Once critical of global deals, president slow to pull out of any

Washington — The “America First” president who vowed to extricate America from onerous overseas commitments appears to be warming up to the view that when it comes to global agreements, a deal’s a deal.

From NAFTA to the Iran nuclear agreement to the Paris climate accord, President Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric is colliding with the reality of governing. Despite repeated pledges to rip up, renegotiate or otherwise alter them, the U.S. has yet to withdraw from any of these economic, environmental or national security deals, as Trump’s past criticism turns to tacit embrace of several key elements of U.S. foreign policy.

The administration says it is reviewing these accords and could still pull out of them. Yet with one exception — an Asia-Pacific trade deal that already had stalled in Congress — Trump’s administration quietly has laid the groundwork to honor the international architecture of deals it has inherited. It’s a sharp shift from the days when Trump was declaring the end of a global-minded America that negotiates away its interests and subsidizes foreigners’ security and prosperity.

A day after his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, certified that Iran was meeting its nuclear obligations, Trump on Thursday repeated his view the seven-nation accord was a “terrible agreement” and “as bad as I’ve ever seen negotiated.”

“Iran has not lived up to the spirit of the agreement and they have to do that,” Trump said at a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni. He said U.S. officials were analyzing the deal carefully and would “have something to say about it in the not too distant future.”

Earlier Thursday, he delivered a similar assessment of the North American Free Trade Agreement, railing against the 1990s trade deal while offering no indication he was actively pushing for wholesale changes.