May 26, 2026
President Trump keeps talking about the Iran nuclear deal. But not the one he’s negotiating — he talks a lot about the nuclear deal former President Barack Obama negotiated with Iran. A deal that Trump has said for more than a decade was disastrous.
But is that true? Was Obama’s deal a dangerous document that allowed Iran to have a nuclear weapon? And is the new deal that Trump is negotiating with Iran better, worse, or the same? Well, whether it’s better or worse is going to be up to you. And since we don’t yet know exactly what Trump is negotiating, all we can do right now is understand the Obama deal so when Trump’s deal is announced, we have something to compare it to. So that’s what we’re going to do in this video. Obama’s deal was officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. There’s one thing that both President Trump and President Obama agreed on. Both of them said repeatedly that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
The JCPOA deal was agreed to in July of 2015 and implemented in January of 2016 by not only the United States and Iran, but also China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. The deal said that Iran’s nuclear program would be “exclusively peaceful,” and the deal reaffirmed that “under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons.” To ensure that actually happened, Iran agreed to allow continuous monitoring of its operations by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran also agreed to give up nearly all of its enriched uranium and almost all of its centrifuges, which are the machines used to enrich uranium. Some parts of the deal were scheduled to last between 10 and 25 years, and others lasted forever. In exchange for that, Iran received sanction relief from the United States and our European allies.
And according to this report from the International Atomic Energy Agency dated November 23, 2017 — so almost two years after the deal was implemented — Iran was in full compliance with the JCPOA. The IAEA said Iran was not enriching uranium outside the range agreed to for “peaceful purposes.” The report said “no enriched uranium has been accumulated through enrichment R&D activities,” and it said Iran had submitted to all IAEA inspections.
Then there’s the money. You’ve probably heard President Trump say this….
The facts are much different than what Trump is implying here. It is true — money did exchange hands between the U.S. and Iran — but that exchange had nothing to do with the JCPOA. The United States gave Iran about $400 million in cash in January of 2016 and then $1.3 billion in interest right around the same time that the JCPOA was implemented. But that payment — according to the Obama administration — was actually announced months earlier and was the result of an unrelated settlement reached between the United States and Iran after a decades-old failed weapons deal.
In case you didn’t know, in the 1960s and early 1970s Iran legally purchased a lot of weapons and military equipment from the United States. But after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the U.S. cut off those purchases even though Iran had already paid. The deal at the time called for the establishment of a tribunal to untangle all the money issues between the U.S. and Iran and said those unspent Iranian funds were supposed to be placed in an interest-bearing account.
Well, in the 1980s Iran tried to get its money back, and it took decades to negotiate. Finally, in 2015 Iran had enough and asked the tribunal to hold hearings to get its money. And instead of the hearings, the Obama administration settled with Iran for the $400 million in cash, which they say was the principal payment Iran made in the 1970s for those weapons, and the $1.3 billion, which is what accumulated in interest. At the time Obama said if they had let the tribunal decide, it probably would have cost the U.S. more money. He also said the settlement had to be made in cash because the sanctions had cut Iran off from the international financial system, so there was no other way to pay them.
Now, besides Donald Trump, a lot of other people had a lot of problems with the JCPOA, including some Democrats who said it did not go far enough. They said it did not address Iran’s funding of proxy terror groups in the Middle East and did not address its humanitarian violations. Others said the deal was no good because it didn’t include restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program. And separately, a lot of people had a lot of problems with cash being part of the weapons settlement with Iran, including several members of Congress who said Obama didn’t have the power to hand over that money.
But when it comes to what the JCPOA was actually about — Iran’s nuclear program — even the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran was complying, at least until President Trump took office and pulled the United States out of the JCPOA in May of 2018. Trump pulled the U.S. out but never negotiated another deal with Iran during his first term, and without a deal, Iran basically restarted its nuclear program. Since 2018 Iran has repeatedly said their nuclear program remained “peaceful.” But in July 2019, the International Atomic Energy Agency verified that Iran’s nuclear activities were exceeding JCPOA limits, and things deteriorated from there. And after that strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer by the Trump administration, Iran adopted a new law that suspended all cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
For the record, the Strait of Hormuz was not part of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran because the strait was never an issue. While Iran has long thought the strait was its property, the reality is the Strait of Hormuz has been operating as an international waterway with no toll for years. Iran had no say over which ships entered or exited the strait, at least until President Trump launched the war against Iran in late February of this year. And now — well, you know what the situation is now.
So now that you know the basics of Obama’s nuclear deal, if and when President Trump announces his deal with Iran, we can have something to compare it to. I hope this was helpful. So if you want to read all about the JCPOA and the IAEA reports on Iran’s nuclear compliance and lack of compliance, I’m going to email all this out to you tonight in my Facts HQ email, so make sure you sign yourself up.
Read the JCPOA here.
Read the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 2017 Iran inspection report here.
Read what happened AFTER 2018 here.
Watch Trump talk about pulling out of JCPOA here.
Watch Trump talk about the payment here.
Read more about Iran’s nuclear ambitions after 2018 here.
