Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal Was Working. Trump Tore It Up.

Ms. Maloney is a vice president and the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

In announcing attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, President Trump declared that Tehran had “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.” A few days later he said, “If we didn’t hit within two weeks they would’ve had a nuclear weapon.”

Mr. Trump’s timeline is greatly exaggerated, but it’s clear that the nuclear threat looms large in his shifting justifications for the attacks. His statements are also a reminder that he tore up the deal that was designed to prevent a war over Iran’s nuclear program.

In 2015, President Barack Obama and the leaders of Britain, China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia and the European Union reached an agreement formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that imposed restrictions across the spectrum of Iran’s nuclear activities.

The product of years of diplomacy, the plan elevated a technically complex national security challenge into a fierce political debate split largely along partisan lines. A few months before the deal was signed, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, addressed a joint session of Congress — at Republicans’ invitation — to campaign against it.

When Mr. Obama eventually presented the completed deal to Americans, he emphasized the possible over the perfect. He argued that although the agreement didn’t resolve “all our problems with Iran,” it contained “the most comprehensive inspection and verification regime ever negotiated to monitor a nuclear program.”

Critics condemned the agreement as insufficient to rein in a uniquely malevolent regime. They also said Iran was trying to use its industrial-scale enrichment program to maintain pathways to weapons capability in violation of its obligations under the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. And they denounced the deal’s relaxation of international sanctions that had choked off Iran’s oil revenues, enabling its leadership to gain access to tens of billions dollars of frozen funds.

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