You know, in all my years in public life, and folks, that’s been more than a few, I have rarely seen a moment that captures the cost of abandoning diplomacy quite like the one we’re living through right now. Just this past Friday, June 13th, Barack Obama sat down with Robin Roberts at his presidential center in Chicago, and he said something that I think a whole lot of Americans were already feeling in their bones.
He said, “It is doubtful that any agreement with Iran is going to be significantly different from the deal we already had.” And let me tell you, that is not just a former president defending his legacy. That is a man who spent years in the situation room who understands what it takes to build a coalition and hold it together, telling the American people the plain truth.
Because one day after that interview, Donald Trump announced his own deal with Iran, a memorandum of understanding to end the war that has shaken the entire world. Now look, I want to be careful here because this is a sensitive moment and the stakes are about as high as they get. If this deal brings peace, if it stops the bombing and ends the suffering of ordinary people, then I will be the first to say, “Thank God for that.
” But here is the question we have to sit with, and we’ll come back to it in a moment. If we were always going to end up at a negotiating table with Iran offering sanctions relief for nuclear concessions, what exactly did we gain from all the destruction it took to get here? That question matters. It matters for every American family, for every service member, and for every nation in the world that is watching to see whether America’s word still means something.
Now, to understand why Obama’s words carry the weight they do, you’ve got to understand what came before. Let me take you back. In 2015, the Obama administration working alongside the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, and Russia, negotiated the joint comprehensive plan of action, the JCPOA. Now, look, I’ll be the first to tell you that deal was not perfect.
No deal ever is. When I was in the White House, every agreement I ever signed had something in it that made me wse a little. That’s the nature of diplomacy. But here’s what the JCPOA did accomplish. It constrained Iran’s uranium enrichment. It gave international inspectors real access. And it kept the world’s major powers aligned on one of the most dangerous nuclear challenges of our time.
And it was working. Iran was complying. The inspectors confirmed it. Then in May of 2018, the United States pulled out and President Trump called it the worst deal ever made. What followed was a slow escalation that most of the world saw coming. In June of 2025, Operation Midnight Hammer struck Iran’s nuclear facilities at Ford, Natans, and Isvahan.
Then on February 28th of this year, a full-scale war began. American and Israeli air strikes hit military and government targets across Iran. Iran’s supreme leader was killed. Iran responded by closing the straight of Hormuz, one of the most critical shipping lanes on Earth. Global energy markets went into freefall.
A naval blockade followed in April, costing Iran $500 million a day. Civilians suffered, economies shuttered, and after months of brinkmanship, we arrived right back where we started at a negotiating table talking about the same issues we were talking about in 2015. So, let’s be precise about what actually happened this past weekend because precision matters when we’re talking about war and peace.
Obama told Robin Roberts, and I want to be fair to his exact meaning here, that it is doubtful any new agreement will be a significant improvement from the deal we had in the first place, one that had worked for a long stretch of time before the United States pulled out of it. He said he was hopeful the bombing stops and ordinary people are no longer suffering.
And then he said something that I think cuts right to the heart of it. That on a lot of difficult foreign policy problems, the notion that we can just bully our way or bomb our way to solutions may sometimes seem appealing, but you’d think we would have learned that lesson by now. Now, here is what we know about the New Deal.
It is a memorandum of understanding that calls for a 60-day ceasefire on all fronts. The Strait of Hormuz reopens without tolls. Iran reaffirms its commitment to the nuclear non-prololiferation treaty. There will be some sanctions relief and a partial unfreezing of Iranian assets. Iran says around $ 24 billion, though Vice President Vance has disputed that figure.
The formal signing is set for Geneva on June 19th. And this is where things start to get complicated because as of right now, the full text of this agreement has not been released to the American public. We are being asked to celebrate a deal that most of us haven’t read. And in a democracy, that ought to give every citizen pause.
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Let me tell you something from experience. When you sit in that Oval Office and a crisis lands on your desk, and they always do, you have a choice. You can reach for the biggest hammer in the toolbox, or you can do the harder thing, the slower thing, the thing that doesn’t make for a great headline, but that might actually solve the problem without breaking everything around it.
In 1994, I faced a nuclear crisis with North Korea. We came very close to a military confrontation. And I will tell you honestly, the temptation to act with overwhelming force was real. But we chose diplomacy. We negotiated the agreed framework. Was it perfect? No. Did it buy us time and prevent a catastrophe? Yes, it did.
Now, the fundamental criticism I have of how we got to this moment with Iran is not that a deal was reached. I am grateful a deal was reached. My criticism is that the path to this deal required a fullscale war. It required a global energy crisis. It required the assassination of a head of state and the deaths of civilians, including children.
It required the closure of the most important shipping lane in the world. And it required months of a naval blockade that punished ordinary Iranians who had nothing to do with their government’s nuclear program. When President Trump declared in March that there would be no deal except unconditional surrender, that was not strategy.
That was escalation beyond what the situation required. And the proof is in the outcome itself. Because what we got at the end of all that was not unconditional surrender. What we got was a memorandum of understanding that looks in its basic structure remarkably like the kind of diplomatic framework that was available all along.
