 came the same day as Iran’s government released four American detainees, including The Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian. Some critics of the deal said Washington had paid a ransom, but U.S. officials said the timing was a coincidence.

Nuclear capabilities

The JCPOA is a highly technical 18-page document covering restrictions on Iranian enrichment, uranium stockpiles, use of nuclear facilities, advanced centrifuge research and development, reactors, as well as requirements of a joint commission and for international inspection and monitoring. In exchange, U.S., E.U., and U.N. nuclear-related sanctions were to be lifted. The deal took more than 18 months to negotiate, starting with secret talks.

So far, in Trump’s preliminary deal, there are two broad mentions of the nuclear issue — but details are pending on further negotiations to reach a final deal.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons,” the memorandum reads.

It states that the countries “agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpile and rich material pursuant,” by a mutually agreed upon mechanism. They also “agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs.”

The paragraph ends with acknowledgment that the U.S. and Iran understand the “critical importance of the nuclear issues above” and “express their attention to immediately direct these issues in the negotiation in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.”

The senior official told reporters Wednesday that the deal would set a “minimum standard,” under which at minimum the enriched stockpile would be destroyed by downblending.

Trump as he exited the JCPOA listed what he called its “glaring flaws”: Among them, its silence on the regime’s development of ballistic missiles; how the deal’s inspection provisions “lack adequate mechanisms to prevent, detect, and punish cheating”; its sunset provisions, which he called “totally unacceptable”; how it “does nothing to constrain Iran’s destabilizing activities, including its support for terrorism.”

Trump in his Wednesday briefing said in his arrangement, the U.S. will work closely with Israel to get Iran to turn over enriched material “that’s very deep in the bowels of the earth … Nobody can get it, so it’s not important that we do it quickly … When we have a chance, we’ll do it, but in the meantime, we have cameras on every inch of it. Nobody can do it, and if they do, we’ll hit them with [Patriot missiles], that’s all.”

Ballistic missiles

Trump vowed in 2018 to find a deal that would “include efforts to eliminate the threat of Iran’s ballistic missile program; to stop its terrorist activities worldwide; and to block its menacing activity across the Middle East.”

Critics of Obama’s deal often emphasized that it allowed Tehran’s missile production to continue.

In recent years, Iran has fired rounds of missiles at Israel and stuck other U.S. allies in the region. U.S. intelligence has said Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have remained largely intact, despite some damage from the war.

Under Trump’s arrangement, it remains unclear whether Tehran would have to make any commitments to curtail its ballistic missile program.

Trump said Wednesday that he would be working on a “parallel effort with the Gulf nations to address nonnuclear issues, such as the conventional ballistic missiles.”

“Missiles aren’t the problem. Missiles, they hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet,” Trump said.

Natalie Allison, Michael Birnbaum, Karen DeYoung, Joby Warrick, Adam Taylor, Glenn Kessler and Susannah George contributed to this report.