Israel’s claims divide Europe, U.S. on Iran nuke deal
White House sides with Netanyahu; allies unconvinced
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration Tuesday embraced Israel’s claims that Iran entered a nuclear deal with the world’s major powers under false pretenses, a stark divergence from its European allies, who said the disclosures broke little new ground and reinforced, rather than weakened, the case for the 2015 deal.
The administration echoed the claims made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday in a dramatic PowerPoint presentation, suggesting he had coordinated it with the White House to set the stage for President Donald Trump’s decision about whether to rip up the agreement negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
Trump has threatened to scrap the deal as soon as May 12, if Britain, France and Germany do not agree to wholesale changes. The White House cited Netanyahu’s theatrical presentation — based on documents taken from an Iranian warehouse in a nighttime raid in January — as further proof of the agreement’s flaws.
“The deal was made on a completely false pretense,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said at her daily briefing. “Iran lied on the front end. They were dishonest actors. So the deal that was made was made on things that weren’t accurate, and we have a big problem with that.”
Sanders said the White House had discussed the rollout of the new information with the Israelis in advance. A senior Israeli official said Yossi Cohen, the chief of Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, first informed Trump of the operation in January during a visit to Washington. Netanyahu briefed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the details in Tel Aviv on Sunday.
As U.S. intelligence agencies and outside experts pored over the 55,000 pages and 183 compact discs of Iranian files, the starkly divergent reactions to Netanyahu’s presentation on each side of the Atlantic suggested how the debate over the Iran deal was likely to play out should Trump decide to reimpose sanctions on Tehran.
The White House did not assert that the files demonstrated that Iran was in violation of the 2015 agreement. But Sanders argued that the disclosures shed new light on the scope of Iran’s deceit.
Sanders brushed aside a potentially dangerous typo in its initial statement Monday evening about the Israeli disclosures. The statement said, “Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and from its own people.”
White House officials later said that was a clerical error and that it should have said “Iran had a robust” program. But Sanders said, “We think the biggest mistake that was made was under the Obama administration by ever entering the deal in the first place.”
Israel is not finished with its lobbying campaign. Officials there said they planned to share much of the data they had harvested from the secret archive with the International Atomic Energy Agency — including data on some previously unknown nuclear sites in Iran.
But there were no signs that Netanyahu’s presentation Monday swayed the three European leaders — President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain — all of who have lobbied Trump not to scuttle the deal.
“The Israeli prime minister’s presentation on Iran’s past research into nuclear weapons technology underlines the importance of keeping the Iran nuclear deal’s constraints on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions,” the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, said in a statement. “The Iran nuclear deal is not based on trust about Iran’s intentions; rather it is based on tough verification.”
The French foreign ministry said the inspection regime under the agreement “is one of the most exhaustive and robust regimes in the history of nuclear nonproliferation.” But it added, “The new information presented by Israel could also confirm the need for longer-term assurances on the Iranian program, as the French president has suggested.”