Former US president Barack Obama warned that the US may be “worse off” than it was before the start of the war against Iran under the recently brokered Washington-Tehran Memorandum of Understanding, in an interview with NBC News on Friday.
“We’ve now fought a war, spent billions and billions of dollars, you know, put enormous strain on our military,” Obama told NBC. “It feels like we’re back where we were before we started the war, except maybe a little bit worse off.”
He added that he was happy to see the ceasefire in place and hopeful that it would hold. Still, he accused the current administration of enabling Iran’s nuclear development by pulling out of a previous Obama-era deal.
“Iran had agreed not to develop nuclear weapons,” Obama emphasized. “This administration, or a prior version of this administration, pulled out of it, which caused then Iran to develop more nuclear capacity.”
Former energy secretary warns MoU may be 'too generous'
Obama is not the first former White House official to criticise the deal, which was signed by US President Donald Trump in France on Thursday.
Former US energy secretary Dan Brouillette, who held the position from 2019 through 2021 under Trump’s first administration, warned that the agreement is “too generous” to the Islamic regime in Tehran, in a Friday interview with CNN.
Brouillette stated that he believes the US blockade on Iranian ports along the Strait of Hormuz, which aimed to block the regime from exporting Oil, was “very effective” in economically pressuring Tehran to negotiate.
He added, however, that the agreement is “a little too generous” when it comes to giving Iran “certain things up front,” like the ability to immediately restart the export of oil.
Brouillette said that the sale of oil could generate up to an estimated $60 billion a year for Iran, according to the CNN report.
US must 'keep an eye' on Iran's funding of terror proxies
He shared his concerns regarding Iran using financial resources to fund proxy terrorist organizations that are “adversarial to their neighbors in the region, as well as to the United States.”
“We’re going to have to keep an eye on that,” Brouillette asserted. “If they return to funding proxies around the world again, I say all bets are off.”
Brouillette additionally told CNN that if he was responsible for negotiating the terms of the deal, he “would have done things a little differently.”
“I want to see more performance, if you will, before I would release sanctioned funds or create some new fund for the rebuilding of Iran,” he explained.