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

President Donald Trump on Friday defended the continued lack of a war-ending deal with Iran by once again trashing the prior nuclear agreement brokered by Barack Obama, his predecessor and longtime political foe.

“They’ve dealt with very weak and ineffective leadership on behalf of the United States” and others “that allowed them to get away with murder,” Trump said of Iran in an NBC News interview.

He was asked why Iran is still holding out in negotiations if they are desperate to reach an agreement, as Trump insists that they are.

“It takes a little while … This should have been done long ago,” Trump said when pressed.

He then brought up the Obama-era nuclear deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA — which Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018 and did not renegotiate.

“That deal was tantamount to giving them a nuclear weapon. It was a horrible deal given by Barack Obama, and really penned by him,” Trump told NBC. “It was a horrible deal.”

It was hardly the first time Trump has excoriated the JCPOA, which was reached in 2015 by an international coalition including the U.S.

“The DEAL that we are making with Iran will be FAR BETTER,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on April 20, adding a few minutes later that such a deal will come “relatively quickly!”

It’s become a frequent refrain from Trump as the Iran war, which he initially said would last four to six weeks, stretches into its fourth month without a short-term peace deal, let alone one that solves the Iran nuclear threat.

Trump often claims had he not pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA, Iran would have already obtained and used nuclear weapons.

But many national security experts say the deal, while not perfect, succeeded in its main goals of halting Iran’s march toward proliferation and enabling effective monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear activities.

And since Trump’s withdrawal, Iran has breached the JCPOA’s nuclear limitations, including ramping up their uranium enrichment and pulling back on some of the transparency measures the deal had established.

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

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

“I find it very hard to say how we are in a better position” currently, Ernest Moniz, who was the U.S. energy secretary when the 2015 was inked, told CNBC.

“Maybe there will be a rabbit pulled out of a hat. We all hope so. But right now, the conditions would certainly appear to be far less favorable than they were a decade ago,” he said.

Here’s what to know about the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal: 

The U.S. has expressed concern since the 1970s that Iran may be pursuing a nuclear weapons program. A U.S. intelligence report in 1995 said that the Islamic Republic was “aggressively pursuing” that capability and, with foreign help, could produce a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade.

In response to international pressure, Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, according to U.S. assessments. But concerns continued to mount, especially following the 2009 revelation of Iran’s Fordow nuclear enrichment facility, which was initially kept secret from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The U.S. has imposed a variety of sanctions on Iran for decades as it seeks to influence Tehran and constrain its adversarial behavior. While those sanctions dealt damage to Iran’s economy and slowed the regime’s nuclear development, they did not eliminate the threat perceived by the international community.

Part of that perception stemmed from Iran’s rapid manufacture of centrifuges, which are needed to produce the fissile material that could be used in nuclear bombs, in the 2000s.

“When the Bush administration took office, Iran had no centrifuges,” Obama said in 2015, but “by the time I took office, Iran had installed several thousand centrifuges, and showed no inclination to slow — much less halt — its program.”

In 2013, the U.S., France, the United Kingdom, China and Russia and Germany — known as the P5+1 — began talks with Iran, leading to the “Joint Plan of Action,” an interim agreement that took effect in January 2014. The JCPOA followed, being finalized in July 2015.

The nearly 160-page agreement contained numerous provisions. Broadly, it set up limits on Iran’s nuclear program, and imposed new verification and inspection requirements, in exchange for conditionally lifting nuclear-related sanctions.

Parts of the agreement, including some key transparency rules, were implemented in perpetuity. Other provisions were set to eventually expire — some after just 10 years.

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

According to the IAEA’s most recent assessment in February, Iran as of June 2025 had a total enriched uranium stockpile of nearly 21,800 pounds. Of that total, more than 970 pounds were enriched up to 60%. While uranium is considered “weapons grade” at 90% enrichment, it is usable as a nuclear explosive at the 60% mark.

The deal also included measures to reduce Iran’s installed centrifuges, prevent it from producing weapons-grade plutonium and halt its development of nuclear infrastructure.

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

“In contrast to every other country in the world, the [IAEA] inspectors would need to be granted access to a suspected covert site within 24 days,” he explained. “That is a very, very important novel constraint.”

Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, called the JCPOA’s monitoring regime “unique and critical” to its success.

“The JCPOA included the most intrusive monitoring and inspection regime ever negotiated,” Davenport told CNBC in an email. “The deal was not perfect, but it was an effective, verifiable agreement. It got the job done.”

Critics, however, panned the JCPOA. They accusing Obama of rewarding Iran’s belligerence while homing in on the sunset provisions and the deal’s lack of focus on other forms of Iranian aggression, including its missile program and its support for terrorism.

The deal would “obviate any remaining pressure to follow through on the deal’s requirements while using that cash to fuel its aggressive expansion throughout the Middle East,” then-Sen. Marco Rubio wrote in a 2015 op-ed.

Trump, in his 2018 speech on the JCPOA withdrawal, claimed, “If I allowed this deal to stand, there would soon be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Everyone would want their weapons ready by the time Iran had theirs.”

According to some estimates, however, Iran’s “breakout time” — the time it would take to enrich enough material for a bomb — shrank significantly in the years following the U.S. pullout from the JCPOA.

The JCPOA remained in effect after the U.S. withdrew from it. But it’s “history” as far as Moniz is concerned.

“It’s not being followed, it’s not being complied with by Iran, so to me a new agreement needs to be reached,” he said.

That new agreement has yet to emerge, despite periodic reports that the parties are close to a deal and as Trump frequently signals one is forthcoming.

Meanwhile, some reports indicate that Trump’s determination to strike a stronger deal than Obama’s has led to sticking points in negotiations, including on whether Iran will get any form of monetary compensation.

“There is limited utility in comparing any nuclear agreement reached today with the JCPOA,” Davenport told CNBC.

A new agreement “needs to contend with greater uncertainty regarding Iran’s nuclear materials and technologies due to a gap in inspections and uncertainties created by the U.S. and Israeli bombing,” she said. “An effective agreement in 2026 will also need to contend with the technological advances Iran made after the JCPOA collapsed and increasing political motivations in Iran to weaponize.”

Moniz noted that the Iranians “have always said that they are committed to not having a nuclear weapon … but of course our attitude was ‘don’t trust and verify.'”

“That was really what the JCPOA was about,” he said. “President Trump has chosen the opposite set of strategic priorities, and so far those aren’t working out very well.”