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Trump clings to self-defeating argument about Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran
That the president averted a “nuclear holocaust” by rejecting an international plan that was working as intended is utterly insane
Mar. 17, 2026, 3:13 PM EDT
By Steve Benen
Clearly on the defensive as the war in Iran continues, Donald Trump turned his attention Tuesday to one of his favorite rhetorical targets: the 2015 international nuclear agreement with Iran, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. To hear the incumbent American president tell it, he has no regrets about his decision in 2017 to abandon the deal.
“If I didn’t terminate Obama’s horrible deal, the Iran nuclear deal, you would’ve had nuclear holocaust,” the Republican said at a recent Oval Office event.
The rhetoric was familiar, but still wrong. A couple of weeks ago, the incumbent president similarly insisted that if he hadn’t abandoned the international agreement, Iran would have used a nuclear weapon against Israel. A day earlier, on his social media platform, Trump wrote, “If I didn’t terminate Obama’s horrendous Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), Iran would have had a Nuclear Weapon three years ago.”
I’m mindful of Trump’s eagerness to avoid blame for his own misguided decisions, but as the war continues to unfold, it’s important the public understand how much he’s turning reality on its head.
The 2015 diplomatic breakthrough - to my mind, the greatest feat of international diplomacy since the end of the Cold War - did exactly what it set out to do. The policy dramatically curtailed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and established a rigorous system of monitoring and verification. Once the policy had taken effect, each of the parties agreed that the participants were holding up their end of the bargain, and Iran’s nuclear program was, at the time, on indefinite hold.
And then Trump took office and abandoned the policy for reasons he never explained.
In broad strokes, Obama set out to use economic sanctions to get Iran to the international negotiating table. That worked, and a breakthrough agreement followed. Trump came to believe he could duplicate the strategy by abandoning the policy, restoring the old sanctions and adding new ones.
This was known as the Republican’s “maximum pressure” campaign, and it was pursued on the assumption that Iran would inevitably return to the negotiating table and accept a new agreement. If Obama’s sanctions led to a landmark deal, the argument went, then maybe Trump’s harsher sanctions could produce an even better deal.
Trump’s approach failed, and that didn’t happen.
In fact, once the U.S. was no longer a part of the agreement, the West lost verification access to Tehran’s programs. It was at that point that Iran, rather than begging the White House for attention, almost immediately became more dangerous by starting up advanced centrifuges and ending its commitment to limit enrichment of uranium.
A few years ago, Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy for Iran at the time, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that after Trump’s decision, Iranian attacks on U.S. personnel in the region got worse, Iranian support for regional proxies got worse, and the pace of the Iranians’ nuclear research program got “much worse.”
White House officials have described Trump as a “visual learner,” so here’s a chart that might help him understand recent events.
Iran’s nuclear program was, for all intents and purposes, on ice when the JCPOA was in place. Then Trump scrapped it, Iran’s nuclear program advanced, and the Republican president decided to go to war over a threat that he personally made worse through incompetent policymaking.
How Trump arrived at his decision adds insult to injury.
One of my favorite stories about the Iran deal came a few months into Trump’s first term in the White House, when the president held a lengthy meeting with top members of his team, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford. Each of the officials reportedly told Trump the same thing: It was in the United States’ interest to preserve the JCPOA policy.
The Republican expected his team to tell him how to get out of the agreement, not why he needed to stick with it. When his own advisers told him the policy was working, Trump reportedly “had a bit of a meltdown.”
Soon after, he abandoned the JCPOA anyway - not because it was failing, but because Trump was indifferent to its success.
I know I’m a broken record on this, but all Trump had to do was nothing. He could have simply left the policy alone and allowed it to work. He did the opposite. The Republican was convinced his strategy would work - he even boasted at one point that he was prepared to be Iran’s “best friend” — but the entire gambit backfired.
If Trump wanted to apologize for having made the spectacularly wrong call, that would be a welcome development. But the idea that he prevented a “nuclear holocaust” by rejecting an international agreement that was doing exactly what it set out to do is utterly insane.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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