How Trump’s Understanding With Iran Echoes Obama’s 2015 Nuclear Deal

If you want to understand Iran’s negotiating posture for the new nuclear deal with the United States, listen to what Washington and Tehran said about the nuclear deal of July 2015.

At the time, President Barack Obama presented the accord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as a watershed in U.S.-Iranian relations that could lead the clerical regime to moderate its policies beyond the nuclear file. “They have the ability now to take some decisive steps to move toward a more constructive relationship with the world community,” Obama said on the day of the agreement’s finalization. In late 2014, the president argued that a nuclear deal may “strengthen the hand of those more moderate forces inside of Iran.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei begged to differ.

In fact, the supreme leader, whom Israel assassinated at the start of the latest war with the Islamic Republic, maintained that his very definition of negotiations dramatically differed from Washington’s. In October 2015, Khamenei said he conceived of two types of negotiations: the “modern” type and the American type. “Modern” negotiations, he asserted, “means a deal. It means giving something and receiving something else in return.” For the Americans, however, negotiations mean “opening the way for their penetration in economic, cultural, political and security areas.”

In other words, Khamenei feared that the United States conceived of negotiations as a ploy to fundamentally transform the character of the Islamic Republic — from its radical Islamist ideology and its support for regional proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah to its political system and its domestic repression. Obama’s rhetoric likely strengthened this conviction. Accordingly, Iran’s dictator contended that his negotiations with Washington were merely transactional — that is, “modern.”

And that transaction was simple: Iran’s only “purpose of entering into the nuclear negotiations is to lift sanctions,” Khamenei said weeks before the JCPOA’s finalization — not to end its nuclear program, missile program, terrorism, or theocratic tyranny at home.

Of course, Obama’s view was painfully naïve. He believed that merely concluding the JCPOA, and providing its attendant sanctions relief, would motivate the Islamic Republic to moderate. In this sense, unlike Tehran, the president implicitly saw the negotiations as American, not “modern.” The clerical regime thus scored a victory at the negotiating table: From the perspective of U.S. interests, the JCPOA turned out to be fatally flawed, providing woefully limited, temporary nuclear restrictions that preserved the bulk of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, thereby giving Tehran a patient pathway to the bomb.

Consequently, in August 2015, Khamenei boasted that his strategy — the “modern” model of negotiations — had prevailed. America, he said, sought to use the JCPOA “as a means to exert influence in our country, but we blocked their path and we will definitely block their path in the future.”

The future has now come. And history is repeating itself.

The new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the United States and Iran essentially amounts to another “modern” negotiation — but this time, both Washington and Tehran are treating it as such. The two nations have engaged in a transaction that meets the regime’s primary objective — sanctions relief and the termination of America’s Strait of Hormuz blockade — without addressing the underlying threat that truly lies at the heart of the conflict: the Islamic Republic’s very nature.

In this sense, the parallel between President Donald Trump’s MOU and the JCPOA is striking. But in a key way, the MOU is worse. While Obama merely spoke about regime moderation, the JCPOA was silent on the matter. By contrast, notwithstanding Vice President JD Vance’s own statements expressing eagerness to transform America’s relationship with Iran, Trump’s MOU goes out of its way to assure Tehran that Washington seeks no moderation in the regime aside from the nuclear file: “The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.”

That’s music to Tehran’s ears. It fundamentally reverses Trump’s previous expressions of support for the Iranian people, moving prospects for regime change off the table. It means Washington will not take meaningful steps to stop Iran’s support for terrorist proxies in the Middle East, as Trump had originally pledged to do.

In other words, it gives the clerical regime, crippled by sanctions as well as Washington’s and Jerusalem’s military might, a new lease on life — precisely when it’s the weakest it has ever been in its 47-year history.

To wit: Whereas Iran’s economy was severely degraded by sanctions in 2015, the country’s economic situation today is even more dire. The U.S. blockade has cost the regime hundreds of millions of dollars a day. Had Trump’s campaign continued, Tehran’s grip on power would have severely declined. The MOU reverses that progress.

This reality reflects another comparative weakness of the MOU. In the JCPOA, Iran agreed to some — albeit inadequate — restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. But in the MOU, Iran receives an end to the Strait of Hormuz blockade merely for agreeing to talk about the nuclear program, thereby enabling billions of dollars to flow back to the regime’s coffers. Moreover, Washington has issued a general license that halts Iranian petroleum sanctions, providing billions more in economic relief.

Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader and the son of the previous leader, can now brag that his regime has outwitted Washington at the negotiating table just as his father did. He has achieved his only goals for the “modern” negotiations he pursued. Trump, by contrast, has achieved little at the bargaining table to gloat about — save, perhaps, for lower oil prices that put the Republican Party in better stead for the upcoming midterm elections.

That’s not a victory for Washington. It’s a strategic defeat.

Tzvi Kahn is a research fellow and senior editor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. For more analysis from Tzvi and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDD. Follow Tzvi on X @TzviKahn. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.