Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton took to X on Wednesday to draw a direct line between the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear agreement and the military situation that ultimately led to Operation Epic Fury, posting a pointed statement crediting President Donald Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the deal as a turning point that weakened Iran’s position on the world stage.
Cotton’s post read in full: “Disastrous Obama-era deals paved the way for Iran’s nuclear ambitions. President Trump ended those ambitions. Iran’s radical regime is infinitely weaker today than it was 10 months ago.”
The nuclear agreement Cotton referenced — formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA — was signed in 2015 under President Barack Obama and involved the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Iran. The deal placed limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment activities and allowed for international inspections of its nuclear sites in exchange for the lifting of major economic sanctions. Supporters at the time argued it would delay Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon by at least a decade. Critics, including Cotton, argued from the beginning that the deal was fundamentally flawed — that it failed to address Iran’s ballistic missile program, provided cash infusions that fueled Iranian military expansion, and set expiration dates on key restrictions that would ultimately allow Tehran to resume full-scale nuclear activity.
Cotton had been one of the JCPOA’s most vocal and consistent opponents in the Senate, famously organizing a 2015 open letter signed by 47 Republican senators warning Iranian leaders that any agreement not ratified by Congress could be reversed by a future president. That warning proved prophetic. In May 2018, President Trump announced the United States was withdrawing from the deal entirely, calling it “defective at its core” and reimposing a sweeping regime of sanctions on Iran under what the administration labeled a “maximum pressure” campaign. Iran responded by gradually rolling back its own commitments to the agreement’s restrictions and accelerating uranium enrichment well beyond the levels the JCPOA had permitted — enriching to levels that U.S. officials said brought the country closer than ever to weapons-grade material and factored directly into the decision to launch military operations earlier this year.
Cotton’s post arrived the same day he was questioning U.S. Central Command chief Admiral Brad Cooper before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the senator used the exchange to paint a sweeping picture of Iran’s collapse as a regional military power. Cotton asked Cooper directly: “What is Iran’s current ability, since it retains its revolutionary terrorist ambitions, to support its terror proxy network in the region versus where it was just 11 months ago?” Cooper replied: “As we sit here today, they are unable to resource and supply Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Houthis. Chapter to be seen of what that looks like in Iraq. New prime minister wants to distance himself from Iran, but we’ll see. That’s what he’s committed to. We’ll see what that looks like.”
Disastrous Obama-era deals paved the way for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) May 14, 2026
President Trump ended those ambitions.
Iran’s radical regime is infinitely weaker today than it was 10 months ago. pic.twitter.com/hFcPyqswwO
Cotton then summarized what he characterized as a comprehensive military defeat of Iran’s power projection capabilities, stating: “So they can’t support their terrorist proxies. They’re years and years away from reconstituting, if at all, their missile and drone forces and their nuclear program, and they’re a generation away from rebuilding their navy. Seems to me like a little better position than we were relative to Iran under Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s disastrous nuclear deal. Thank you.”
Cooper’s testimony before the committee provided the hard military data underpinning Cotton’s claims. The CENTCOM chief told senators that the campaign destroyed roughly 90 percent of Iran’s defense industrial base, including major segments of its missile, drone, naval, and weapons-production infrastructure, and declared that every military objective set out for Operation Epic Fury had been achieved. In his written testimony, Cooper said Operation Epic Fury had damaged or destroyed more than 85 percent of Iran’s ballistic missile, drone, and naval industrial base through more than 1,450 strikes on weapons-manufacturing facilities, and said it would take Iran “a generation” to rebuild its navy and years for its drone and missile production to recover.
The contrast Cotton was drawing between the JCPOA era and the present was not subtle. Under the Obama deal, Iran received approximately $150 billion in sanctions relief — a figure long cited by Republican critics — and retained the right to enrich uranium at low levels, operate advanced centrifuges, and continue ballistic missile development entirely outside the deal’s scope. By 2019, after Trump’s withdrawal, Iran had resumed enrichment and ultimately began producing uranium enriched to 60 and then 84 percent purity, far beyond what any civilian nuclear program would require. Cooper confirmed in Thursday’s hearing that Iran’s nuclear breakout time has been set back, though he declined to discuss specifics of the nuclear program in a public setting
Cooper also addressed Iran’s proxy network directly, telling the committee that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are now “completely cut off” from Iranian weapons supplies and support from Tehran — the culmination, he said, of months of precise planning and decades of experience.
The political backdrop behind Cotton’s post is also notable. Prediction markets on Polymarket currently list Cotton at 15 percent odds to become the next Senate Majority Leader, placing him as one of the more prominent Republican alternatives in a race that currently sees Chuck Schumer leading at 26 percent and incumbent leader John Thune at 22 percent amid intraparty tensions. Cotton has long been positioned as a leading hawk on Iran policy, and his public commentary Thursday served to reinforce that identity at a moment when the Iran conflict remains one of the defining issues of the Trump second term.
The senator’s alignment with the Trump administration’s handling of Iran has been consistent and vocal throughout the conflict. His X post framing the current military reality as a direct vindication of Trump’s 2018 JCPOA withdrawal — and as a rebuke of Obama and Biden-era diplomacy — was characteristic of the argument Republicans close to the administration have made since Operation Epic Fury began: that years of what they described as appeasement and accommodation created the conditions for an Iran that needed to be confronted militarily, and that Trump’s pressure campaign, begun in 2018, ultimately set the table for the degradation of Iranian power now being documented by the Pentagon’s own commanders on Capitol Hill.