After President Trump announced on Tuesday that he was pulling the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal, Iranian officials, like Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, quickly scrambled to play the victim card and attempt to convince European and Asian leaders who co-signed on the deal to stay in it.
In response to US persistent violations & unlawful withdrawal from the nuclear deal, as instructed by President Rouhani, I’ll spearhead a diplomatic effort to examine whether remaining JCPOA participants can ensure its full benefits for Iran. Outcome will determine our response.
— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) May 8, 2018
It’s safe to assume that Iran is in a vulnerable position given the leverage the U.S. has on Iran’s economy. Already, President Trump is moving to reimpose sanctions on the Islamic republic, which will phase in later this year. It only makes sense that the Iranians are looking for some sympathy.
Former President Barack Obama posted on Facebook his disapproval with the current administration’s move.
While it must be a tough pill for Obama to swallow, this is exactly how he designed the deal to begin with. But now he and his former advisers are playing the victim, too.
If you recall during the charm offensive his administration conducted in the lead up to the deal, Obama explicitly said in 2015, “If Iran violates the agreement over the next decade, all of the sanctions can snap back into place.”
Just a week prior to President Trump’s announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alleged that Iran was cheating on the nuclear deal. Whether that was the straw that broke the camel’s back with respect to the deal, both Trump and Netanyahu seemed justified in derailing the deal.
It’s what Obama would have wanted his successors to have the ability to do. If President Trump felt that Iran was violating parts of the nuclear deal, then he has every reason to snap those economic sanctions back into place.
The key difference between Obama and Trump is their respective definitions of the word “violate.” Obama may have a very high threshold for what a violation is and what it means for the deal, while Trump could have a lower threshold. That goes back to the notion that Obama simply trusted the Iranians more than Trump does.
Obama and the Iranians, though, are not victims in all of this. They constructed a flawed deal that was never designed to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranian regime.
While we’ll never really know the extent to how much damage the Iran nuclear deal caused, President Trump’s next steps are crucial to ensuring that Iran doesn’t have the ability to obtain or develop a nuclear weapon. With tensions rising dramatically in the region between Iran and Israel, the last thing the U.S. needs is another ground war in the Middle East.
