Trump should have listened
to Obama about Iran
The president is flailing to solve a problem of his own making.
By Stephen Kinzer – Boston Globe - April 9, 2026
In the horrific war on Iran that he launched without direct provocation, President Trump has threatened to bomb an ancient nation “back to the stone ages.” Then, a little while later, he accepted an apparent cease-fire. This war has thrown the Middle East and much of the world into upheaval. How did we get here?
War between the United States and Iran was hardly inevitable. A decade ago, Barack Obama saw it coming and offered a way to avoid it. A look back at his prescient warnings in the summer of 2015 burnishes his decidedly mixed foreign policy record. He may have misjudged other world crises, but his view of Iran turns out to have been crystal clear.
During that summer, Obama devoted himself to promoting the nuclear deal that he had struck with Iran. His central argument was always the same: It’s this deal or war. “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically, or it’s resolved through force, through war. Those are the options,” Obama asserted at a White House press conference. He made that same point in a speech at American University: “Let’s not mince words. The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war — maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon.”
That “soon” took 11 years to materialize, but it has come. President Trump ripped up the nuclear deal in 2018. That did more than shred Obama’s greatest foreign policy achievement. It also destroyed a framework that could have prevented this war and perhaps helped to stabilize the Middle East. The nuclear deal may be seen in retrospect as the last major off-ramp as Iran and the United States careened toward collision. Trashing it set the United States on the path to war — just as Obama predicted.
Under the nuclear deal, which was painstakingly negotiated over two years, Iran was given the right to enrich limited amounts of uranium in exchange for accepting tight limits and controls on its nuclear program. Some in Washington were appalled. Driven by a quintessentially American will to win, they rejected the idea of compromise with Iran. In effect, they agreed with Obama’s formulation of the choice America faced: negotiated deal or war. They preferred war.
This position was crystallized in an open letter that 47 Republican senators addressed to “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” as the nuclear deal was being concluded. It said that since the deal was not enshrined in a ratified treaty, it was “a mere executive agreement.…The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen.”
During Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he promised to do just that. He repeatedly denounced the nuclear accord as “the worst deal ever negotiated.” No one was surprised when he pulled the United States out of it soon after taking office.
This was hardly the first tragically missed opportunity to ease tension between Iran and the United States.
For most of the 19th century, the only Americans in Iran were Protestant missionaries. Rather than try to convert Muslims, they devoted themselves to good works. They founded the country’s first modern medical clinics and, in 1873, a school that went on to educate several generations of the Iranian elite. While Britain and Russia were looting and dismembering Iran, these Americans showed their hosts a wonderfully positive side of the American character.
In 1953, the United States showed a very different side of that character. Iran was then a fledgling democracy led by a popular nationalist, Mohammad Mossadegh. He led Iranians to nationalize their vast oil reserves. That outraged powerful leaders in Washington. President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to stage a coup in which Mossadegh was deposed. For the next quarter-century, an American ally, Mohammad Reza Shah, ruled Iran with increasing harshness. Anger at his close ties to the United States helped fuel the revolution in which he was deposed in 1979. That revolution gave rise to the intensely anti-American regime that has ruled Iran ever since. It is a product of our 1953 intervention.
Reconciliation seemed possible after the 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington. In the weeks that followed, notably at a key conference in Bonn, Germany, Iranian diplomats helped their American counterparts connect with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and recruit it to serve as the ground force in our war against the Taliban. Iranians hoped that this cooperation would set the stage for a better relationship. Those hopes were dashed when President George W. Bush accused Iran of being in an “axis of evil” with Iraq and North Korea.
The last chance for diplomacy came in 2020, with Joe Biden’s rise to the presidency. Biden had been vice president when Obama negotiated the nuclear deal, and some hoped that he would bring the United States back into it. He never did. Instead, he kept the United States on the path that Trump had set — the path that his former boss had warned would lead to war.
Remarkably, none of this turned ordinary Iranians against the United States. In fact, the opposite was true. Every American who has visited Iran in recent decades can testify to the warmth of Iranians’ welcome. As recently as a couple of years ago, Iranians made up the most pro-American population on earth. That sentiment has presumably been bombed out of many of them in recent weeks.
Obama profoundly misunderstood some countries, notably Libya and Syria, which he helped cast into violent upheaval. But he understood Iran. He realized that without diplomacy there would be war. Today’s headlines, sadly, vindicate him.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.