2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden described the situation in Iran as an issue that “our administration had solved and put on the back burner.”

The former vice president spoke Friday at a campaign event in Iowa where he touched on the Thursday death of top Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. The Pentagon confirmed that President Donald Trump’s Defense Department ordered a U.S. military airstrike that killed Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force. The airstrike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who is the leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, the group that attempted to storm the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on Dec. 31, 2019.

Biden spoke of the Obama administration’s goals in Iran, “to deter regional oppression and negotiate a better nuclear deal.”

“Thus far, they have badly failed on both accounts,” Biden said. “Now the administration has said that the goal of killing Soleimani was to deter future attacks by Iran. But the action almost certainly will have the opposite impact. This morning we could be on the brink of a new kind of major conflict in the Middle East.”

Biden asserted that the Trump administration’s actions have put an “extremely dangerous problem that our administration had solved and put on the back burner back on the table.”

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The former vice president touted the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal, which was signed on July 14, 2015. Less than a year after this deal was signed, Iran test-fired two missiles marked with the words “Israel must be wiped out” in Hebrew in what was described as “in a show of power by the Shiite nation.” Biden was in Jerusalem when this incident occurred.

In January 2016, Iranian military forces seized two U.S. Navy boats containing 10 American sailors off Iran’s Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. That same month, former Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry admitted in 2016 that some of the money Iran received from the United States as sanctions relief would go to terrorism.

“I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists,” Kerry said in a 2016 interview. “You know, to some degree, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.”

The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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