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Former President Barack Obama has expressed doubts about the effectiveness of any deal President Donald Trump could negotiate to end the U.S.’s war on Iran, suggesting that any potential terms would be similar to terms he had negotiated as president over a decade ago.
In an interview that aired on ABC News Saturday — one day prior to Trump announcing a “deal” on Sunday evening — Obama predicted that the eventual agreement between the U.S. and Iran wouldn’t be much different than the multinational deal he helped broker during his second term in office.
“It is doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place and had worked for, for a long stretch of time before we, the United States, pulled out of it,” Obama said, referring to Trump’s decision in 2018 to upend the agreement.
Obama expressed a desire for any deal that does materialize to end military hostilities on both sides.
“I’m hopeful that bombing stops and ordinary people are no longer suffering as a consequence of the war,” he said.
Obama’s skepticism was coupled with disagreements on Trump’s foreign policy practices.
“The notion that we can just bully our way or bomb our way to solutions may sometimes seem appealing, but the fact of the matter is that taking the time to explore diplomacy and exhaust the possibilities of coming up with deals that don’t solve 100 percent of the problem, but solve 80 percent, 90 percent of the problem, while avoiding the necessity of going to war” is worth pursuing, Obama said.
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Trump first described a negotiated “deal” between the U.S. and Iran as “complete” in a Truth Social post on Sunday evening. He issued another message shortly after, explaining that it would be signed later this week.
The “deal” is technically a temporary ceasefire agreement, wherein both sides have agreed to certain terms while further negotiations carry on for the next 60 days.
Details of the ceasefire agreement are not yet readily available. Iranian media indicated that the deal could include the release of $24 billion in funds that were frozen by the U.S. during the war. Iran also signaled that the U.S. and Israel would provide $300 billion for the reconstruction of infrastructure destroyed during the conflict.
In an interview with CBS News on Monday, Vice President JD Vance seemed to both dispute and confirm billions of dollars in incentives for Iran as part of the new deal. Notably, one of the reasons Trump was deeply critical of Obama’s original deal with Iran was because it released assets and money owed to the country by the U.S.
“There’s nothing about $24 billion” in the agreement, Vance said, responding to a question on that matter.
When asked whether it was “true or false” that the U.S. would provide hundreds of billions of dollars to Iran for rebuilding its infrastructure, Vance wouldn’t give a straight answer, though his response did seem to indicate it was part of the agreement.
A reconstruction fund is “the sort of thing [Iran] could have access to, funded by the Gulf … coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation,” Vance said.
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