Sunday 14 July 2019

Trump scrapped the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to spite Obama? I think not.

In the latest leaked diplomatic letters and emails published in the Mail on Sunday, it seems Sir Kim Darroch, the ambassador in Washington forced into retirement, accused Donald Trump of withdrawing the US from the historic 2015 nuclear deal with Iran just to "spite" Barack Obama. Really?!! I seriously think that is wrong. I have absolutely no doubt that Trump gained great satisfaction out of screwing Obama's legacy but surely that wasn't the principal reason why he took the US out of the agreement and started reimposing sanctions? Trump made it clear from the start of his presidential campaign that he thought the 2015 deal was the worst he had ever seen. Mike Pompeo, when he was CIA director, accused the Iranians of cheating on the 2015 deal and said it needed to be toughened up. John Bolton, national security adviser, was of course always against it. They hated the deal because they thought it gave too much to Tehran and imposed limits on their enriched uranium project that were too lenient and then set a mere 15 years (2031) on the running of the agreement. I have to say I always thought that was a glaring anomaly. If you want to stop a country from going nuclear you don't sign an agreement that only covers until 2031. Well, the dates were agreed at the time by the US, Russia, China, UK, France and Germany. There were some awfully clever people involved on the technical side, so I assume there were good reasons for this. But basically, the Obama administration and the other countries had this expectation that Iran would give up any idea of getting a nuclear bomb and rejoin the international community with open and friendly arms. If that's true, it was somewhat optimistc thinking in my view. Anyway Trump and co thought it was all dreadful. They also - Trump/Pompeo/Bolton - reckoned any deal with Iran had to include restrictions on Iranian malign military activities in the Middle East. Well that was never going to happen. Iran would argue they're doing what they're doing in their national strategic interest. But that's what Trump said he wanted. All this is in the public domain. So I cannot understand why Sir Kim would have summed up his view of Trump and the nuke deal by saying the president was just out to spite Obama. That's the sort of thing Washington newspapers were saying. Is that all the ambassador was basing his remarks on in his secret file to London or did he have some super inside intelligence? A large amount of so-called secret intelligence often comes from or is orginally sourced from stories in newspapers. So this supposedly highly sensitive email/diplomatic letter from the ousted ambassador is no big deal.

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