Kerry: Trump can’t instantly undo Obama actions

Departing Secretary of State John Kerry says unraveling President Obama’s achievements will take Donald Trump longer than the president-elect expects.

“I just don’t believe that,” Kerry said Tuesday in Davos, Switzerland while discussing Trump instantly reversing Obama’s moves. “I don’t believe they will be.”

Kerry cited Obama’s landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran as one policy victory Trump will struggle with rolling back.

{mosads}“If the United States were to decide suddenly and say, ‘Hey, we’re not going to pursue this and so forth,’ I’ll bet you — I haven’t talked to all of them, but I bet you that our friends and allies who negotiated this with us will get together and that Russia, China, Germany, France and Britain will say, ‘You know what? This is a good deal. We’re going to keep it,’” Kerry said.

The U.S. and its allies agreed to reduce sanctions against Iran in exchange for greater restrictions on its nuclear capabilities in the historic 2015 pact. Trump repeatedly vowed to renegotiate or completely eliminate the deal while campaigning for the presidency last year.

“We’ll have made ourselves the odd person out,” Kerry said. “[And] we will have done great injury to ourselves, and it will hurt for the endurance of one year, two years, whatever, while the administration is that.”

Kerry added that he believes the Obama administration’s agreement with Iran will survive despite Trump’s opposition to it. 

“We hadn’t talked to Iran at a high level in 35 years,” he said. “We built trust in a place where it’s very difficult to do that in terms of the outside forces that were pushing in on us.”

“So I believe this is an agreement that can endure, and there is no question in my mind the world and region are safer because a country with whom we still have differences — on Yemen, on Syria, on Hezbollah, etc. — is not hurtling towards a nuclear weapon [and] all of the tensions that would create.”

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, meanwhile, slammed Trump’s criticism of the pact as “meaningless” Tuesday.