Editorial: Israel’s Iran Trove and Diplomatic Groupthink

Published May 1, 2018 8:29am ET



The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the Iran deal—is facing another life-or-death deadline on May 12, and once again we must listen to the arguments for and against the deal and wonder if President Trump will or won’t keep the United States in it. The president wants out of it, but European allies, particularly France’s Emmanuel Macron, want him to stay in. Trump seems to lean toward abandoning JCPOA and renegotiating a new deal, but he has seemed so in the past, and here we are.

The momentum may have changed on Monday. In a dramatic news conference, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a cache of incriminating documents—a half-ton of stolen paper and digital documents from a storage facility in Tehran—that prove, he claims, that Iran has brazenly lied to the international community about its nuclear activity. The trove may or may not give us much information that wasn’t already known, but it again confirms what skeptics have said from the deal’s beginning—namely that Iran negotiated the deal in bad faith.

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