Trump’s Iran war and the Obama nuclear deal: a personal history.

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Wendy Sherman was on the verge of tears. It was July 2015, and Sherman, then a top Obama administration official at the State Department, had just stepped up to a lectern in a drab conference room. The tears, Sherman reassured her rapt audience, were “largely exhaustion.” She had flown back to D.C. the night before from Vienna, where she had led the U.S. delegation that successfully negotiated the Iran nuclear deal. Now, just hours after inking arguably the most significant arms-control agreement of the 21st century, Sherman was on hand to answer questions from a roomful of suited, youngish people attending an annual State Department conference about nuclear policy.

I was one of the suited, youngish people in Sherman’s audience. A rising junior in college, I had wandered into the nonproliferation conference—as one does when one goes to school in the nation’s capital—in hopes of seeing a favorite professor, who was set to give a lecture on nuclear history. But Sherman’s return after clinching the Iran deal had forced a change to the schedule. And as she stood there blinking back her emotions, Sherman told us a story that I’ve been flashing back to ever since Donald Trump started his war with Iran—one that now reads like a relic from a more hopeful political era.

Sherman, wearing a tan pantsuit and dark-framed glasses, recounted what had happened the previous day. Negotiators from the U.S., Iran, and the other five countries party to the deal had gathered at a United Nations complex on the banks of the Danube to speak privately about the agreement they’d just reached. The diplomats, Sherman explained, sat in a horseshoe formation and spoke one by one. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry went last, and he initially stuck to his talking points. But then the mood shifted. “At the end of it, Secretary Kerry, completely impromptu, said, ‘When I was 22, I went to war,’ ” she recalled, referencing Kerry’s tour of duty in Vietnam in the late 1960s in which he was repeatedly wounded. “And then he choked up, sort of like I did a few minutes ago. He couldn’t get the words out. And everyone was completely spellbound.” After the secretary regained his voice, Sherman went on, he managed to complete his thought: “I went to war, and it became clear to me that I never wanted to go to war again.” Sherman then summed up the lesson for the conferencegoers hanging on her every word. “That’s what this was all about,” she said of the Iran deal, “trying to settle these matters through diplomacy and peaceful means. And it was such a moving moment that everybody in that small room applauded, including the Iranian delegation, and everyone had tears in their eyes.”

You can watch a video of the speech Sherman gave at that conference 11 years ago here. Viewed from a very different moment in U.S.–Iran relations, it becomes a window into an alternate history, a glimpse of what’s been lost to two Trump presidencies. The Iran nuclear deal, reached during the twilight of the Obama administration, grew out of a distinctly Obamaesque ethos: that professional, expert-informed, diligent diplomacy with allies and adversaries alike could yield progress on seemingly intractable problems.

Landing a few years after that administration had sealed a major U.S. arms-control agreement with Russia and amid its detente with Cuba, it seemed like proof that negotiation, halting and piecemeal though it might be, was still the portal to a safer world.

Today the Iran nuclear deal looks more like the moment that theory of politics peaked. Trump’s first election dashed the incipient thaw with Cuba. Barack Obama’s treaty with Russia, the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the two countries, lapsed in February. The agreement Sherman and Kerry once spoke of so emotionally no longer exists, summarily ripped up during Trump’s first term. War, which both once argued was the only real alternative to diplomacy, is now a reality. And even as the conflict’s humanitarian, economic, and political damage mounts, the nuclear deal remains a hate object for Trump and other Republicans. That’s true even as the president makes an increasingly grasping effort to strike a better peace accord with the Islamic republic.

There seemed to be no one better to talk about all of that with than Sherman. So I recently took the train to Cambridge to visit her tucked-away office at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she’s now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. We spoke shortly after Vice President J.D. Vance led a delegation to Islamabad for the U.S.’s highest-stakes negotiations with Iran since the Obama administration. But those talks ended in deadlock, and Trump has since extended a fragile ceasefire that leaves Iran in control of a vital seaway, blockaded Iranian ports, and deployed a third aircraft carrier strike group to the region. Over the weekend, he canceled plans for his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, a real-estate buddy who lacks any professional diplomatic experience, to resume the discussions sans Vance. On Wednesday, the president posted a seemingly A.I.-generated image of himself holding an assault rifle captioned “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!”

Sherman’s preference for diplomacy remains undimmed. She told me she was “glad” Vance had brought experts with him to Pakistan—“because you can’t do this just with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner”—and expressed hope that the talks would resume. But as Sherman also suggested, a better path really could have been possible. During his first term, Trump lambasted Obama’s agreement as “a horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” Sherman, at the time and in the years since, readily conceded that it wasn’t perfect. It didn’t place restrictions on Iran’s support for Hamas, Hezbollah, or other military proxies across the region. It didn’t limit the Islamic republic’s burgeoning ballistic missile program, which the country has since used to retaliate against Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other regional adversaries. And as many Republican critics pointed out, even the deal’s strictures on Iran’s nuclear program came with expiration dates. Sherman cast some of those shortcomings as the cost of reaching any agreement at all. “If we had tried to do more, we’d probably still be negotiating,” she told me.

