Former Secretary of State John Kerry had harsh words on Thursday for President Donald Trump’s recent decision to wage war with Iran and current attempts to resolve the conflict.
Kerry, lead negotiator of the nuclear nonproliferation deal the United States hammered out with Iran in 2015, spoke out on GBH’s Boston Public Radio about the current two-week ceasefire, calling it “remarkably loosey-goosey.”
“It’s shocking, honestly,” Kerry said. “I think it proves more serious and more dangerous as we go on, because the Strait of Hormuz [is] in the control of Iran, which they were not before [the war] started. And the threat to global economies of next steps which extend this war is just shuddering to think about, and may be a larger, more complicated economic impact than we’ve ever dealt with.”
The Strait of Hormuz, at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf, is where about 20% of the world’s oil passes through, although traffic has dropped precipitously since the war began. The ceasefire announced Monday is supposed to open the strait to oil tankers once again, but it’s not clear how effectively that provision is being implemented. Initial reporting suggest few if any oil tankers have passed through the strait since Tuesday’s ceasefire.
Kerry also suggested that Trump erred in being convinced to go to war by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who Kerry says previously pitched war with Iran to presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, who both refused.
“When you go to war, you go to war hopefully with the support of your people,” Kerry said. “And you have a defined threat, you have a clarity as to why you need to go to war. And equally importantly, I think we’ve learned through the years, you have allies. You have people supporting you because your cause is just — it’s right.
“In this case, you have a war that is essentially fulfilling the long-held dream of Prime Minister Netanyahu to do as much damage to Iran as he is permitted to,” said Kerry.
Kerry also stressed that, thanks in large part to the nuclear deal he helped hammer out a decade ago, Iran in no way presented an imminent threat to the U.S. before the war began.
“No, there was not an imminent threat,” Kerry said. “An imminent threat would have been something that [they could do] in one or two days, three days, a week, whatever. Maybe you can say a month. But Iran did not have the capacity. And by the way, Donald Trump himself stood up and bragged and said we’ve obliterated their nuclear program [after attacks in June 2025] … There isn’t a notion possible to conjure up by which they could have made a nuclear weapon at this point in time.”
While Kerry said negotiations to end the war are essential, he raised questions about whether the Trump Administration and the president himself will be capable of carrying them out.
“I think there is a strategic gap her that is more significant than any I saw under any presidency while I was in public life,” Kerry said. “It’s quite staggering … Secretary of Defense [Pete Hegseth] talks in terms that are childish and, you know, basically like he’s advertising for a Friday night fight. It’s just amazing to me, and I don’t think it has earned respect in many quarters of the world where you need to bring people to the table.”
Asked about efforts to invoke the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to remove Trump from office, Kerry replied that he didn’t like discussing hypotheticals, but added: “I’ll tell you this: In Europe, the newspapers, the news media, are filled with politicians and observers and commentators and everybody wondering, what has happened to the United States of America, that you can have an Easter message like we had from this president talking about annihilating [a] civilization?
“I don’t think anywhere in the history of our nation have we seen that kind of rupture with the spirit of our country, with the reality of our country, with our Constitution, with everything that we stand for,” Kerry added. “So this is a very real challenge, this question of the president’s state of mind and the president’s capacity to be able to make the peace that is necessary here.”
