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Trump withdraws from Iran deal, reimposes ‘highest level’ of sanctions [1]

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Date: 2018-05-08 18:23:00+00:00

President Trump said Tuesday he would walk away from the Iran nuclear agreement, a decision he took after concluding that the deal has only emboldened Iran and prevents the U.S. from keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

[FULL REMARKS: Trump’s announcement withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal]

“I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal,” Trump said in a White House press conference.

“We will be instituting the highest level of economic sanction,” he added before signing a declaration to impose those sanctions. “Any nation that helps Iran in its quest for nuclear weapons could also be strongly sanctioned by the United States.”

The Treasury Department explained that some sanctions would be reimposed in 90 days, while others would be reimposed in 180 days, but did not provide a further explanation of which sanctions would take hold when.

Tuesday’s announcement came a little more than six months after the president informed Congress he would not recertify the agreement, which he had long hammered as an insufficient insurance policy against Iran’s weapons development program. Trump’s biggest grievance with the Obama-era deal has always been its so-called “sunset clause,” a provision that allows key limitations on Iran’s use and development of new technologies for uranium enrichment to be phased out beginning in 2025.

“If I allowed this deal to stand, there would soon be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East; everyone would want their weapons ready by the time Iran had theirs,” Trump said. “It is clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement.”

Trump outlined several reasons for getting out of the deal, including the absence of language that commits Iran not to provoke its neighbors in the Middle East, or test ballistic missiles. He also cited Israel’s demonstration last week showing that Iran lied about its prior efforts to develop nuclear weapons, which Trump said makes the heart of the agreement a “giant fiction.”

He said leaving the “horrible, one-sided deal” in place would have led to a dangerous nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

Israeli officials in particular had urged Trump to scrap the deal in the weeks leading up to his announcement, arguing that the current structure forces the U.S. and its allies to prepare for a day when Iran has nuclear weapons because of the agreement’s expiring constraints, according to a national security source close to the White House.

U.S. officials began working closely with their European counterparts in January to make improvements to the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, so Trump might be less inclined to withdraw from it entirely. But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly informed France, Germany, and the United Kingdom late last week that the president was dissatisfied with the proposed changes and planned to take unilateral action.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron both urged Trump to preserve the deal during separate visits to Washington shortly before the May 12 deadline to reinstate sanctions against the Iranian regime or renew the current waiver.

Trump spoke with Macron by phone on Tuesday morning, hours before delivering his televised address from the White House. The French president had warned reporters over the weekend that a decision by Trump to withdraw from the agreement “could mean war” between Iran and the West, something Iran also alluded to.

“If the United States leaves the nuclear agreement, you will soon see that they will regret it like never before in history,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said during a speech on Sunday. Russian officials also warned the U.S. ahead of Trump’s decision that exiting the agreement could have “harmful consequences” for the international community.

Top White House advisers and Cabinet-level officials spent months preparing Trump for Tuesday’s announcement, and internal deliberations sometimes spilled into public view. When Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in congressional testimony last fall that preserving the agreement was in America’s national security interest, proponents of the nuclear deal seized on his comments.

But when Trump tapped CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a strident critic of the agreement, to be secretary of state, upholding the agreement seemed like less of a guarantee. Newly-appointed White House national security adviser John Bolton had also criticized the deal prior to joining the West Wing, once describing it as a “strategic debacle” on Fox News and arguing that it be destroyed and replaced with new sanctions against Iran.

Trump’s decision to scrap the deal and reinstate sanctions on Tehran is likely to inject tension into the U.S. relations with European allies, though administration officials expect the backlash to blow over rather quickly.

European leaders were expected to meet Tuesday afternoon to discuss a path forward for the agreement and the economic and political consequences of Trump’s withdrawal from it. Merkel, Macron, and British Prime Minister Theresa May have previously said they intend to stay in the deal, along with Russia and China, in order to prevent it from collapsing.

Pompeo reportedly told the E3 countries earlier Tuesday that the Trump administration would be open to resuming negotiations if its European partners agree to be more aggressive in eliminating the deal’s so-called sunset clauses.

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[1] Url: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/trump-withdraws-from-iran-deal-reimposes-sanctions

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