Timothy Birdnow

Trump keeps the iran nuclear deal in place.

Accordding to Breitbart:

"President Donald Trump will not re-certify to Congress Iranian compliance with the landmark nuclear deal signed in 2015 under President Barack Obama, but will keep the agreement itself in place.

Congress will be urged to pass new "trigger points” to hold the Iranians to account and the Treasury Department will be directed to place additional sanctions on the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a wing of the Iranian military accused of terrorist acts in support of the Iranian regime throughout the region"

End excerpt.

This is too cute by half and has all the earmarks of mcMasters and Tillerson, two internationalists who have always supported the Obama policies. Donald Trump campaigned ona promise to end this deal, which was never a formal treaty and which gave Iran the right to develop atomic weapons.

More from the Breitbart article:

"Tillerson called the JCPOA, against which Trump ran extensively during his campaign for the presidency, was "only one piece of what concerns us in our relationship with Iran.”

"We don’t think that nuclear deal should define the entire policy. Quite frankly, in the past, it more or less has defined Iran policy,” he explained, citing the Iranian Shiite theocratic regime’s "destabilizing” support of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and "other terrorist activities.” The decision to not certify compliance has the effect of putting reform of the nuclear deal in the hands of Congress. Tillerson recommended against Congress either doing nothing – and leaving the current deal in place – or scraping the deal entirely. Instead, he suggested:

There is a third path the president is going to be suggesting Congress consider. … amend the INARA to put in place some very firm trigger points … that if Iran crosses any of these trigger points the sanctions automatically go back into place. There’s no determination other than they’ve hit a trigger point. There’s no other action required, the sanctions just automatically go back on. These are trigger points that are specific to the nuclear program itself, but also deal with things like their ballistic missile program.

Tillerson explained what he saw as the benefit of putting these "trigger points” into federal law, saying they would then form a more permanent part of American Iran policy. The provisions of a reform bill would extend beyond the sunset provisions of the JCPOA and would require both a future President and Congress to overturn, addressing what Tillerson called "a countdown clock to when Iran can resume its nuclear weapons development program.”

"The President also would like to have the Congress deal with that expiry within INARA,” Tillerson said, arguing such a law would put Iran on notice that the trigger points would be part American-Iranian relations in perpetuity.

End excerpt.

Congress never voted on this; it was Barack Obama's imperial policy. Why is Trump sending it back to Congress now? If he wants Congress to deal with it he should write his own plan and submit it to Congress, not ask them to decide what dto do with Obama's plan.

And this business about "trigger points" is imbecilic; we aren't going to hve an inspection regime to veify if they are hitting this mark. Americans are prohibited from being part of any inspections. What Trump ahs done here is merely kick the can down the road - a shiny enriched uranium can that may well explode when kicked.

Trum promised America he was going to get rid of this terrible deal and now he has allowed himself to be talked into it by his liberal appointees. It is inexcusable.

Time is running out. North Korea and Iran share all of their technological advancements and concentrating on Korea is pointless; this has to be dealt with in tandem. Trump has just upended his own policy.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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