Vice President JD Vance explained Monday night why the latest Iran deal is expected to be different from and more effective than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama administration, as critics and Israeli officials have cast doubt on the agreement's effectiveness and likened it to the Obama-era deal.
President Trump has repeatedly blasted the JCPOA and vowed that any agreement negotiated under his administration would actually achieve the goal of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. As Vance explained, the latest deal is better largely because the Gulf states support it, whereas they opposed the JCPOA.
"The Gulf Arabs hated the Obama deal."
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Vice President JD Vance tells @seanhannity why he believes the new Iran agreement will succeed where previous deals failed.
Vance says regional allies support the framework and that the administration has built in safeguards to verify… pic.twitter.com/8TRXwEOUuk
"If you go back to the original Obama-JCPOA, there were a couple of big problems with it. Number one, by the way, is that the Gulf Arabs hated the Obama deal. Why? Because they thought that it empowered the Iranians to be a malign actor. It actually enriched the Iranians while they were misbehaving," the vice president explained. "This deal, the Gulf Arabs love, because they know that this is the kind of deal that could fundamentally transform the Middle East."
He went on to explain how the United States intends to ensure that Iran abandons its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
"The president has been most consistent on this point, and that is they cannot and will never have a nuclear weapon," Vance said.
"How will we be able to verify that?" Fox News' Sean Hannity asked. "Will we have American specters on the ground? What happens to the nuclear dust? Will it be degraded or will it be removed? Will we be a party to that? Will it reflect what we did in Libya years ago?"
"So what we're going to do, Sean, is destroy the highly enriched material, the nuclear dust as we call it, and we're going to do it with the Iranians," the vice president explained. "That's what the president has said. He wants us to work with the Iranians, with the international organizations, to destroy that stockpile of enriched material, because that does set them back a little bit further."
"We've already fundamentally destroyed their program, but that does set them back a little bit further, and that's important, of course, to the United States of America. And they're agreeing never to enrich," he added. "They're agreeing right now to eliminate the enriched stockpile, and if they don't get to a point where they agree to stop enriching, then they don't get the other benefits of the bargain."
Vice President JD Vance tells @seanhannity how the US will work to guarantee that Iran never has a nuclear weapon.
— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 16, 2026
"They're agreeing right now to eliminate the enriched stockpile. And if they don't get to a point where they agree to stop enriching, then they don't get the other… pic.twitter.com/gFVBR9gZtG
This comes after the United States and Iran agreed to a deal on Sunday, bringing a temporary end to hostilities as the parties continue negotiating a more detailed and finalized agreement. The deal, a simple memorandum of understanding, provides a 60-day negotiation period for further talks. The Trump administration has said the memorandum reopens the Strait of Hormuz, ends military operations on all fronts, and lifts the American maritime blockade on Iranian ports and ships.
However, the actual text of the agreement has yet to be released, meaning most of the information circulating has come either from the Trump administration or the Iranian regime. As a result, confusion over what was actually agreed to has continued to grow.
The formal agreement is expected to be released within the next few days, with the official signing scheduled to take place in Switzerland on Friday.