According to Iraf, Barack Obama, former President of the United States, in a detailed interview with CBS News, once again defended the JCPOA, describing it as an “effective, verifiable, and intelligence-agency-approved” agreement.
He said the agreement had addressed the West’s alleged concerns about Iran’s nuclear program while preserving Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy.
Referring to security assessments during his presidency, Obama stated: “Not only did I believe the agreement was working, but even Israeli intelligence agencies held the same view. U.S. intelligence services also confirmed that the JCPOA was effective.”
He emphasized that at the time of the agreement’s implementation, there was no serious technical dispute regarding its effectiveness, and the opposition was primarily political.
The program host, referring to the Trump administration’s claims about the “ineffectiveness” of the agreement, asked Obama whether such disagreement genuinely existed.
Obama replied: “There was no independent or serious person who said the agreement did not work. The disagreements were more political than technical.”
He then directly explained Trump’s motivations for withdrawing from the JCPOA, saying: “It is unclear whether he truly believed the agreement did not work or not; he just said it didn’t work because I had done it. Apparently, this has become a pattern.”
With this statement, he effectively stressed that Trump’s decision was not based on security assessments, but on political rivalry and an effort to undermine the legacy of the previous administration.
The former U.S. president also noted that the JCPOA was never designed to change the Iranian government or weaken the country’s defense capabilities, and such expectations were fundamentally outside the framework of the agreement.
He said: “If your goal was to change the government in Iran, well, that was not the goal of the agreement. If your goal was to destroy Iran’s military so it could no longer create issues in the region, this agreement would not do that. But fundamentally, these were not the objectives of the deal.”
In another part of his remarks, Obama referred to the consequences of the U.S. withdrawal, emphasizing that this unilateral action removed Washington from a credible multilateral framework and triggered escalating regional tensions—tensions that, he said, could have been avoided through continued diplomacy.
These statements come as many international analysts have emphasized in recent years that the Trump administration’s exit from the JCPOA not only produced no gains for the United States, but also increased insecurity, regional instability, and reduced Washington’s credibility in the international system.
