Barak, others urge Trump to keep nuclear deal
WASHINGTON — Ehud Barak, the former Israeli leader known for his hawkish views on Iran, said it would be a “mistake” for President Donald Trump to decertify the Iran nuclear deal, both because it would play to Iran’s advantage and because it would scuttle any hope of a negotiation with North Korea.
Barak, a decorated soldier who was prime minister and defense minister, is the latest and most prominent Israeli to urge Trump not to disavow the deal — a step the president is expected to take when he announces his broader strategy for dealing with Iran later this week.
“Even if America decides to pull out of it,” Barak said in an interview on Tuesday, “no one will join — not the Chinese, not the Russians, not even the Europeans. It will serve the Iranians.”
Iran, he pointed out, is complying with the terms of the agreement. It will “continue to harvest” the economic benefits of the deal. But if Trump disavowed it, that would give the Iranians a pretext for resuming their drive toward a nuclear “breakout” capability, particularly in the latter years of the agreement, when the economic benefits are outweighed by Iran’s desire to join the club of nuclear states.
The lessons of a broken deal will not be lost on North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, Barak said. “They will say it makes no sense negotiating with the Americans if they can pull out of a deal that has been signed, unilaterally, after a relatively short time.”
An unconstrained North Korea could impel Japan and South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons, he said. In the Middle East, Iran’s renewed drive for a bomb would pressure neighbors like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey to do likewise.
“Think what happens in the next generation if Iran turns nuclear,” he said. “It’s become almost inevitable that we are entering a totally different international landscape.”
As Trump’s expected decision draws closer, other prominent Israelis are urging him not to decline to certify the agreement. Uzi Arad, a former top Mossad official who served as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser, traveled to Washington last week to lobby Republicans on Capitol Hill to preserve the agreement.
On Tuesday, Condoleezza Rice, who served as President George W. Bush’s secretary of state, added her voice to those urging Trump not to disavow the deal, which was negotiated by the Obama administration. “The United States wants to be seen as living up to the obligations that it’s undertaken from president to president to president,” she said on Fox News.
Barak’s advocacy for the deal is particularly significant because, as Israel’s defense minister from 2007 to 2013, he led the preparations for a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. He warned then that if the Israelis did not act at some point, Iran’s effort to produce a bomb would no longer be vulnerable to any military action.
He and Netanyahu were closely aligned in that view, but they faced resistance from the chiefs of Israel’s intelligence agencies, who argued that a military strike could have catastrophic consequences and that they were exaggerating the imminence of the Iranian threat.