A Democratic senator seems to have struck a nerve after he pointed out that the Trump administration’s attempts to negotiate a lasting peace deal with Iran look an awful lot like the Obama-era agreement that President Donald Trump abandoned during his first term in office.
During a Sunday appearance on Fox News, Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware said the administration needed to give Congress a “full intelligence picture” of what happened during the June 21 strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and needed to share a comprehensive strategy on Iran.
“I’ll just note that President Trump by press accounts is now moving toward negotiation and offering Iran a deal that looks somewhat similar to the Iran deal that was offered by Obama: tens of billions of dollars of incentives and reduced sanctions in exchange for abandoning their nuclear program,” Coons said.
Trump fired back in a late-night Truth Social post, “Tell phony Democrat Senator Chris Coons that I am not offering Iran ANYTHING, unlike Obama, who paid them $Billions under the stupid “road to a Nuclear Weapon JCPOA (which would now be expired!), nor am I even talking to them since we totally OBLITERATED their Nuclear Facilities.”
The attack came despite Coons generally praising Trump during the interview and calling his appearance at last week’s NATO summit a success.
Adopted in 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action called for sanctions against Iran to be phased out in exchange for Tehran agreeing to dismantle critical infrastructure, halt new research, restrict enrichment capabilities, and allow international monitoring.
Trump abruptly withdrew from the agreement in 2018, leading Iran’s nuclear program to surge ahead. When the president returned to office in January, he began trying to negotiate a new deal that one arms expert called a “dollar-store-JCPOA.”
Ever since the U.S. joined Israel’s attacks on Iran by bombing the nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan, the president has insisted that Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated” and that he “doesn’t care” if the administration reaches a comprehensive peace agreement with Iran, CNN reported.
The United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector, however, said the damage to Iran’s nuclear program was “severe” but not “total,” and that the program could up and running again within months, The New York Times reported.
As Coons pointed out in his interview with Fox News, it’s not clear whether Iran was able to move almost 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium before the strikes.
“It would fit in the back of an F-150 pickup truck and there are open-source pictures of trucks pulling up to two of these facilities and leaving afterwards,” Coons said.
Despite Trump’s public posturing, many of his advisers believe that a longer-term deal with Iran is needed to cement the ceasefire agreement that Iran and Israel reached after the U.S. strikes.
CNN reported last week that the administration was floating various proposals to try to bring Tehran back to the negotiating table, including offering $20 billion to $30 billion in funding from an Arab ally to rebuild the country’s civilian nuclear program.
Other ideas included potentially removing some sanctions and allowing Tehran to access $6 billion of assets sitting in foreign bank accounts, or enlisting a Gulf state to replace the Fordow nuclear facility with a non-enrichment program.
