About a week and a half ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a news conference at the Ministry of Defence in Tel Aviv, where he stood in front of an enormous “Iran lied” graphic, and talked of the country’s covert nuclear arms program. What wasn’t clear to everyone watching, however, was that none of the “evidence” that he was sharing was new. In fact, despite the promise of bombshells, there was not one shred of new evidence to show that Iran had violated the terms of the international deal – or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – that they’d entered into nearly three years ago. This, however, didn’t stop right wing media outlets from sharing Netanyahu’s evidence of past nuclear weapons research, and passing it off as new. Even the White House put out a statement saying that Iran “has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program,” which they were forced to correct after-the-fact. But the wheels, by that point, were already in motion. Donald Trump had already made up his mind to invalidate the JCPOA agreement.
In an another era, the administration would have lied to us, and told us there was new evidence of uranium enrichment. The Trump team, however, has apparently figured out that, in their post truth world, it’s no longer necessary. All they need to do now is show a few old photos while using heightened language about “nuclear blackmail.”
We no longer require facts, even fake ones.
Today, Donald Trump, in spite of the fact that Iran, according to every international inspector and expert who studies such things, has kept their word, and ceased their covert weapons program, essentially ripped up the 2015 deal, saying “America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail.” When asked by a reporter at the White House, how voiding this multi-national agreement makes us us any safer, the President just stared forward blankly.
This is all you need to know about Trump pulling out the Iran Deal… in 12 seconds.#IranDeal pic.twitter.com/geGxL8e9tL
— ALT- Immigration
(@ALT_uscis) May 8, 2018
(@ALT_uscis) I could see how, if Trump and his team felt as though they might be able to strike a better deal, it could make sense to threaten rescinding the existing one, but what happened today makes absolutely no sense at all, on any level. Iran, by all accounts, has been honoring the deal, and Trump’s team didn’t even attempt to rectify the issues they claimed to have had with the existing arrangement. Trump had claimed in the past, for instance, that he didn’t like the fact that the deal was set to expire after 10 years, but it doesn’t look as though he even attempted to extend it. He just pulled out with no plan as to how to move forward, leaving the whole world significantly less stable.
Former CIA Director John Brennan, I think, put it best. “Today, Donald Trump simultaneously lied about the Iranian nuclear deal, undermined global confidence in US commitments, alienated our closest allies, strengthened Iranian hawks, and gave North Korea more reason to keep its nukes,” he said. “This madness is a danger to our national security.”
And “madness” is exactly the right word. With one flick of his pen, and a number of lies, Trump undid a half-decade of painstaking “sanctions diplomacy,” during which time the United States, working with Russia, China, Japan and India, through the exertion of economic pressure, got Iran to the table, where a peaceful path forward was negotiated over a course of two years. And now it appears to all be falling apart because Donald Trump, likely motivated by his desire to undo every one of Obama’s achievements, decided to kill it. And the ramifications in this instance could be enormous. As CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour said today, this move of Trump’s is “possibly the greatest deliberate act of self-harm and self-sabotage in geo-strategic politics in the modern era.”
And for what?
Even if the international community is able to dissuade Iran from restarting their nuclear weapons program, and we avoid war, our position in the world has been greatly diminished. As former Secretary of State John Kerry said earlier this evening, if nothing else, this move of Trump’s has “(opened) up an opportunity by both China and Russia to play a role now in the region that is super-sized.” And we’re already seeing this reflected in the comments of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, who noted today that Russia and China are now the world’s only two superpowers. [“Iran will be conferring with the world’s two super powers, Russia and China,” Rouhani said in response to Trump’s un-signing ceremony.]
And just think of what this does to our standing in the Muslim world… As the conservative website Axios reported today, “57% of Arab youth surveyed this year see the U.S. as an enemy, and 35% consider the U.S. an ally. That’s almost a complete reversal of the numbers from 2016.” And that’s before Trump decided to break our promise to Iran and reinstate sanctions.
But Trump got to keep another ridiculous campaign promise, and I’m sure members of his base, who’ve been convinced by Fox News that everything Obama did was bad for America, will eat it up. They’re no doubt online right now, thumping their chests and tweeting in all-caps about how “we’re not going to be pushed around anymore.” The truth, however, is that Trump has no idea how to get us a better deal. And we’re all going to suffer as a result of this.
The truth is, Trump probably doesn’t know what was in the Iran deal he just tore up. And he probably hasn’t thought about the kind of signal this sends to the North Koreans, who now know that, no matter what they sign, there’s a chance that we could change our minds and walk away. But the important thing is that this kept us from talking about Michael Cohen taking vast sums of money from Putin-aligned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, the rumor that Trump paid a Playboy playmate to have an abortion, AT&T paying bribes in order to gain access to the Trump administration, and the new evidence of money laundering within the Trump Organization. And I think that’s al that matters to Trump. At this point in the game, it’s just about surviving the day.
