Even as President Donald Trump considered withdrawing the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal, former Secretary of State John Kerry tried to work behind the scenes to keep it in place. | Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images Trump policy on Iran ‘dangerous and ill-advised,’ Kerry says

Former Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement he helped negotiate was “dangerous and ill-advised.”

Speaking on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” Kerry called the deal the “single strongest, single most accountable, single most transparent nuclear agreement anywhere in the world,” saying Trump had mucked everything up by exaggerating the importance of potential long-term problems.


“I think it’s a very dangerous and ill-advised move that is not based on any broad strategy,” said Kerry, who served under President Barack Obama and has been a target of Trump’s criticism.

Kerry was a key negotiator on the agreement, which was designed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and which also included the world’s other leading powers, including Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia. He said that the U.S. withdrawal from the deal had empowered Iran’s hard-liners in their criticism of the United States as untrustworthy.

“Donald Trump proved them right,” Kerry told Zakaria.

POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Even as Trump considered withdrawing the U.S. from the deal — the president did so in May — Kerry tried to work behind the scenes to keep the deal in place, drawing a rebuke from Trump. “The United States does not need John Kerry’s possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran Deal,” the president wrote on Twitter on May 7. “He was the one that created this MESS in the first place!”

Last week, Trump again mocked Kerry and said he’d be happy to run for president against him.

“I see that John Kerry, the father of the now terminated Iran deal, is thinking of running for President,” he tweeted. “I should only be so lucky — although the field that is currently assembling looks really good — FOR ME!”

Addressing other international issues, Kerry was also dubious of the Trump administration’s policy toward Russia, though he declined to speculate on whether Russian President Vladimir Putin was forcing the president’s hand by holding something over Trump. However, the former secretary of state did say it was “incomprehensible” to think that anything and everything Trump said and did on his pre-candidate trips to Russia was not recorded by the government.

Kerry was also critical of what he described as indifference to America’s infrastructure. “Our infrastructure is in desperate need,” the former Massachusetts senator said, comparing China’s high-speed bullet trains with the Acela trains that run in the northeast corridor of the United States.

“We should be ashamed of what is happening now,” he said.

