Thomas Friedman writes in the NYT:
The judges have voted and the results are in: President Donald Trump’s decision to tear up the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 — a decision urged on by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — was one of the dumbest, most poorly thought out and counterproductive U.S. national security decisions of the post-Cold War era.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Moshe Ya’alon was the Israeli defense minister when the nuclear agreement was signed, and he strongly opposed it. But at a conference last week, he said, according to a summary by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, “as bad as that deal was, Trump’s decision to withdraw from it — with Netanyahu’s encouragement — was even worse.” Ya’alon called it “the main mistake of the last decade” in Iran policy.
Two days later, Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s top military commander when Trump withdrew from the deal, offered a similar sentiment, which Haaretz reported as “a net negative for Israel: It released Iran from all restrictions, and brought its nuclear program to a much more advanced position.”
It sure has. The International Atomic Energy Agency recently reported that Iran has amassed a stock of enriched uranium hexafluoride that independent nuclear experts calculate is sufficient to produce weapons-grade uranium for a single nuclear bomb in as little as three weeks.
complete and utter boofheads
ReplyDeleteHere I can agree with Not Trampis. This was the crazed mentality of the New York real estate negotiator. He thought the deal was no good because Obama, Kerry and the others didn't wage trade war on Iran prior to cutting the deal. This is an incredibly cruel application of negotiations theory to the real world. You would have to call that evil. Plus the deal is about the only good thing Obama ever achieved. I've looked at this deal and it was very well worked out. Had all these confidence-building measures and so forth. I couldn't believe what I was reading since it read like an exercise in enlightened statesmanship. The Iranians were happy with the deal and no evidence emerged that they weren't following it.
ReplyDeleteThen Trump pulled out of the deal and murdered the General. These are catastrophes. Iran would be crazy not to get a modern nuclear arsenal the way they and others have been treated.