Trump called it the "worst deal in history." Now he's bombing Iran to get Obama's deal back.

In 2018, Donald Trump scrapped his predecessor's Iran nuclear agreement. But the framework he's negotiating to end the war now looks hauntingly familiar.

For the past month, Donald Trump has been, in his words, “bombing the hell out of Iran,” apparently to get an agreement similar to the one his predecessor already negotiated — and Trump threw out — years ago.

In 2018, Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama. With characteristic fanfare, he called it “the worst deal ever negotiated” and promised that his administration would do far better. Eight years later, Americans are watching their country fight a war in the Middle East (one that has sent oil prices soaring above $100 a barrel, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and killed thousands of people) in pursuit of a peace agreement that looks, in its broad strokes, remarkably like the deal Trump destroyed.

In other words, America is fighting for what it already had.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, brokered by the Obama administration alongside five other world powers, did pretty much what Trump has demanded. It froze Iran’s nuclear program, capped uranium enrichment, opened the country’s facilities to international inspectors, and removed Iran’s most dangerous stockpiles. In exchange, Iran got sanctions relief. It wasn’t perfect. Critics (myself included), argued it didn’t address Iran’s ballistic missile program or its support for regional proxies.

But it largely worked. Iran was under the most intrusive nuclear monitoring regime in history. Its path to a bomb was blocked. When I was in the first Trump administration, even former critics of the nuclear deal begrudgingly realized it was working. Senior members of Trump’s national security team reportedly advised him to keep the Obama agreement in place.

Trump ripped it up anyway.

In the wake of that decision, the situation with Iran deteriorated. As a former U.S. special envoy for Iran later told Congress, the regime resumed its nuclear research and capacity to build a bomb, ramped up its attacks on U.S. interests in the region, and expanded its support for terrorists and reckless proxy groups in the region. The Trump White House responded by killing top Iranian figures. The Iranians responded by targeting former U.S. officials for assassination once Trump was out of office. And then back in power, Trump has gone to war with Iran.

Now, according to recent reporting, the Trump administration has transmitted a 15-point peace proposal to Iran via Pakistani intermediaries. The terms seem to be as follows: dismantle the nuclear facilities at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow; hand enriched uranium stockpiles to the International Atomic Energy Agency; commit to never pursuing nuclear weapons; and accept full international monitoring. In exchange, the United States would lift sanctions and help Iran develop civilian nuclear power, including at its Bushehr plant.

Sound familiar? That’s basically the terms of the JCPOA, Obama’s nuclear deal. Maybe the Trump team will get a few more things thrown in. But the White House has apparently gambled the stability of the world economy, America’s security, and the lives of millions for a deal that we already had.

To be fair, the original nuclear deal never required Iran to dismantle its facilities outright or to reduce its ballistic missile capacity, which is why Trump’s boosters note that the current proposal is somewhat more ambitious. But the architecture to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb (verification, monitoring, sanctions relief, and civilian nuclear cooperation) is the same one that Trump declared a historic embarrassment and abandoned. The difference now is that just to get back to the negotiating table that he was already sitting at, Trump went to war.

Experts who worked on the original nuclear deal are not surprised, even if they are appalled. Ali Vaez, the Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group who helped bridge the gaps leading to the 2015 agreement, told WBUR that Iran came to the pre-war Geneva talks willing to make new concessions to Trump beyond the 2015 nuclear deal. The problem, Vaez said, wasn’t Iranian intransigence. It was that the Trump administration “was seeking a surrender agreement” that it was never going to get. So the president decided to drop bombs.

The human and economic toll of Trump’s bumbling approach here is staggering.

Iranian children have been slaughtered, U.S. troops have been killed, civilians in the region have been targeted, and the war has triggered the largest oil supply shock in history. As a result, families across America are paying more for gas, groceries, and everything in between. The U.S. Postal Service has begun surcharging packages to cover fuel costs. Meanwhile, America’s allies have backed away from the United States, reluctant to help with such an obviously unnecessary war, while America’s foes like Russia and China have celebrated.

And for what? To negotiate a deal that diplomats had already signed, verified, and put into effect a decade ago but which Donald Trump — in his limitless petulance and fog-headed foolishness — threw away in pursuit of something “better.”

It’s important to remember that Trump didn’t actually walk away from the original Iran deal because it was bad policy. He walked away because it was Obama’s. He spent the past eight years insisting he was a tougher guy who could do much better and that his deal-making genius would produce something historic. Instead, he started a disastrous conflict that sparked a global economic shock, all just to get Iran to negotiate a peace plan with America that seems largely similar to what we already had.

In other words, we’ve let a bully turn the world into his playground.

History will record that the “worst deal in history” was not the one Barack Obama made in Vienna in 2015. It was Trump’s decision to blow it up and make the world pay for the wreckage.

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Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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