In May 2018, US President Donald Trump shocked European allies — while exhilarating many Israelis — when he announced that he was withdrawing from predecessor Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which also included Germany, France, Russia, China and Britain, was a “horrible one-sided deal that should never ever have been made,” the president insisted.
“The deal lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime’s nuclear activity, and no limits at all on its other malign behavior, including its sinister activities in Syria, Yemen, and other places all around the world,” he said from the White House.
And he blasted the JCPOA for failing to “address the regime’s development of ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads.”
Eight years later, after a massive bombing campaign against Iran that the US carried out alongside Israel, Trump appears to be chasing a deal along the same contours he once complained about.
Even that problematic outcome seems beyond his reach, as Iran appears singularly unbothered by the president’s increasingly stale threats of destruction if the Islamic Republic doesn’t make a deal.
Published originally on May 18, 2026.
Read the full article at the Times of Israel.