Had the nuclear deal remained in force, however, it might have laid the groundwork for a very different-looking region—and perhaps even a very different-looking Iran. The agreement, Sherman said, quickly opened up diplomatic inroads between the U.S. and Iran that could have yielded future talks on subjects including missiles and regional proxies. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s first secretary of state, was among the figures who helped set the administration’s Iran talks in motion. And had she won the presidency in 2016, Clinton would probably have made an effort to build on it. “I can’t guarantee anything,” Sherman told me. “But I do know that it had changed things, and we could make use of that.”

Clinton, infamously, did not win the presidency. And after Trump withdrew from Obama’s agreement, he embarked on a “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions meant to bring Iran to heel. He promised that a “much better deal” was in the offing. Instead, the lapse allowed Iran to stockpile 11 tons of enriched uranium, potentially enough for up to 100 nuclear bombs. Contra Trump’s claims, the wave of airstrikes he ordered last year against Iranian enrichment plants set back but didn’t destroy the country’s nuclear program. Now, after setting off a spasm of violence that has so far killed more than a dozen U.S. soldiers and hundreds of civilians in the region, Trump is reportedly considering a permanent ceasefire with terms even friendlier to Iran than the deal he once trashed. Some of the president’s more hawkish Republican allies seem intent on heading off that possibility. “No JCPOA-like deal on President Trump’s watch,” Sen. Lindsey Graham wrote last month on X, using an initialism for the Obama-era Iran deal’s formal name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. This week, Iran reportedly offered Trump a quid pro quo that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway that has been closed to most commercial shipping since the war began, if the U.S. pushes to a later date talks over the future of Iran’s nuclear program. In summary, then: Trump jettisoned Obama’s deal, presided over the growth of Iran’s nuclear program, sparked a rippling campaign of violence, and is now attempting seat-of-the-pants negotiations that may result in a deal worse than the one he tore up.

Even if Trump does make a deal, the past 11 years can’t be undone. Iran’s theocratic regime distrusts him for nixing the nuclear deal in the first place, for using the guise of diplomatic talks as cover to launch the current round of fighting, and for U.S.–Israeli strikes that killed several top officials—including the new supreme leader’s father, wife, and other relatives. Some of the people on the Iranian side are the same ones who once negotiated with Sherman, but those on the American side are decidedly not. Over two nonconsecutive Trump terms, the State Department she formerly helped run has been hollowed out. Its Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which includes Iran, shed scores of career officials last year, many of them replaced by greener subordinates or political appointees. The department also reportedly laid off experts on oil and gas who would otherwise have been tasked with troubleshooting how the U.S. might respond if Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz.

The department conference where I first saw Sherman speak to a crowd full of aspiring nuclear experts, nonproliferation advocates, and department officials is a case in point. The following year, the State Department renamed the gathering after a now-retired U.S. nuclear physicist who helped advise the Iran deal negotiations. It was discontinued entirely during Trump’s first term, only to briefly return under Joe Biden. The department declined to comment on the record about the future of the conference now that Trump is back in the White House.

It’s also far from clear that the current administration has either the emotional intelligence or the patience that high-stakes diplomatic talks sometimes demand. “It’s very unnerving in some ways,” Sherman said. “The Iranians can get very angry.” Mohammad Javad Zarif, who was then Iran’s foreign minister, would sometimes retreat to the back of the room during the nuclear talks and put his head in his hands, pantomiming despair. In her 2018 memoir, Sherman describes exchanging photos of grandchildren with another Iranian official, Abbas Araghchi, who has since sat down with Vance and Co. “I don’t trust Iran for anything,” Sherman said, “but it makes you understand these are human beings.” Trump, on the other hand, has oscillated between genocidal-sounding threats to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages” and dovish wish-casting about its imminent capitulation (sentiments usually expressed on Truth Social or in phone calls with reporters shortly before U.S. stock markets open). Sherman spent nearly a month living out of a hotel and trading proposals back and forth with the Iranians; Vance walked away from the talks in Islamabad after less than a day.

Sherman’s own résumé is proof that what’s past isn’t always gone. After Biden beat Trump in 2020, she returned to the State Department—this time as the country’s first Senate-confirmed female deputy secretary of state. And before she retired in 2023, Sherman was involved in policy discussions about making overtures to Iran aimed at restarting the nuclear accord.

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Yet even those fledgling efforts suggest that the Obama era’s most optimistic possibilities are well and truly behind us. As Sherman explained of the failure to renew elements of the deal under Biden, “The Iranians understandably were wary, because the deal had been torn up and they didn’t know what was going to happen in the next administration.” In that sense, American voters’ decision to return Trump to the White House may have created a rift with much of the world that will be harder for future administrations of either party to bridge. The president’s shambolic tariffs, logorrheic assaults on long-standing allies, and unilateral attack on Iran have sent public opinion of the U.S. plummeting across the world. “There’s no question that our allies and partners don’t know what to do with us,” Sherman said. Ditto our adversaries.

If anyone has a right to feel jaded about that, it’s Sherman. Still, much as she was 11 years ago, she remains involved in helping shepherd future generations of international-affairs experts. Yet she also sounds more tempered by reality than she did back then. As we sat together in her cramped Harvard office, the door cracked for some fresh air, she said something that could double as a blueprint for how we might all collectively navigate a moment in which the possibility of a better world remains but the experience of watching it get thwarted is acute. “On one hand, I’ve been very lucky,” Sherman told me. “On the other hand, not everything is a success. And as we found out, and as I say to the students I meet with here at the Kennedy School, you have to persist, because you may get something done, and it may, as we’ve seen now, get undone.”

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