Barack Obama said Saturday that the Iran nuclear deal he negotiated kept Iran from building a bomb without a single shot fired, and he blamed Donald Trump for throwing that deal away and pulling the country into a war.
Obama made the comments at a rally in Cleveland, where he was campaigning for Senate candidate Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton, the Democrat running for governor of Ohio, with 10 days left before the November 3 election.
“Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons because I had put a deal in place and I didn’t have to fire a missile to do it. I just had to engage in diplomacy,” Obama told the crowd.
The Iran nuclear deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was signed in 2015. Under it, Iran agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons and to allow continuous monitoring of its nuclear program. In return, the United States and other world powers lifted economic sanctions, the financial penalties that had cut Iran off from selling oil and doing business with much of the world.
Trump pulled the United States out of the deal in 2018. At the time, he argued it still allowed Iran to keep enriching uranium, the process of refining nuclear fuel, and that over time it would bring Iran to the edge of being able to build a bomb.
Obama said the stated reason for the war was to force Iran to give up its nuclear program, something he argued his deal had already handled. He said Trump pulled out of the agreement, started the war, and declared victory, only for the fighting to drag on for months afterward.
He then laid out what he said the war has cost: attacks on American allies and bases, Americans killed, hundreds more wounded, and a depleted stockpile of U.S. missiles. Trump has denied reports of munitions shortages. Obama also said Iran now has veto power over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway off Iran’s coast that a huge share of the world’s oil passes through. When Iran can threaten that route, oil prices climb worldwide, and Obama tied the war directly to higher gas and diesel prices at home.
He called it an unnecessary war that nobody asked for and nobody voted for. Trump told reporters in September that he does not even call it a war, describing it as a small military conflict.
Obama also went after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, mocking his focus on testosterone levels in the military, and called the administration “not serious people” whose lack of seriousness Americans end up paying for.
PolitiFact, which reviewed Obama’s claim, found that many specialists share his view that the Iran nuclear deal kept Iran from getting a weapon. Critics, Trump among them, argued from the start that it did not go far enough because it left Iran some ability to enrich uranium.
Iran was not the only target. Obama hit the administration on tariffs, the taxes on imported goods that get passed down to shoppers through higher prices. An Axios analysis found Trump’s tariffs have cost Ohio households $11.2 billion, about $2,274 per household.
Brown is running for Senate and Acton for governor, and both races are on the ballot November 3.
