When Barack Obama was the President of the United States, he signed a deal with Iran known as the JCPOA, which is a fancy word for a deal that kept the US safe from Iran’s nukes. It was viewed as a landmark deal for the US/Iran diplomacy and it was a large part of the former President’s legacy. But now, the current President Donald Trump has pulled America out of the deal, calling it “one-sided,” and the POTUS who signed it in the first place has called this decision “misguided.”
Obama says it sends the wrong message to North Korea
Obama’s main problem with Trump pulling out of the JCPOA is to do with the message that the new move sends to North Korea.
The American government is desperately trying to denuclearise Kim Jong-un’s volatile regime over there, so to scrap a deal that did just that with Iran can’t possibly do the North Korea crisis any favours.
So, Obama is saying that by trashing the deal with Iran, Trump now “risks [the United States] losing a deal that accomplishes” what the JCPOA did with Iran, but with North Korea. The current President has always maintained that he would, one way or another, sort out the nuclear crisis going on with Kim’s regime in Pyongyang, and he still has yet to solve it – in fact, he has escalated it if anything. He’s accepted an invitation to get there “by May,” but it’s May and he still has yet to go.
