What you can expect soon is widespread handwringing about how Iran will now be free to go ahead and build a bomb. That’s a nonsensical take for two reasons:
1. Iran has insisted all along it has no designs on building nuclear weapons. If you could take that seriously, then there would never have even been a pretext for the agreement Trump is now exiting. In other words, either you trust them that they’re not building nukes, in which case there’s no need for the agreement, or you don’t trust them, in which case you lost your freaking minds when you signed a deal with them.
2. It’s already been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the deal wasn’t stopping anything, so for anyone to pretend Trump’s withdrawal is the catalyst for Iran building a bomb requires willful self-delusion. They’ve been working on one the whole time. All we did today was to stop pretending to think otherwise.
I eagerly await John Kerry’s expression of outrageously outraged outrage. The man gave Iran everything it wanted for almost nothing in return, and worked damn hard at it, and now Trump just throws it all away:
Vice President Pence has told congressional leaders that President Trump plans to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, Fox News has learned.
A source said that Trump has made the decision to withdraw – and his announcement Tuesday afternoon will start a 90-day countdown to the restoration of sanctions.
Once sanctions are re-imposed, the U.S. effectively would be out of the deal.
It’s not clear which sanctions lifted under the deal Trump plans to immediately re-impose. He has several options. A more limited move could leave Trump more room to potentially stay in the deal if other members agree to toughen it.
If he follows through on a sweeping imposition of sanctions, the move threatens to topple the Iran nuclear agreement as a whole – and with it, his predecessor’s signature foreign policy achievement
The reimposition of sanctions by the United States will not have the same bite as when our European allies joined in the sanctions, but don’t make the mistake of thinking they will have none. To the extent there are still Iranian assets we can re-freeze, that’s going to hamper Iran’s ability to fund its favored terrorist groups and will limit the pool of money that can fund its ongoing nuclear work.
What it won’t do is harm the average Iranian, since they’ve already made it clear that the mad mullahs’ promise that they would use that money to help the general populace proved to be a complete lie.
Let’s not allow this awful deal to die without remembering how it got so bad.
Remember the first 2004 presidential debate between Bush and Kerry? It was dominated by Kerry’s sneering disdain for Bush’s performance on the world stage. Kerry insisted that he was a master at dealing with world leaders, and later expanded on the point by emphasizing that this was all about knowing how to get them to trust you. The Iran deal showed us exactly what Kerry meant by that. He was so determined to get Iran to sign, that he constantly lobbied our allies to give the mullahs whatever they wanted – the point where some said Kerry was acting like Iran’s lawyer rather than as a negotiating counterpart – all so he could then go back to the mullahs and claim he’d proven himself trustworthy to them.
Inherent in all this was Kerry’s (and Barack Obama’s) belief that the United States never had a legitimate reason to be hostile toward Iran. The hostage crisis and the constant support of terrorism meant nothing to Kerry, and to the extent they were a problem, they were only because American leaders had not dealt with Iran effectively like the expert genius John Kerry would.
What did we get out of all this? A deal with no enforceable restrictions on nuclear development, no real inspections and no way to verify anything.
That’s the garbage Donald Trump just walked away from, despite Kerry’s madcap attempts to save it.
Trump made the right call – almost as right as the one America’s voters made on Election Day 2004.
What you can expect soon is widespread handwringing about how Iran will now be free to go ahead and build a bomb. That’s a nonsensical take for two reasons:
1. Iran has insisted all along it has no designs on building nuclear weapons. If you could take that seriously, then there would never have even been a pretext for the agreement Trump is now exiting. In other words, either you trust them that they’re not building nukes, in which case there’s no need for the agreement, or you don’t trust them, in which case you lost your freaking minds when you signed a deal with them.
