Nuclear deal pullout ‘could spark arms race’

BORIS JOHNSON appealed again to Donald Trump not to back out of the Iran nuclear deal yesterday in the most direct way he knew – appearing on Fox and Friends, the US president’s news show of choice.

The Foreign Secretary is on a two-day trip to Washington to meet senior Trump administration officials in an attempt to persuade the president to recertify the deal before a May 12 deadline.

Mr Trump said on Twitter last night that he will be announcing his decision on the Iran deal today from the White House, at 7pm British time.

Mr Johnson began by saying the US president was “right to see flaws” in the current deal. “He’s set a very reasonable challenge to the world,” Mr Johnson said.

But he warned that without the accord, Iran could develop a nuclear weapon and would spark “an arms race in the Middle East”.

“You’re going to have the Saudis wanting one, the Egyptians, the Emiratis. It’s already a very, very dangerous state at the moment; we don’t want to go down that route,” he told Brian Kilmeade, the Fox News host.

Mr Johnson said a key flaw was the so-called “sunset clause”, which currently allows Iran to develop enrichment programmes after 2025 without economic sanctions.

But he argued that the solution was to “fix the flaws in the deal”, adding “There doesn’t seem to me at the moment to be a viable military solution”.

Mr Johnson later told Sky News that Mr Trump would be “in line for the

‘It’s already a very, very dangerous state at the moment; we don’t want to go down that route’

Nobel Peace Prize if he can fix the Iran nuclear deal”.

Mr Trump has called the deal “the worst ever made”. It was signed in 2015 by the US, UK, France, Germany, China and Russia, and eased international sanctions in return for verifiable limits on Tehran’s nuclear programme.

The president got into a public spat yesterday with John Kerry, the former secretary of state and lead negotiator of the deal for the Obama administration, who has been quietly promoting the nuclear agreement.

Mr Trump said on Twitter: “The US does not need John Kerry’s possibly illegal shadow diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran deal. He ... created this MESS in the first place!”

Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, said yesterday his country would stay in the deal even if the US pulled out, provided that the other parties remained involved. “We are not worried about America’s cruel decisions,” he said.