Wendy Sherman

People like Abbas Arachi, who was my counterpart during the 2015 negotiations, and he's now the foreign minister, and he knows every single detail of that deal.

We're just not going to get this done?

Absolutely.

There were many points along the way.

where I said to my counterparts, if you can't do it, you can't do it.

We'll just see where we go from here.

We thought we were very close to a set of parameters.

That means sort of a framework for doing the final details of the deal.

And the Supreme Leader at the time gave a speech and set out a whole new set of parameters.

And I think surprised even his foreign minister.

And we had to figure out how we could get from where we were, which we thought was on our way to a deal, to now consider what the Supreme Leader had publicly said.

So the critics say that the strongest part of the deal only lasted for 15 years.

They wanted it to last forever.

Now, we argued that it gave us what is called a one-year breakout timeline, so that we would have a year if somehow we discovered Iran was cheating, which we thought was highly unlikely, to do something about it.

And I think some critics, like what we have seen in the past couple of months, wanted to go to war.

They thought they could create a regime change.

We constantly said to the United States Congress, if we risk war, it could close the Strait of Hormuz.

It could increase the gas prices.

It could take down the international economy.

It could mean the lives of our military and an enormous cost to our economy and to American citizens.