Undone deal endangers all
President Trump, who seems ready to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for a North Korean nuclear deal that exists only in his imagination, has moved to unravel the real accord that by all reliable accounts is preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. The operative difference between these projects — the successful Iran negotiation the president disdains and the hypothetical Korean one he won’t stop boasting about — is that Trump had nothing to do with one of them.
In an announcement Tuesday teased with Trump’s usual reality-showmanship, the president justified withdrawing from the eight-party Iran agreement on the grounds that it does not address every past and present example of Iranian misconduct. In nearly the same breath, he inexplicably hoped that negotiations hardly begun with one of Iran’s few rivals for rogue statehood, North Korea, will usher in a “future of great security and prosperity.”
Trump has done his worst to undo an agreement supported by the United States’ closest allies in Europe,
which made vigorous efforts to dissuade him from his headlong course, as well as chief adversaries Russia and China — the latter an indispensable party to any Korean talks. Moreover, Iran’s compliance with the deal since 2015 has been confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has carried out a painstaking verification regime, as well as Trump’s top intelligence and military advisers.
Other than the vague superlatives and insults he has heaped on the deal, Trump’s case against it comes down to its inevitable failure to be eternal or perfect. “The deal’s sunset provisions are totally unacceptable,” he proclaimed Tuesday, referring to restrictions on Iran’s uranium enrichment that expire in a decade or more. At the same time, he cited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ballyhooed evidence of Iran’s secret nuclear activities two decades before the agreement was contemplated. But concerns about Iran’s past and future development of nuclear weapons only bolster the case for keeping and extending an agreement that prevents the regime from so arming itself now.
Citing Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism, its role in regional conflicts and its ballistic missile program, Trump also criticized the agreement for imposing “no limits at all” on the regime’s “other malign behavior.” In other words, a deal conceived and designed to deal with Iran’s nuclear activities is being blamed for not dealing with its non-nuclear activities.
Continuing in the vein of holding a single international agreement responsible for ending global conflict itself, Trump said the Iran accord “didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace and it never will.” It certainly won’t bring even a measure of stability in light of Trump’s unilateral exit, which at best weakens the United States’ international alliances and standing and at worst clears the way for Iran to resume clandestine nuclear activities.
The president’s dismissal of the prospect of an Iranian bomb as “a weapon that will only endanger the survival of the Iranian regime” is false on its face and contradicted by every international anti-proliferation effort. That includes the Iran deal that Trump has so recklessly undermined and a Korean deal that looks even more remote as a result.