Inside the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal that President Trump withdrew from

President Donald Trump on Friday defended the still-unreached deal to end the war with Iran by once again abandoning the previous nuclear deal brokered by his predecessor and longtime political rival Barack Obama.

In an interview with NBC News, President Trump said of Iran, “They’ve been dealing with very weak and incompetent leadership on behalf of the United States,” saying, “They got away with murder.”

He was asked why Iran is still negotiating if it is desperate to reach a deal, as President Trump claims.

“It’s going to take some time…This should have been done a long time ago,” Trump said in response to a question.

He then brought up the Obama-era nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), from which President Trump withdrew the United States in 2018 and did not renegotiate it.

“That deal is tantamount to giving us nuclear weapons. It’s a terrible deal given to us by Barack Obama, and he actually wrote it,” Trump told NBC. “That was a terrible deal.”

This is not the first time President Trump has criticized the JCPOA. The JCPOA was agreed to by the United Nations, including the United States, in 2015.

“The deal we have with Iran will be much better,” President Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on April 20, adding minutes later that such a deal “will happen relatively quickly!”

President Trump has begun to use these words more frequently as the war with Iran, which he initially said would last four to six weeks, has stretched into four months with no resolution of Iran’s nuclear threat or a short-term peace agreement.

President Trump often claims that if he had not withdrawn the United States from the JCPOA, Iran would have already acquired and used nuclear weapons.

But many national security experts say that while the deal is not perfect, it succeeds in its primary purpose of halting Iran’s march towards nuclear proliferation and allowing for effective monitoring of Iran’s nuclear activities.

And since President Trump withdrew, Iran has violated the JCPOA’s nuclear restrictions, ramping up uranium enrichment and revoking some of the deal’s transparency measures.

Asked in an interview on NBC why he didn’t renegotiate a better nuclear deal during his first term, Trump said, “It takes years to do these things.”

President Trump also claimed to NBC that the JCPOA would have already “expired a long time ago.” However, many of its key provisions were permanent, while others were set to last 15, 20, or more years.

Ernest Moniz, who was the U.S. Energy Secretary at the end of 2015, told CNBC that it is now “very difficult to say how we are in a better position.”

“Maybe a rabbit will come out of a hat. We all hope so. But the current situation certainly looks much more unfavorable than it did 10 years ago,” he said.

Here’s what you need to know about the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal.

Since the 1970s, the United States has expressed concern that Iran may be pursuing a nuclear weapons program. A 1995 US intelligence report said the Islamic Republic was “aggressively pursuing” its capabilities and, with foreign support, could produce nuclear weapons by the end of the decade.

According to the US assessment, Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure. But concerns continued to grow, especially after the 2009 revelations of Iran’s Fordow nuclear enrichment facility. The facility was initially kept secret from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The United States has imposed various sanctions on Iran for decades in an effort to influence Iran and curb its hostile actions. Although these sanctions damaged Iran’s economy and slowed the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, they did not eliminate the threat perceived by the international community.

Part of this perception stems from Iran’s rapid production in the 2000s of the centrifuges needed to produce fissile material for use in nuclear bombs.

“When the Bush administration took office, Iran didn’t have centrifuges,” President Obama said in 2015, but “by the time I took office, Iran had thousands of centrifuges, and we had no intention of slowing down that program, much less stopping it.”

In 2013, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, and Germany (known as the P5+1) began talks with Iran, leading to an interim agreement, the Joint Plan of Action, that entered into force in January 2014. Subsequently, the JCPOA was finalized in July 2015.

The approximately 160-page agreement included numerous provisions. Broadly speaking, it conditionally lifted nuclear-related sanctions in exchange for placing limits on Iran’s nuclear program and imposing new verification and inspection requirements.

Parts of the agreement, including some key transparency rules, were permanently implemented. Other provisions will eventually expire, some in as little as 10 years.

Under the deal, Iran was limited to about 660 pounds of uranium, enriched to just 3.67%, for 15 years. This enrichment level is typically used in commercial nuclear reactors.

Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile totaled nearly 21,800 pounds as of June 2025, according to the IAEA’s latest assessment in February. Of this total, more than 970 pounds were concentrated up to 60%. Uranium is considered “weapons grade” when enriched to 90%, but can be used as a nuclear explosive at 60%.

The deal also included measures to reduce Iran’s installation of centrifuges, block production of weapons-grade plutonium, and halt development of its nuclear infrastructure.

“The most important feature of the JCPOA was its extraordinary verification and transparency measures,” Moniz said.

“In contrast to all other countries in the world, (IAEA) inspectors must be granted access to suspected secret sites within 24 days,” he explained. “This is a very important new constraint.”

Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, said the JCPOA’s oversight structure is “unique and critical” to its success.

“The JCPOA includes the most intrusive monitoring and inspection regime ever negotiated,” Davenport told CNBC in an email. “The agreement wasn’t perfect, but it was an effective and verifiable agreement. The job got done.”

However, critics slammed the JCPOA. They accuse President Obama of rewarding Iranian belligerence while focusing on the sunset clause and the deal’s lack of focus on other forms of Iranian aggression, including missile programs and support for terrorism.

The deal “avoids any remaining pressure to fulfill the requirements of the agreement while using its funds to facilitate aggressive expansion across the Middle East,” the senator said at the time. Marco Rubio wrote in a 2015 op-ed:

In his 2018 speech about withdrawing from the JCPOA, President Trump claimed, “If we keep this deal going, there will soon be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Everyone would want to have their weapons ready by the time Iran gets them.”

However, according to some estimates, Iran’s “breakout time” (the time it takes to enrich enough material for a bomb) has significantly shortened in the years following the US withdrawal from the JCPOA.

The JCPOA remained in effect even after the US withdrew. But for Monis, that is “history.”

“The agreement is not being honored and not being followed by Iran, so for me a new agreement needs to be reached,” he said.

Despite regular reports that the parties are close to a deal and President Trump frequently hinting that a deal is near, the new agreement has not yet been revealed.

Meanwhile, some reports say President Trump’s determination to strike a stronger deal than President Obama has led to stalled negotiations, including over whether Iran will receive any form of financial compensation.

Davenport told CNBC that “comparing the JCPOA to the nuclear agreements signed today has limited utility.”

He said the new agreement “needs to combat further uncertainty regarding Iran’s nuclear materials and technology due to inspection gaps and uncertainties created by US and Israeli bombings.” “Achieving an effective deal in 2026 will also need to address the technological advances Iran has made since the collapse of the JCPOA, as well as the growing political motivation for weaponization in Iran.”

Moniz said Iranians “have always said they are committed to not having nuclear weapons…but of course our attitude has been ‘no trust, no verification.'”

“That was exactly what the JCPOA was about,” he said. “President Trump has chosen opposite strategic priorities, and so far they haven’t worked out very well.”