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President Donald Trump promised on Monday that the nuclear agreement he is negotiating with Iran will be "much better" than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed in 2015 under the Obama administration, which he described as one of the worst deals ever made in terms of national security.
Trump posted the message on his social network Truth Social at a time of heightened tension: the second round of negotiations in Islamabad began this Monday, led by Vice President JD Vance alongside Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, but Iran declared the same day that for the time being it will not participate in the talks, demanding the release of frozen assets and the resolution of the crisis in Lebanon.
"The agreement we are making with Iran will be much better than the JCPOA, one of the worst deals ever made regarding our country's security," Trump wrote, adding that Obama's pact "was a guaranteed pathway to a nuclear weapon, which will not happen and cannot happen with the agreement we are working on."
Trump reiterated his accusation that the Obama administration paid 1.7 billion dollars in cash loaded onto a Boeing 757 bound for Iran. "They emptied the cash from banks in Washington D.C., Virginia, and Maryland. The bankers said they had never seen anything like it," he stated.
That payment was actually a legal settlement of a 37-year dispute: 400 million corresponded to Iranian funds deposited before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and 1.3 billion were negotiated interest. Trump, however, portrayed it as part of a pattern of concessions that, according to him, funded the Iranian regime without any real reciprocation.
The leader also stated that if he had not canceled the JCPOA in 2018, "nuclear weapons would have been used against Israel and throughout the Middle East, including our beloved U.S. military bases."
The wartime context surrounding the negotiations
The war context surrounding these statements is decisive. The Epic Fury Operation, a joint offensive by the U.S. and Israel launched on February 28, 2026, destroyed more than 5,000 Iranian targets, including nuclear facilities in Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had confirmed in March that Iran possessed 5,500 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%, enough to manufacture nine nuclear bombs.
After the failure of the first round of negotiations in Islamabad—21 hours of discussions from April 10 to 12 without a deal—Trump imposed a naval blockade in the Gulf of Oman on April 13, with estimated losses for Iran of 435 million dollars per day. On April 15, U.S. Marines boarded an Iranian cargo ship at sea, an incident that Iran described as "armed piracy."
The positions of both parties remain very distant: Washington demands the complete dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program and a twenty-year moratorium on uranium enrichment, while Teherán offers only a five-year pause and claims $270 billion in compensation for war damages.
The bilateral ceasefire mediated by Pakistan, in effect since April 7, expires on April 22. Trump has already threatened to destroy "all power plants and bridges in Iran" if no agreement is reached before that date. "If an agreement is reached under Trump, it will guarantee peace, security, and stability, not just for Israel and the Middle East, but for Europe, America, and the rest of the world," the president promised.
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