Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Iranian nuclear agreement—which he made official on Tuesday—has been coming since at least September 9, 2015, when he appeared at a rally in Washington, D.C., alongside Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, and Phil Robertson, of “Duck Dynasty.” That was the occasion on which Trump said, “Never, ever, ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran.”

His remarks that day were mostly focussed on the thing that Trump is almost always focussed on: money. He talked about the money that Iran would get access to because of sanctions relief, and the money that would flow to America’s partners in the agreement—Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia—thanks to trade deals. “All of these countries are going to do business with Iran,” Trump said. “They are going to make lots of money . . . . And we’re going to get nothing. We are led by very, very stupid people.” And yet, what he didn’t mention was that, as a result of the deal, U.S. companies would be allowed to do business in Iran. They’d make money, too.

In December, 2016, just a few weeks after Trump’s election, Boeing announced a seventeen-billion-dollar deal to supply eighty American-built jetliners—fifty single-aisle 737s and thirty double-aisle 777s—to Iran Air, the government-run carrier that is based in Tehran. “Today’s agreement will support tens of thousands of U.S. jobs directly . . . and nearly 100,000 U.S. jobs in the U.S. aerospace value stream for the full course of deliveries,” the aerospace company, whose headquarters are in Chicago, said in a statement.

Four months later, Boeing reached a sales agreement with another Iranian airline. This time, it agreed to supply thirty 737s to Aseman Airlines, a privately owned carrier that also operates out of Tehran. In both cases, Boeing said that the deals were a direct result of the 2015 nuclear agreement. In April, 2017, when it confirmed the deal with Aseman, the company said, “Boeing continues to follow the lead of the U.S. government with regards to working with Iran’s airlines, and any and all contracts with Iran’s airlines are contingent upon U.S. government approval.”

Boeing wasn’t alone. In the wake of the Iran deal, Schlumberger, the Houston-based oil driller, reached preliminary agreements to reënter Iran, which is among the world’s largest oil producers. So did General Electric, which also has a big energy division. Other U.S. companies saw their own opportunities. Last year, for example, U.S. and European firms that make household appliances met with Iranian officials about the possibility of investing in Iran.

With a population of eighty million and an annual gross domestic product of about four hundred billion dollars, Iran is a medium-sized, middle-income country. It’s never going to be a huge market for U.S. firms, but, if its President, Hassan Rouhani, succeeds in his stated aim of liberalizing the economy and kick-starting growth, it could be a significant one. According to the World Bank, the Iranian economy “experienced a strong recovery in 2016 as a result of sanctions relief.” Oil exports doubled, and output in the non-oil sector also rose. Then Trump’s election happened. More recently, growth has slowed; the value of the Iranian currency, the rial, has fallen sharply; and some of the deals that Iran reached with foreign companies have been called into question.

Last month, with the May 12th deadline for Trump to pull out of the Iran deal approaching, Boeing announced that it would defer delivery of the first jets that Iran Air ordered. Although the company has obtained export licenses for these aircraft, it isn’t clear whether they will ever be delivered. In the best-case scenario, Trump’s announcement on Tuesday will result in several months of uncertainty, as Boeing and other U.S. companies wait to see whether a face-saving deal can be reached before the sanctions on Iran actually go back into effect.

And while American businesses may be hamstrung by Trump’s action, the situation will be different for firms in other countries. They may well look to steal a march on their U.S. competitors. In the past few years, European carmakers, such as Volkswagen, have resumed exporting cars and trucks to Iran, and Renault has agreed to build a factory near Tehran. Chinese companies have agreed to invest billions of dollars to upgrade some of Iran’s oil-production facilities, and CITIC Group, a Chinese state-owned investment company, has extended ten billion dollars in credit to a group of Iranian banks. Just last week, Iran Airtour and Aseman Airlines ordered forty smaller passenger jets from Sukhoi, a Russian aircraft manufacturer.

At the moment, Sukhoi doesn’t have the capability to compete with Boeing in supplying larger aircraft, but the European company Airbus certainly does: when Iran Air ordered eighty jets from Boeing, it also ordered a hundred from Airbus. Three of these planes have already been delivered, and Airbus hasn’t said what it intends to do about the rest. Airbus uses a lot of U.S.-made components in its manufacturing plants, but European countries don’t agree with Trump’s reimposition of sanctions. Another transatlantic trade dispute seems likely. (The U.S.’s new Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, has already called on German companies doing business in Iran to “wind down operations immediately.”)

If what Trump said in 2015 wasn’t actually true then, it is today. Some very, very stupid people, and one in particular, are running the U.S. government. “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning,” he told the crowd that September. But even measured according to his blinkered, cash-only criterion, his decision on the Iran deal is a losing move. Setting aside the damage it will do to the reformists in Iran, the prospect of reaching other nuclear deals, and the principle of multilateralism, it’s bad for American businesses, bad for American workers, and bad for American consumers. (It’s already helped to drive up gasoline prices.) Winning be damned.