CNN’s “Global Report: War With Iran,” hosted by Anderson Cooper, followed a predictable pattern. He brought on anti-Trump hawk John Bolton first, then Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), who blamed President Trump for the entire crisis.
While Kelly agrees that “the Iranians cannot get a nuclear weapon,” he insists Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA is why we are facing this crisis today:
“Well, I am in the camp where the Iranians cannot get a nuclear weapon. And the problem with this is, if you go back to 2018, when Donald Trump was in the White House, he tore up the Iran nuclear deal. They were not enriching uranium to the point where they could develop a nuclear weapon, but Donald Trump didn’t like it because it was something his predecessor put in place, and he tore it up, and that’s how we got to where we are today. […] And so far, what I’ve seen is mostly like a clown show out of the White House on this.”
This narrative is wrong and incomplete.
The JCPOA never banned enrichment. It only limited it temporarily, with many restrictions expiring after 10 to 15 years, and it ignored Iran’s missiles and proxy aggression. No deal with Iran is going to stop its enrichment.
How do we even know Iran was truly following the JCPOA in full? IAEA inspections verified compliance with declared nuclear limits before 2018, but those inspections had clear limits. They depended heavily on Iran’s cooperation, declared information, and limited access. They could not guarantee the absence of hidden activities or undeclared sites.
Iran has a long, documented history of concealing nuclear work. The 2018 Israeli intelligence operation exposed Iran’s secret “atomic archive”—thousands of files and documents showing undeclared nuclear weapons-related efforts that Iran had hidden from the IAEA for years. Blind trust in such a deceptive regime is naive.
Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018. His withdrawal ended U.S. involvement and shifted American policy to sanctions and pressure, but the JCPOA itself remained in force for the other signatories until the multilateral collapse in 2025. It did not “end” the deal globally when the U.S. left.
Trump pulling out of the nuclear deal did not stop it from continuing—the other parties, including the UK, France, Germany, the EU, Russia, and China, kept it alive, and Iran ramped up enrichment anyway.
Kelly ignores the Biden years (2021–2025), when Biden agreed to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian funds through a 2023 prisoner swap. The money was transferred to restricted Qatari accounts but was supposedly never used or spent. U.S. officials insisted after the October 7 attacks that not a dollar was touched, though we do not know whether that is true.
The nuclear deal Obama negotiated was not intended to stop Iran from enriching uranium. It only imposed temporary caps and limits that expired, allowing enrichment to continue while ignoring missiles and proxies.
In 2016, President Obama gave Iran $1.7 billion in cash, on pallets of untraceable foreign currency. Biden also agreed to unfreeze another $6 billion for Iran through the 2023 prisoner swap, with the funds transferred to restricted Qatari accounts but supposedly never used or spent. U.S. officials insisted after the October 7 attacks that not a dollar was touched, though we do not know whether that is true.
So if you wonder how we got to where we are today, look no further than Democrats.
Next, Anderson Cooper brought on Reza Aslan, who claimed that Trump is going to leave Tehran with hardliners still in power, a collapsed economy, and undrinkable water.
“That is what Trump is going to be leaving behind,” Aslan said. “And he’ll probably just call that a measure of victory and move on to the next thing.”
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