If the circumstances were reversed, would President Obama return Iran's drone?

I doubt it, and I highly doubt they will do so either… Unless we trade them something for it.

I also think the value of it is being overstated.

Iran’s entire military is self-conceived thanks to decades of UN sanctions preventing them from getting weapons from even the Russians or Chinese. They would not only have to reverse engineer the technology, but they’d have to build from scratch the base technology to make use of whatever they reverse-engineered out of the drone. And in the end the real value of the drone is minimal. Some stealth and surveillance tech that will be out of date within a year anyways. The only real threat they pose with it is selling it to China or Russia. But in all reality, it would be a mediocre benefit for either of those countries, and one would argue the neither wants to “affront” the US for such a minimal gain.

I also missed the memo where Obama announced his Irish heritage….

Much like your other question I think we would as a public gesture. Obviously we’d wait till we and our allies have the data and samples we want but after that the only thing left is the political value of being able to say “see, we are willing to work with you”.

O’Bama? I heard he was part-Irish, but not that Irish.

I am about 30–50% sure that we actually intended for Iran to capture that drone. So I dunno.

It would be a completely different situation to begin with since Iranian drone tech is small fry compared to ours.

My question is why isn’t there a few pounds of explosives in the drone to blow the fucker up if it loses radio communications for a few minutes.

@Qingu I thought it was funny. Mods did not.
@johnpowell That is the “Question of the Day”

No.
In fact, I would expect the US to declare war on Iran immediately for this “act of war”.