An early test of whether President Trump will bow to Israel’s political clout may come over the Iran nuclear agreement which Prime Minister Netanyahu wants killed, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.
By Paul R. Pillar
Among the foreign policy issues on which Donald Trump took a simple anti-Obama, or anti-Clinton, stance during the campaign but about which he had not seemed to have devoted much thought, one of the most prominent and important is the agreement that restricts Iran’s nuclear program, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA.
When the new president does get a chance to give the subject more attention, he will see that opposition to the agreement is primarily a matter of old political baggage. If he does not want to be burdened with such baggage and desires instead to set his own course, he will build on the agreement rather than succumb to the pressures of those who would like to kill it.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations in 2012, drawing his own “red line” on how far he will let Iran go in refining nuclear fuel.
The baggage has had two parts. One has been the effort by President Obama’s political opposition to deny him any major achievements — applicable to the JCPOA in that it has been one of the President’s most significant foreign policy achievements. Even viewed through a crass partisan political lens, this motivation will get more out of date with each day that goes by after Mr. Obama leaves office.
The other part has been opposition of the Netanyahu government in Israel, with all the usual implications of how that government’s postures affect U.S. politics and how the Iran issue has thus been treated as if it were an Israel issue. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition has been motivated by the objectives of keeping a regional rival to Israel isolated forever, portraying Iran as the root of all problems in the Middle East, distracting attention from problems that involve Israel and its policies, and keeping U.S. diplomacy and cooperative measures in the Middle East confined to Israel or channels approved by Israel.
This opposition was…