Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said that the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the JCPOA, is the “strongest” and “most transparent” agreement on the planet.

“Britain, China, Russia are all still trying to keep the agreement in place because they recognize it's the strongest, most transparent, most accountable nuclear agreement on the planet,” he told CBS News in an interview published on Sunday.

He said, "President Trump decided unilaterally to ignore all of our allies and move to get out of the agreement."

U.S. President Donald Trump quit the nuclear deal in May 2018 and introduced the harshest ever sanctions in history on Iran as part of his administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.

In another interview with CBS News in September, Kerry said, “France, Germany, Britain, China, Russia, all still support a multilateral agreement that was a model of multilateral diplomacy. We came together, the world welcomed this, the United Nations Security Council ratified it, embraced it. And that still is there. Along comes President Trump and he pulls out. He broke the agreement… The escalation is the absolutely foreseeable and it was foreseen that this is what would happen. Why do I say that? Because we were ridiculed for saying that the alternative to what we were trying to do in making the agreement was war, was conflict.”

NA/PA