Obama: Withdrawing from Iran nuclear deal ‘is a serious mistake’
Former President Barack Obama offered a rare public rebuttal to President Donald Trump on Tuesday, calling his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear “a serious mistake.”
Obama has been reluctant to rebuke his White House successor, following a precedent set by previous chief executives. But the potential unraveling of his signature foreign policy achievement prompted a 12-paragraph statement on Tuesday.
“We all know the dangers of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon,” wrote Obama, who spent 18 months negotiating the agreement in 2014 and 2015 . “If the constraints on Iran’s nuclear program under the JCPOA are lost, we could be hastening the day when we are faced with the choice between living with that threat, or going to war to prevent it.”
Trump has long been outspoken in his criticism of Obama and the deal,which he blasted as “decaying” in his announcement on Tuesday. The U.S. is planning to reimpose a set of sanctions within months, though Iran said it would seek to preserve the deal during a limited period of talks with its other signatories, China, France, Russia, Germany, Britain and the European Union.
But Obama emphasized that the deal “was never intended to solve all of our problems with Iran,” and he warned that undermining it despite no clear evidence of Iranian violations could hasten an arms race or outright regional conflict.
“The reality is clear,” he wrote. “The JCPOA is working — that is a view shared by our European allies, independent experts, and the current U.S. Secretary of Defense.”
Obama also said violating the deal could undermine the United States’ credibility on the international stage. He said the JCPOA had worked to halt Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon, highlighting its international inspections and noting that some of its provisions were permanent.
Obama has made few public comments about Trump’s presidency, although he made an exception last year when Trump moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, another of Obama’s signature acts.
Former Vice President Joe Biden echoed Obama’s concerns Tuesday, accusing Trump of acting out of reckless self-interest.
“President Trump has manufactured a crisis for his own political interests that puts us on a collision course not only with an adversary but also with our closest partners,” Biden said in a statement.
He added that withdrawal could backfire by rallying other countries to Iran’s side. “It will allow Iran to garner international sympathy while doing nothing to reduce its harmful activities across the Middle East,” he said.
U.S. allies and adversaries that were party to the agreement had urged the Trump administration not to tear it up. But Trump deemed the JCPOA a bad deal that failed to make the U.S. safer, and said he was following through on his promises.
Secretary of State John Kerry, who spent countless hours negotiating the agreement with his Iranian counterpart as well as officials from Europe, China and Russia, also blasted the move.
“Today’s announcement weakens our security, breaks America’s word, isolates us from our European allies, puts Israel at greater risk, empowers Iran’s hardliners, and reduces our global leverage to address Tehran’s misbehavior, while damaging the ability of future Administrations to make international agreements,” Kerry said.
“The extent of the damage will depend on what Europe can do to hold the nuclear agreement together, and it will depend on Iran’s reaction. ... We should all hope the world can preserve the nuclear agreement,” he added.