‘The world is scratching its head’: John Kerry calls Trump’s plan to end Iran war an attempt to fix his own mistakes
John Kerry, the former Massachusetts senator who helped negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, called the Trump administration’s deal to end the war in Iran an attempt to “dig itself out of a hole they dug themselves.”
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The agreement announced Sunday, and set for a ceremonial signing Friday in Geneva, would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lift the United States’ naval blockade in the region. The exact contents of the deal, however, were still unclear Tuesday, and the announcement drew a mix of skepticism and criticism from lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“The world is scratching its head trying to understand what the war has achieved other than higher prices and the unprecedented weaponization of the Strait of Hormuz,” Kerry wrote in an emailed statement to the Globe on Tuesday.
Kerry earlier this year called Trump’s threat to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran a “prelude to becoming one of the greatest war criminals in history.”
Kerry, who is traveling for a conference in Kenya, said Tuesday that while “we don’t know exactly what this page-and-a-half” memorandum of understanding says, the 2015 agreement he helped broker limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program was working “before it was ripped up,” referring to when Trump pulled out of the deal during his first term.
That action set “us on a predictable, avoidable eight year trajectory in which Iran accelerated nuclear activity and war became inevitable,” Kerry said Tuesday. “Now there’s a license to negotiate again to try and get back to where we were in 2016, to get enriched uranium out of Iran and inspectors back into Iran. We should all hope for the best.”
A 2018 Globe report revealed that Kerry had engaged in shadow diplomacy at the time, using his extensive network of contacts from his time as a top diplomat to salvage the 2015 Iran nuclear deal he helped craft. The Globe reported that he held undisclosed meetings with European leaders and the Iranian foreign minister to keep the pact alive more than a year after he left office.
The Globe’s reporting prompted Trump to publicly attack Kerry on social media, calling the behind-the-scenes efforts a “possibly illegal” violation of diplomatic norms.
Much remains unknown about the most recent deal Trump announced, including whether it says anything about Iran’s nuclear program or support for its regional allies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah, issues that the United States and Israel cited to justify the war.
Republicans in Washington have also said they need more information about the agreement, saying there were still many unanswered questions about the deal and they need thorough briefings before it is finalized.
“I just don’t know enough about it,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, told reporters in the Capitol. “Even the people who follow this stuff closely up here don’t know that much about it.”
Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, reiterated his criticism of Trump’s Iran policy on “Fox News Sunday,” arguing that the US was “in a much worse position” now than under Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.
In a Sunday post on Truth Social, Trump called for his impeachment, calling Reed a “Dumocrat from R.I.,” who he said “lied when stating the the [sic] Deal we just made is not as good as the Obama disaster known as the JCPOA. Reed is either an outright fraud, or incompetent.”
Reed told the Globe on Tuesday that “the truth hurts sometimes.”
“I think he is trying to establish a situation where he can claim victory and also a better outcome than the JCPOA, and that remains to be seen,” Reed said.
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Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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