Donald Trump may have fulfilled his election promise to quit the Iran deal, but he certainly wasn’t doing so to get out of a “bad deal”.
If Donald Trump is good at one thing, it’s keeping his word on election promises. The promises may have been utterly crazy, but Trump does appear to be sincere about trying to deliver. Abandoning the 2015 Iran nuclear deal with the “strongest sanctions in history” is a key case in point.
Apart from a poorly informed campaign promise, there’s no logical reason why Trump has dumped the Iran nuclear deal. It was not, as he said, “insane” and he was incorrect to claim that the US has paid Iran hundreds of millions of dollars in cash to sustain the deal. The US instead lifted a blockade on Iranian bank accounts, which provided Iranians with access to billions of their own money.
The deal, which Iran has overwhelmingly complied with, is formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA), to which the UN Security Council permanent five (USA, UK, France, Russia and China) plus Germany were signatories.
As a replacement to the JCPA, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered Iran a new 12-point plan so onerous that one US lawmaker described it as requiring everything short of Iran becoming an officially Christian state. “Iran will never again have carte blanche to dominate the Middle East,” Pompeo said, presumably retaining for the US the right to do. Iran will be “crushed” if it does not comply.
Read the article by Professor Damian Kingsbury in Crikey.