Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with President Donald Trump prior to the President’s departure from Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv on May 23, 2017, in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo: Kobi Gideon / GPO via Getty Images)
During his presidential campaign and throughout his nine-month presidency, Donald Trump has been fixated on ending the Iran nuclear deal, which he called “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”
Under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran agreed to curtail its nuclear program and in return, it received billions of dollars of relief from punishing sanctions.
Iran has allowed 24-hour inspections by officials from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Iran has gotten rid of all of its highly enriched uranium,” Jessica T. Mathews wrote in the New York Review of Books. “It has also eliminated 99 percent of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium…. All enrichment has been shut down at the once-secret, fortified, underground facility at Fordow … Iran has disabled and poured concrete into the core of its plutonium reactor — thus shutting down the plutonium as well as the uranium route to nuclear weapons. It has provided adequate answers to the IAEA’s long-standing list of questions regarding past weapons-related activities.”
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Yukiya Amano, director general of IAEA, refuted Trump’s allegation that Iran had kept IAEA weapons inspectors from entering military bases. Amano said, “So far, IAEA has had access to all locations it needed to visit. At present, Iran is subject to the world’s most robust nuclear verification regime.”
But in spite of the fact that the IAEA has affirmed eight times — most recently in August — that Iran is meeting its obligations under the deal, Trump refused to certify Iran was in compliance and he decided the deal is not in the US national security…