Iran's Rouhani: I'm not going to let Trump rip up the nuclear deal

Keep these things in mind: It's not a treaty. It's never been ratified by the Senate or even submitted for ratification. It's got some legal standing in the sense that Congress failed in its "resolution of disapproval," which was Bob Corker's gift to Obama and the mad mullahs. But it's still little more than an executive agreement between Obama and his pals in Tehran, and Trump is in no way bound by it. But Iran's President Hassan Rouhani seems to think he can somehow prevent Donald Trump from ripping it up - or at the very least, he thinks he can bluster about consequences enough that Trump will get nervous and back down:

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Nice little throw-in at the end there, just in case Trump got the idea that we're all friends and that this might be a reason he should keep Obama's terrible deal on the books, even though it's not really technically on the books at all. That will surely serve as an incentive to Trump to go with the status quo. The problem with ripping up the deal is not anything Iran might do. Iran's going to cheat on the deal anyway, and in fact Obama anticipated that and made it very easy for them to do so by making the inspection regime toothless - even going so far as to allow the mullahs to self-inspect in certain situations. The problem comes with the fact that the other nations involved in the deal have basically dismantled their inspection regimes, which means that even if we keep ours in place - as it appears we have every intention of doing - the effect won't be the same with other nations not taking part. But that's no reason for the U.S. to make it any easier than it needs to be for Iran to keep developing nukes. If James Mattis and Michael Flynn are leaders of the new national security team, you can bet the advice Trump receives will be a lot more reality-based concerning the threat Iran poses. And if Trump actually cares about what Benjamin Netanyahu thinks, which he does, then he won't be so dismissive of Israel's concerns like Obama was.

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A major variable, of course, is who succeeds John Kerry as Secretary of State. Kerry is the one who basically acted as Iran's lawyer in the negotiations between Iran and the western nations, and made sure the structure of the deal was a massive giveaway with no serious attempt to prevent Iran from developing nukes. Recent Secretaries of State - even Republican, for whatever reason - have tended to be the kinds of people who like to sign agreement so they can save the pieces of paper around, rather than putting U.S. national security at the forefront. If Trump follows suit and chooses a top diplomat with that mindset, you could see tension between the State Department and the national security team over what to do on Iran. For that reason alone, the Jon Huntsman talk is making me nervous. If there are any consequences to be suffered for the U.S. approach to the Iran nuclear deal, it will be because we bungled it, not because Iran did anything to us. The only thing to do is scrap this turkey and tell Iran in no uncertain terms that they're not getting nukes.

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