Now, here’s where I need you to think long term with me because this part doesn’t get enough attention. When the United States signed the JCPOA in 2015, it wasn’t just America making a promise. It was a commitment endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and supported by our closest allies in Europe and around the world.
That agreement carried the weight of international law and multilateral consensus. When we walked away from it unilaterally, we didn’t just break a deal with Iran. We sent a message to every nation on Earth that America’s signature might not mean what it used to. And now years later, we are signing a new bilateral agreement with the same country on what appear to be broadly similar terms.
So let me ask you the question that every foreign minister and every capital in the world is asking right now. Why would anyone trust this one? If we tore up the last deal because a new president didn’t like it, what stops the next president from tearing up this one? That is not a partisan question.
That is a question about whether American democracy can sustain commitments across administrations. And it matters because nuclear diplomacy only works if both sides believe the agreement will outlast the new cycle. I am also troubled that we are entering a 60-day negotiation window with a memorandum that has not been shared publicly, whose financial terms are already being disputed between Washington and Tehran, and which has not been submitted to Congress for meaningful review.
We’ve got to remember that transparency is not an obstacle to national security. It is the foundation of it. When you hide the details of a deal from the people who have to live with its consequences, you don’t build trust, you erode it. Now, look, I understand the political dynamics at play here, and I want to be honest about both sides.
President Trump is framing this as the greatest deal in history. He posted on Truth Social that his deal is, and I am going to do my best to convey this accurately, a wall against Iran ever having a nuclear weapon. and the complete opposite of what he calls the Obama deal. Using a deliberately misspelled version of Obama’s name, he called for the impeachment of Senator Jack Reid of Rhode Island simply for questioning whether this deal is actually better than the JCPOA.
On the other side, Obama and many Democrats are treating this moment as vindication, proof that diplomacy should have been the first tool, not the last resort. And here is the honest truth. There is a kernel of something real in both positions. If this deal genuinely constrains Iran’s nuclear program more effectively than the JCPOA did, that would be meaningful.
And if the basic architecture turns out to be fundamentally similar to what Obama negotiated, then Obama’s point about the unnecessary cost of the detour is hard to argue with. But what worries me is that both sides are spiking the football before the game is over. The deal text has not been released.
The 60-day negotiation window is where the real substance gets hammered out. Enrichment limits, centerfuge numbers, IAEA inspection protocols, the timeline for sanctions relief. None of that has been agreed to yet. What we have right now is a ceasefire and a framework. And when politicians declare victory before the hard work is done, the American people are the ones left exposed if it falls apart.
So, let me walk you through what I think happens next. And I want to be honest about the range of possibilities. The first scenario is the hopeful one. The 60-day negotiation window leads to a comprehensive agreement. Iran’s nuclear program is genuinely and verifiably constrained. Sanctions are lifted in a phased conditional way.
The straight of Hormuz returns to full operation. Global energy markets stabilize. The Middle East begins slowly to rebuild. I want that outcome. I pray for that outcome. And if it happens, I will give credit where credit is due, regardless of who is in the White House. But the second scenario is the stalemate. The 60 days expire without a final deal.
The unresolved issues, enrichment levels, frozen assets, verification mechanisms prove too complicated to close in that window. And then Trump faces the choice he described for the New York Times. relaunch military strikes, or as he put it, make the United States the guardian of the Middle East in exchange for 20% of the region’s revenues.
Neither of those options is a path to stability. And the third scenario, the one that keeps me up at night, is what I call the erosion. A deal gets signed on paper, but the enforcement mechanisms are weak. Verification becomes contested. Iran pushes the boundaries inch by inch. American attention shifts to the next crisis.
And within a few years, we’re right back where we were. only this time we’ve burned through whatever international credibility we had left. I have seen that pattern before. It’s the pattern that makes diplomats lose sleep and makes historians shake their heads. And the only way to prevent it is to take the hard, unglamorous work of implementation as seriously as we take the announcement.
We’ve got to remember something that I think we lose sight of in moments like these. America’s strength was never just its military. Our military is the finest the world has ever known. And every man and woman who serves deserves our gratitude and our respect. But what made America truly exceptional? What made nations want to stand with us rather than simply fear us was our ability to build coalitions to honor commitments to demonstrate that a democracy can be both strong and trustworthy.
Barack Obama understood that when he built the JCPOA with six other world powers. And the lesson of this entire episode from that deal to its abandonment to the war to this new memorandum is that when we throw away institutions and alliances for the sake of political branding, we end up paying a much higher price to get back to where we started.
Now, I want this deal to work. I genuinely do because peace is always better than war and ordinary Iranians and American service members have already paid too high a price. But the 60-day window that just opened is the beginning, not the end. The real measure of leadership will not be the press conference or the true social post.
It will be whether America can sustain the discipline, the transparency, and the commitment to see this through honestly, patiently, and with the kind of respect for democratic accountability that the American people deserve. We have done it before. We can do it again. But only if we are honest about what got us here and only if we demand better from our leaders going forward.
That is not a partisan statement. That is an American
